Our Sages taught that the verse, ‘for he has scorned the word of Hashem’ refers to someone who could have learned Torah and didn’t. If a person stops for a minute and thinks about how precious the Torah is, how Hashem Himself came down on Mount Sinai to give it to us, he would immediately realize that missing an opportunity to learn it is a statement denying the Torah’s importance.

And if a person does an accounting of his time, he will see that several times a week, and possibly even several times a day, he has missed opportunities to learn. These missed opportunities are statements of how important Torah is to him, and a person should take this to heart.