Kesher Talk

Congratulations to all Daf Yomi participants! Today thousands of Jews from around the world are celebrating completion of study of the entire Talmud, one page a day. Studying Talmud by this method takes seven and a half years, and the cycle just completed is the 11th.

Madison Square Garden is full, with overflow at the Javitts Center. The Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey is overflowing. There are celebrations in Denver, Toronto, Miami, Boston, and many other locations around the world, all connected with satellite TV.

Unlike the ancient cycle of the Sabbath Torah reading, which culminates in the conclusion of Deuteronomy and the immediate re-beginning of Genesis on the holiday of Simchat Torah, the Daf Yomi cycle is a 20th-century innovation, paradoxically dreamed up by Agudath Israel, an organization originally formed to unite strictly Orthodox Jews against the breakdown of tradition sweeping European Jewish communities as a result of religious reform, secularism, socialism, and Zionism. It was at Agudath Israel’s 1923 convention that Rabbi Yehuda Meir Shapira, a Talmud scholar and teacher who also represented Agudath Israel in the Polish parliament, proposed the cycle of daily Talmud study, to start with the first page of the Talmud at the upcoming Jewish new year.

. . . A typical Daf Yomi class runs an hour, every morning or evening, before or after work, though not everyone who commits to the daily study routine takes part in a class. They might study with a partner, or on their own. One famous class for commuters takes place on a designated Long Island Railroad train. In Manhattan, you can even choose from half a dozen lunch-hour classes.

Technological enhancements to study are popular.

Dial-A-Daf services where subscribers listen by phone to a recorded class on the day's page, once cutting-edge, have been supplemented by on-line resources (but not completely: Many strict Orthodox Jews shun unnecessary Internet use because of the temptation it poses. Agudath Israel sends e-mails to the press, but has no Web site). On the Web, you can find copies of any page of Talmud to print or download to a PDA on sites such as Dafyomi.org. CD-ROMs overlay the text with audio explanations. ShasPod.com is taking orders for a special iPod preloaded with seven years’ worth of mp3 Talmud lessons.

The Daf Yomi program is controversial. Some object that a page a day is too fast and superficial, and attracts participants who don't have the background to study in depth (for example, they don't have enough Hebrew or Aramaic). Others counter that even a page a day acquaints many more Jews with one of the two basic texts of their faith and culture, that a little learning is better than none, that the program makes the Talmud accessible to more people, and that it promotes unity to have Jews all over the world doing the same study on the same day.

The new edition published by Artscroll has fueled the controversy:

If you have a home where everyone comes home at night and plops down to watch television, that's one kind of influence," said Rabbi Nosson Scherman, editor of the project. "A family which discusses political issues and books after supper has another. In a Jewish context, if you have more families which spend a great deal of time studying Torah, they develop differently, too." Others observers think that by leading to an upsurge in people attending Talmud classes, the Artscroll edition has reinforced the community's culture of learning and made it a de rigueur part of an Orthodox lifestyle.

Yet not everyone agrees it has led to an upsurge in actual knowledge. "There are plenty of people who can't tell an Aleph from a Bet but still sit through a class of Gemara every day," Levy said, invoking the traditional term for the ancient rabbinic commentary on the Mishnah, which, when printed together, are known as the Talmud. Good for them, he added, "but I'm not sure anyone's really learning anything."

Certainly, rabbis in some yeshivas and others resisted the Artscroll Talmud because they believed it discouraged students from grappling with the original text and undermined their learning skills. In addition, according to Heilman, a wide perception has developed that studying Talmud is quick and easy. "It sounds impressive that a world has been created of people who can say they've been through Talmud three times," he said. "But the ability to distinguish between a layperson and a great scholar has been lost."

Scherman does not dispute that there are some students who use the Artscroll Talmud "as a crutch." But he maintains, "The benefits far outweigh any undesirable consequences. Using the Schottenstein edition isn't easy — you still have to think," he said. "Anyone who reads it will see there is room for further inquiry and discussion. If you pick up a popular magazine which gives you a 10- to 12-page overview of a particular topic, would any serious person go away saying they're an expert because they've read 10 pages in Reader's Digest?"

(More on how the new edition has increased Talmud study.)

I haven't noticed much controversy about the participation of women, because I haven't heard of any mixed-gender or women-only Daf Yomi classes, even here in NYC, the crossroads of the Jewish world. Traditionally only men study Talmud, although study by women is increasingly accepted in Modern Orthodox circles. Mixed gender classes are frowned upon. Perhaps more women will ask to join classes during this coming cycle and create another controversy?

(If you know of any women's and mixed classes in Manhattan, drop me a line. And, yes, I asked Drisha - they don't know of any either.)

I have greatly enjoyed Talmud study whenever I have experienced it, most often in a class on a Jewish topic, using Talmud texts as resources. My first intro to systematic Talmud study was in Austin, via a monthly course taught by Rabbi Judith Abrams, which also included weekly study sessions in groups. I was still involved with a very syncretic and New Agey havurah at the time, and these sessions introduced me to members of the Conservative synagogue I ended up joining. I also studied more systematically for several months years later, in a weekly class populated mostly by Conservative Jews, taught by a frum rabbi. (I forget which masechet we were learning, but it had to do with how the Temple was constructed.)

The 12th cycle starts tomorrow (well, tonight in the Jewish calendar), and I intend to start with it. Naomi Chana is thinking the same thing, and posted a few helpful links.

I still have a volume of the Steinsaltz edition from the Abrams course, although we won't get to that tractate (Ta'anit) for awhile. I found many English-language resources on the web in addition to the ones Naomi posted, although the E-Daf was the only Talmud I found in the original, and I find the type in the JPEG too fuzzy to read (even if I could read Hebrew and Aramaic without vowels). I think I will buy the first few volumes of the Artscroll edition, since they are on sale right now. (get the entire set for only $2000!)

If you don't know anything about Talmud and want an easy introduction to how it works, check out The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to the Talmud. (There are more detailed overviews, but that's the easiest one.) To get more sense of the context of the Talmud within the Jewish world, and how it functions within the Jewish group consciousness, I highly recommend Jonathan Rosen's brief lyrical meditation, The Talmud and the Internet.

The article in the Forward expresses well what is so captivating about Talmud study, and what I cherish about the values of my heritage:

Tens of thousands of men, women and children, from grade schoolers to senior citizens, will converge on these venues to celebrate . . . the study of a book. Actually, scores of very large books, with very small print (and virtually no pictures, either). If ever there was an event that honors those quintessentially Jewish values of study, intellectual inquiry and the free marketplace of ideas, that exalts the life of the mind as pre-eminent, it is this Siyum.

It is not only intellectualism that will be paid homage that evening, but also the value of individual achievement, of setting and attaining hugely ambitious, long-term goals. The phrase "seven-year, page-a-day cycle" is easy enough to say, but try living it for even one month. Those assembled will be paying tribute to the thousands of individual Jews, the vast majority of them working folk of collars both white and blue, who, day in and day out, use either the early morning, the evening after a long workday or their precious lunch break to study their daily quota.

And that's study, not read. Essays introducing the Talmud often wax lyrical about the multifarious breadth of this masterwork, and that's certainly so. But one cannot "read" the Talmud any more than one can kick back, beer in hand, to peruse the Internal Revenue Code. The lion's share of the Talmud's thousands of pages constitute what one great scholar termed a "brain-grinding tool," involving the very highest levels of intellectual abstraction and requiring laser-focused concentration and fierce determination to navigate even minimally. We speak here, of course, of Talmud study at its most basic, with only the great commentator Rashi as our guide; it gets far more complex as one wades into the multiple levels of commentary on every line of the text (appearing in even smaller print!). And it is written in a maddeningly abstruse mix of Hebrew and Aramaic that contains not a trace of punctuation or vowel marks, to boot. Are we having fun yet?

In truth, however, studying Talmud is great fun. There's something exhilarating about challenging yourself on a daily basis — not just your brawn, at the local gym, nor just your fund of trivia, by doing The Times crossword puzzle (conspicuously in pen, of course) — but all of you: your brain, your memory, your preconceptions, your stamina, your commitment. Especially your commitment, because the pace is inexorable, at times even grueling, and taking even a week's break means you're now seven long, intricate pages behind, which in Daf Yomi terms is an eternity.

But there's more. The Siyum is not only a massive ode to achievement, but, in the main, to other people's achievements, and that, in our self-centered society, is a refreshing rarity. For though hundreds of individuals will indeed be completing the entire Talmud, they will be vastly outnumbered by the many thousands more who will be there because, as one participant at the last such celebration put it, "When your brother makes a wedding, you dance as if it's your own."

. . . . In our increasingly fragmented Jewish world, whose diverse camps can't even agree on the definition of basic Judaic concepts, we need all the unifying opportunities we can find, and this surely ranks among the best of those. . . . Some years back, there were initiatives in Chicago and elsewhere to get citizens city-wide reading the same book at the same time — it began with "To Kill a Mockingbird," as I recall — thereby fostering an intellectual conversation across societal divides such as class and race. The Daf Yomi program is that and so much more. . . .

UPDATE: Ah, now I understand why Daf Yomi is male only!

posted by Judith @ 3/01/2005 01:29:00 PM