As some regular readers know, I used to be a rather avid true-crime podcast listener. I followed several dozen podcasts and am still interested in the long-form ones that cover a particular crime in depth, and at one time even did some fieldwork for a book about true crime podcasts I was planning to write. I had long BART rides and bicycle rides during which I listened to these things nonstop. Then, personal calamity and world events took over and life changed course somewhat, but I kept the materials even though my horror of real-world stuff put me off the genre. This is not a complaint–many people who produce true crime shows are solid, ethical journalists who want not only to report the truth, but also to bring about closure or correct miscarriages of justice. I just can’t stomach tragedy nearly as much as I used to. But once in a while I do get captivated by legal proceedings in a high-profile case.
Such is my interest in Bryan Kohberger’s trial for the murder of four University of Idaho students. As I think I’ve posted before, much of the pretrial action is under seal, which frustrates the journalists and podcasters to no end, but once in a while the judge releases a nugget or two. Anyway, today we learned of a judicial decision on the defense’s motion to suppress the DNA found on a knife sheath at the crime scene. For those who are not following the case, this is the only piece of forensic evidence that links Kohberger directly to the crime, and it was obtained through familial DNA analysis and a genealogy website. I didn’t think the motion had a chance, and was therefore not surprised that the court denied the motion. Here is the reasoning:
[A]pplying well-settled principles of Fourth Amendment, the Court finds no constitutional violation. First, Defendant abandoned any privacy interest in his DNA by disclaiming knowledge or ownership of the sheath from which the DNA was extracted. Second, even if no such abandonment occurred, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in DNA found at a crime scene which is subsequently analyzed to identify an unknown suspect.
This makes sense to me, except for one possible wrinkle. There’s a 1968 case called Simmons v. CALinks to an external site., where a defendant sought to suppress a suitcase on Fourth Amendment grounds. For the motion to suppress, the defendant claimed standing in the suitcase, and this later came back to bite him at trial when he disavowed the suitcase. The court said: “[W]e find it intolerable that one constitutional right [the 5th Amendment privilege against self incrimination] should have to be surrendered in order to assert another [the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures]. We therefore hold that, when a defendant testifies in support of a motion to suppress evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds, his testimony may not thereafter be admitted against him at trial on the issue of guilt unless he makes no objection.”
In other words, had Kohberger made a valid 4th Amendment argument against the admission of the sheath DNA, it shouldn’t have mattered if he said, for the purpose of the motion, “this is my knife sheath” or “this is my DNA.” He would still be allowed to disavow both the sheath and the DNA at trial. But the second rationale of the motion denial still stands: anything discarded at a crime scene is fair game.
This motion, and others in the case, redeem to some extent my interest in these high-profile cases. Because the attorneys on both sides in these cases tend to be very thorough, and know that the eyes of millions of people are on them, they put in a lot of effort to file motions, argue, and mine evidence and logic that remains invisible in other cases. Often one hears of new forensic technologies through these cases that have not yet been employed in a lot of other scenarios. If it weren’t for the Golden State Killer and Bryan Kohberger, I wouldn’t know that the use of genetic genealogy had entered the mainstream of policing (or maybe it’s still cutting edge), nor would I think that the standing issue would find so little purchase with the court. I plan to keep following this case, as I think it’ll be interesting from both a criminal procedure and an evidence angle.
I’m still very shaken by the news and find it difficult to engage with crass and violent materials, so today I’ll focus on the first portion of the daf, which deals with cursing offenses, rather than the second one, which analyzes sex offenses.
We start off with a reminder that Shabbat violations are punishable only when intentional, and move straight on to cursing. It’s an interesting transition: the end of page 65 was devoted to assorted witches, mages, soothsayers, etc., and shifting gears to cursing feels like the continuation of a grimoire.
Anyway, the mishna says that, to be liable for cursing one’s father and mother, one has to actually use a name; using a nickname incurs a liability according to Rabbi Meir, but is not an offense according to others. This is the point of departure for the gemara, which now breaks down the elements of the offense. First, they conclude that this is not just an offense for sons, but also for daughters or for any gender-fluid child (really, this is in the original). Then they wonder whether, to commit the offense, one must curse both parents. Rabbi Yoshiah thinks so, but Rabbi Yonatan thinks that either one is enough, because the text does not specify ״יַחְדָּו״ (together).
Here the gemara looks at several cursing offenses, which differ from each other in the target of the curse: God, a president, a judge, a parent. Here’s the debate:
The issue is that there are separate prohibitions against cursing judges or presidents, and if one has a judge or a president for a father, one technically commits two offenses and, obviously, cannot be stoned twice.
Remember Blockburger? The case that involved someone prosecuted twice for drug sales even though they were similar offenses and the buyer was the same guy? There was a second problem in Blockburger that raised legal issue, and it was this: The Harrison act prohibited buying drugs unless they came from a stamped package (which meant that taxes were paid for them; think buying recreational weed at a dispensary without a medical card), and it also prohibited buying drugs not from a doctor. Could the exact same purchase—if it was made from a non-doctor and not from a stamped package—furnish two counts or just one?
The disposition in Blockburger, which would later become the leading case on double jeopardy issues, was that it is okay to charge a defendant with two counts for the same action if each of the offenses had an element that the other did not:
The sages accept that the same principle applies in our case:
The sages then bring up another issue: the question of the social values promoted by these offenses. Technically, this is a classic Blockburger scenario: each offense has an element—an attribute of the victim—which the others do not. But these elements stem from the different nuances of respect you owe each of these three figures. And yet, they are all of your people, and respect is required for all of them. But in all these cases, one is expected to respect the victims’ authorities because of their greatness, which raises a fourth issue:
The prohibition to curse a deaf person seems to have a different rationale: it is precisely because of the deaf person’s vulnerability—they cannot hear you, and therefore cannot protect themselves or respond to you—that cursing them is especially vicious. In that sense, it’s a prohibition of a different ilk than the previous ones. But the sages say: what all these people have in common is that they are מְשׁוּנִּין, they are unusual, there is something out of the ordinary about them that calls for special care or respect for them.
Today’s limmud is dedicated to the precious memories of Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas, and Oded Lifshitz. עַל־אֵ֣לֶּה ׀ אֲנִ֣י בוֹכִיָּ֗ה עֵינִ֤י ׀ עֵינִי֙ יֹ֣רְדָה מַּ֔יִם כִּֽי־רָחַ֥ק מִמֶּ֛נִּי מְנַחֵ֖ם מֵשִׁ֣יב נַפְשִׁ֑י הָי֤וּ בָנַי֙ שֽׁוֹמֵמִ֔ים כִּ֥י גָבַ֖ר אוֹיֵֽב׃ {ס} (Lamentations 1:16).
***
“My Father in the Heavens, how far I’ve gone,” says the hero of Shai Agnon’s story The Lady and the Peddler. And so have we, my fellow Talmud travelers – a busy week of grading and preparing for a conference and sitting with the vast grief of the news set us back a few pages, so we’re catching up today.
Reading a bigger portion is not necessarily a bad thing. It reminded me that the Talmud is a little bit like Forrest Gump’s mom’s bag of chocolates—you never quite know what you’re going to get. Personally, I don’t feel obligated to find beauty in all of it; the misogynistic locker talk doesn’t tickle my fancy at all, which raises some worrisome questions about what will happen with this Substack the day we hit Tractate Sotah. But, as Aragorn says in Return of the King, “it is not this day”: today’s portion is peppered with peculiar curiosities, which is my jam!
It all starts as a continuation of yesterday’s discussion of how to count violations—the unit of prosecution issue—with the sages finding biblical anchoring for their legal opinions. For example, there are three biblical mentions of the prohibition to bow to idols, and since nothing in the Torah is deemed superfluous, the sages opine that the first is for worship that follows the protocol, the second for unconventional worship, and the third to call attention to the distinction: אַחַת לִכְדַרְכָּהּ, וְאַחַת שֶׁלֹּא כְּדַרְכָּהּ, וְאַחַת לְחַלֵּק.
A further issue pertains to the difference between speech and action–whether saying to an idol, “you are my god” differs, in terms of punishment, from actually performing ritual worship. The general view is that actual worship is a capital offense, and mere speech can be addressed through a guilt offering. Interestingly, they fold into this another issue: that of recognizing the right and wrong gods in the same speech.
The key biblical source for this is the worship of the golden calf, to which the worshippers said, “These are your gods, Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:8). Rabi Yohana says it was lucky that they said “gods” and “they” (implying a partnership between the right god and the wrong one, but at least mentioning the former), rather than attributing the exodus *only* to the golden calf. But Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai believes that even this formulation is to be condemned: not only does it repudiate monotheism, but it might also imply *more* wrong gods beyond the golden calf.
The sages try to parse out the differences between the various types of idolatry using the speech-vs.-act distinction, but then they come up with another distinction: between the principal actor (the person who does the actual idolatry) and the inciter. While the latter is, technically, speech, it can also be seen as acting through others–causing idolatry to happen: וְלֹא יִגְרוֹם לַאֲחֵרִים שִׁידְּרוּ בִּשְׁמוֹ וְשֶׁיְּקַיְּימוּ בִּשְׁמוֹ. The concern about indirect idolatry extends to doing business with foreigners that might require taking an idolatrous oath alongside them, and also to situations such as this one:
Ulla stayed in a place called Kalnevo, which also happens to be the name of an idol. So when asked, “where did you stay?” he said, “in Kalnevo.” When he was chided for blasphemy, Ulla explained that saying idol names that are mentioned in the Torah is allowed, and it says, in Isaiah 46:1, “כָּרַע בֵּל קֹרֵס נְבוֹ” (crouching Bel, hidden Nevo, if you will). While general clowning is disallowed, mockery of idolatry is allowed, and “כָּרַע בֵּל קֹרֵס נְבוֹ” is said to be a mockery of the idols, as if they crouched or knelt to defecate.
From here on, in pages 63 and 64, we get a lot of anthropology: the sages describe different forms of idolatry. These include: having a little pocket idol one can take out and kiss once in a while; placing pictures of rich people near the troughs of hungry cattle, so that the calves paw them; worshipping images of chickens, roosters, a bald goat, a dog and a donkey; sacrificing their children to images of a mule and a horse. Then, we get a side remark: turns out that even the father of Hezekiah, the king who fortified the walls of Jerusalem, wanted to burn him as sacrifice–אֶלָּא שֶׁסָּכַתּוּ אִמּוֹ סָלָמַנְדְּרָא–but his mom smeared salamander blood on him, which rendered him fireproof. The storytelling continues; some of the stories are distasteful, especially on a difficult day like today, so I’m going to leave them be and move on.
The sages observe, though, that biblical and mishnaic sources tend to treat the worship of the Molekh–the idol to whom people would sacrifice their children–as more severe than the worship of other idols. Perhaps, as some sages argue, this is about any idol said to be king (מולך means “reigning”), and perhaps there should be distinctions between worshipping temporary molekhs and permanent ones.
Page 65 turns to witchcraft, trying to distinguish the different kinds of divination based on biblical verses, including necromancers and tellers of omens. I think we’ll leave it at that for today and continue tomorrow.
Today’s page continues on the theme of idol worship, still reflecting a continuing curiosity about the motives. The previous page considered the idea of cult suasion. Today’s page opens with a dispute between Abaye and Rava:
The issue is whether a person who worships an idol not out of true reverence for the idol, but rather to please someone they love or fear is liable (as Abaye says) or not (as Rava says).
In modern criminal law, as any first-year law professor will tell her students, motive usually does not matter. some offenses require a specific type of intent (for example, to commit a theft one has to have an intent to permanently deprive the owner of the stolen thing), but *why* the theft happens doesn’t make a difference. Is it greed? jealousy? need, as in Jean Valjean‘s case? Doesn’t matter. If you took and carried the item without permission, intending to permanently deprive, you’ve stolen it in the eyes of the law. Nevertheless, there are some scenarios in which the motive might matter. Proving a strong motive in court could strengthen the jury’s certainty that the defendant committed the offense. Arguing for a virtuous motive to commit a crime can play a role in sentencing, and sometimes might even dissuade prosecutors from pressing charges.
In this case, says Abaye, the motive does not matter, and his proof is threefold:
The original mishna repeats the words “one who worships” twice – one of those is meant to imply our worshipper-with-an-unusual-motive. Rava’s counterargument is that the repetition is about the form of worship, not about the motive.
The original mishna forbids not only bowing to idols, but rather any form of worship; bowing to another person out of love or fear is permitted, as a sign of respect and subservience, but here we have actual worship. Rava’s counterargument: It is possible to bow out of respect or to bow as a form of worship of the person (e.g., the aforementioned cult leader).
There’s a baraita that teaches that, if an anointed high priest unintentionally worships an idol, he must offer sacrifice as his penance. But if the scenario reflects a truly honest mistake (bowing to the statue of a king to honor the king rather than to worship), then the guilt offering is unnecessary; this situation differs from others, where there is a motive to worship. The other sages seem to at least agree that, for the high priest to do such a thing must be a very serious lapse of judgment that does require a guilt offering.
Which brings us to another interesting criminal law principle. Fear not, all will be explained soon enough:
The issue here is what I call, when I teach double jeopardy, unit of prosecution. Idol worship could include an entire sequence of actions: killing the animal, smoking it, dripping its blood, bowing to the idol. Is each of these a separate offense, or are they all part of a single idol-worship transgression? The different sages try to count the offenses in different ways, finding anchoring for their logic in various biblical verses. They relate it to a similar issue: violating the Shabbat and lighting a fire on Shabbat–with the latter treated so severely that it is counted as a separate offense. Setting aside the biblical juggling, I can see good arguments for a variety of reasonable approaches to this problem–and indeed, Rabbi Yose says that these scenarios should be figured out on a case-by-case basis (פְּעָמִים שֶׁחַיָּיב אַחַת עַל כּוּלָּן, פְּעָמִים שֶׁחַיָּיב עַל כׇּל אַחַת וְאַחַת). Here, for example, is U.S. federal law trying to sort out the very same problem. On one hand, overcharging is petty and creates what could be an unfair lever toward plea bargaining. On the other, undercharging could incentivize people to commit more crimes, knowing that the charges will not become more serious.
This brings the sages back to the questions of motive and intent, and they opine that the misguided idol worshipper, regardless of what he did, is liable only for one guilt offering – and they proceed to dismiss the idea of separating the offense into difference charges, with the rare closing וְתוּ לָא מִידֵּי (“there’s nothing more to discuss.”) Really? Have they decided to dismiss the whole unit of prosecution issue?
NOPE!
They’re back to it. Rav Shmuel arrives in Babylonia from Eretz Israel and discusses a baraita according to which each Shabbat violation is counted separately. And as it happens, I have a case in point in which common law concluded the opposite! I’m not making this up! In Crepps v. Durden (1777), “the plaintiff was convicted of selling small hot loaves of bread, the same not being any work of charity, on the same day (being Sunday) by four separate convictions.” The court concluded, as Lewis Hoccheimer explains in this law review article from 1900 (ah, the days in which these things were merely six pages long!) that the sales of the loaves (albeit to different customers) all constitute one offense. The contradiction is illusionary: as the sages explain, if one lights a fire AND mows one’s field, those are two transgressions; but two instances of mowing (like two instances of selling bread) count as only one transgression.
Now, the sages try to reconcile the two issues, which appear to involve different logical principles: repeated violations on the Sabbath and unintentional idol worship. They combine both into one: an unintentional idolator who engages in a series of worship actions owes only one guilt offering.
Today we’re going over two pages (the Shabbat page and today’s). I might make this a habit, as our family Saturdays are packed with the holy religion of children’s sports. We’ll see how it goes. Anyway, the bulk of both pages is a continuous discussion of the offense of idolatry.
The beginning of p. 60, though, continues the rabbinical discussion from pp. 57-59 about the universal application of various obligations. Rabbi Shimon, you might remember, thought the prohibition on witchcraft applies to Jews and gentiles alike. The reasoning is that the prohibition uses universal language: ״מְכַשֵּׁפָה לֹא תְחַיֶּה״ (“thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”), which includes various commandments, including the prohibition against bestiality, that do have universal application. A similar maneuver is used by Rabbi Elazar to universalize the prohibition on mixing different types of seed and textile. This issue relates directly to the question of the two covenants, which came up in the previous pages: the Noahide one, which applies to all humans, and the Sinaitic one, which applies to Israelites/Jews. The rabbis carefully parse the obligation language: the phrase ״וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת חֻקֹּתַי״ (and you shall keep my statutes) refers to statutes handed now, whereas the phrase ״אֶת חֻקֹּתַי תִּשְׁמֹרוּ״ (my statutes you shall keep) refers to statutes generally, in principle (including the ones already in place.) Which, to me at least, sounds like the vast difference between the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front.
The page now returns to an issue we had discarded halfway through: the criminal trials of blasphemers, specifically the prohibition on witnesses to utter the blasphemy even when reporting the out-of-court statement. Remember that the witnesses have to use the euphemism YOSE in lieu of the actual name? They carve out the elements of the offense: to be liable, one must use at least the Tetragrammaton (the four-letter name of God); the two-leter YH is not enough for committing the offense.
Thing is, if the witnesses and judges were all talking around the issue, how can we be sure what the defendant said? The mishna teaches that when the judgment is over, one witness (the eldest) says the actual name that was uttered, and then the judges rise and tear their garment. The gemara finds biblical anchoring for this custom. In Judges 3:20, when Ehud comes to give news to Eglon the Moabite, he says, “I have a message from God to you”, and Eglon rises => the judges must rise (and if a gentile rose, Israelites surely must!). And in II Kings 18:37, after Rabshakeh gives his Mouth-of-Sauron speech, the Judean officials tear their garments => so must the judges. The judges must not mend their clothes, which they get from the emphasis and repetition in the description of Elisha tearing his garments (וַיִּקְרָעֵם לִשְׁנַיִם קְרָעִים, and he tore them into two pieces). The witnesses do not need to do so, as they would presumably have already done so when they heard the blasphemy in the first place. And the best zinger of the lot is this:
Meaning, there’s a controversy over whether, nowadays there’s a need to tear one’s cloth when hearing blasphemy; Rabbi Hiya says one doesn’t have to, otherwise the entire garment will be torn to pieces, which is such a poetic way to convey desensitization; others dispute this, doubting we’ve become so bad-spoken and suggesting that one still needs to tear their clothes when hearing blasphemy by a Jew.
The last issue the sages flag here is the deviation from the usual procedure, in which witnesses do not testify in each other’s presence to prevent them from hearing each other’s testimony (and thus tailoring their testimony to harmonize with that of other witnesses.) In modern U.S. evidence law, this is addressed in Rule 615, which was recently amended to clarify that, in addition to excluding witnesses from the courtroom, the court may also prohibit the excluded witness from learning about, obtaining, or being provided with trial testimony. The blasphemy business, though, requires an exception from this rule, because how will witness #2 be able to say “I heard that also”? Apparently, the concern about repeating the blasphemy outweighs the concern of witness collusion–both in two witnesses and in three.
Which brings us to a new issue: the definition of idolatry, an offense punishable by death. The mishna lists the forms of punshable idolatry, distinguishing them other forms of dealing with idols, such as cuddling and bathing them, which are not punishable:
One of the most interesting bits about the gemara on this is the interest the sages have in foreign forms of worship. Rabbi Yirmeyah says that bowing to an idol, even if it’s not the usual manner of worshiping that particular idol, is prohibited (there are verses about idol worship that specifically mention bowing, from which they deduce that bowing is especially offensive). The sages pay special attention to the punishable worship of idols in the same way that the Jewish God is worshipped, to prevent a situation where they accidentally prohibit the proper form and target of worship. Some sages believe that cuddling with idols, which is not mentioned, is not forbidden; others believe that the term “bowing” is a general term meant to imply all forms of idol worship–or at least to any worshipful behavior that would be honorable re the Jewish God but is dishonorable re idols.
The rabbis then elicit a principle of “transferred intention”: if one performs an idolatrous labor thinking of another idolatrous labor, the offense is still punishable, as the intent shifts from labor to labor (דִּמְחַשְּׁבִין מֵעֲבוֹדָה לַעֲבוֹדָה). This reminds me a bit of the transferred intent doctrine in modern criminal law: if you wanted to kill A but killed B, your intent to commit murder carries and you are culpable either way. But the sages raise another problem with transferred intention in the context of idolatry: Slaughtering animals, they say, is allowed for mundane purposes. But what if the intent (to use the blood for idol worship) does not come to fruition? There’s a conflict of opinion, and some debate over whether the issue is the person’s liability or the dead animal’s suitability for mundane labors.
So, there’s a lot more of this here, but I want to turn to a little side issue. Often, when relaying a debate, there’s a little tidbit about when and where the conversation happened. Somewhere on page 61, we learn the following:
Rav Hamnuna lost his oxen and, presumably when searching for them, ran into Rabba, who joined him, and along the way they chatted about a contradiction between two mishnayot, which reach opposite conclusions about the liability of someone who declares he’s going to worship an idol but doesn’t actually do it. I love that whoever redacted this stuff wanted to provide us the mental image of these two guys, walking around, looking for oxen, and hashing out the mishnaic contradictions. But the linguistic issue they raise is interesting, because modern law, too, struggles with the point at which declaring an intent becomes an act. Is declaring “I’m going to go worship idols” merely speech, or is it speech-act, which might spur toward idol worship, or which is somehow performative on its own?
One difficult case involves a person who posits themselves as a god and asks others to worship them. The way the sages address this scenario is pretty cool. Some worry that this incitement is worrisome, because folks might be persuaded (שָׁמְעִי לֵיהּ) and some think that it’s harmless, because people will likely say, “how is he different than us?” mock the guy, and then no harm is done. The sages consider that inciting an individual can work, but trying to sway a whole group of people will likely not work, as there will probably be more inertia in a group and less deviant energy.
And the contradiction between the mishnayot can be resolved as follows: There, where the mishna states that one is liable for speech alone, the reference is to an individual who was incited; here, where the mishna indicates that one is not liable for speech alone, it is referring to a case of an incited multitude of people. The Gemara explains: An individual who was incited does not typically change his mind, and he goes astray after idol worship. Therefore, once he agrees to the suggestion to worship an idol, he has fully accepted the idol upon himself as a god and is liable. By contrast, a multitude of people are apt to change their minds, and consequently they do not go astray after idol worship.
This makes me think of the many studies on cults I read when working on Yesterday’s Monsters, and on the acquisition of followers one by one. The sages don’t seem to consider a scenario in which the cult leader accrues a critical mass of worshippers, which would make it easier to tip the scales for the as-of-yet unconvinced. To the extent that the matter of who is swayed, how many, and by whom, has some implications as to the punishment–and the sages debate whether it makes a difference re stoning-vs.-beheading–the arguments that are being made are more about anchoring the punishments in verse than about the psychology of cult suasion.
There is a remarkable moment in Edward Berger’s film Conclave in which Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the Dean of the Conclave of Cardinals assembled to elect a new Pope, sits on the dead pope’s bed, having broken the seal into the holy man’s private chamber to search for evidence of financial malfeasance in the church. On the nightstand of this recently departed man, the most powerful figure in the Catholic church, is an open bible, and on it is a pair of modest reading glasses, mended with tape at the bridge. Lawrence picks up the glasses, holds them close, and his eyes fill with tears. After days of political machination, subterfuge, strategy, plot twists, the simple personal effect cuts to the core of human emotion: Lawrence feels orphaned. His mentor, his father figure, the man he prized and idolized, is gone, and Lawrence, inconsolable, breaks into sobs.
Does this moment of pure, unadulterated grief shake Lawrence into horror at what the papal election has become? At how every player in this complicated, well constructed political drama – the good guys, the bad guys, and everyone in between – has betrayed his principles? At how the vacuum, the power grab, has made all of them into “small, petty men” as one of the other Cardinals says later in the film? After his sobs subside and he finds his emotional bearings, he continues with the search, finding the incriminatory document.
I watched Conclave with great interest. Not just because it is a phenomenal film–not a false note in the script, not a less-than-masterful performance in sight, breathtaking acting, scenery, and costumes–but because I’ve been there. I’ve been at faculty meetings in which Deans were elected, in which new faculty members were appointed, in which colleagues were voted tenure. So I have some <ahem> lived experience </ahem> in the area of putting a group of homo sapiens in a scenario where ambition plays a role, where social advantage is conveyed, and where different values and considerations play a part in sectarian divisions. There is nothing unique about the Conclave: yes, there is ridiculous ceremony and arcane trappings, but aren’t there always ritualized elements in every human encounter? We are interested in these scenarios of group dynamics behind closed doors–jury deliberation is another one–because we have a sense of the major issues that animate these scenarios.
Here are some of the issues that play out, in sophisticated ways, in Conclave. Does the election to an eminent post take into account the personal virtue, the worthiness, of the individual, or is it more important to prioritize a more general policy, or set of values, and then pragmatically select the person who can realistically win office and hold it? How deep (and how low) should we go when inquiring into a person’s past conduct, and how long a memory should we have when assessing, wholesale, a person’s lifetime of goodness? When malfeasance comes to light, who should do the exposing, and how much room must we leave for personal dignity? Is it fair to say that anyone who aspires to high office should be automatically disqualified because aspiration, itself, is a negative trait? At what point does the election start serving the administrative, ritual machine, rather than the ethereal values that the machine is supposed to serve?
Each of the central characters in the film faces these difficult questions and ends up with a different resolution–and almost everybody comes up short. Some are cruder, easier cases. Tedesco, the reactionary Archbishop of Venice, makes every situation into a cudgel to beat his credo into everyone around him. Tremblay, a Canadian liberal cardinal, sees the election as a purely self-motivated power grab and does not shy from lying, stealing, and bribing. Adeyemi, a Nigerian cardinal with conservative views, is nonetheless happy to ride on the wings of diversity until a secret from his past comes to light and then he is seized with fear and begs for secrecy. Bellini, an Italian-American liberal, cares more about steering the church into a more tolerant 21st century than about his own candidacy, and is willing to overlook a lot of moral inadequacies to advance the goal. Even the main protagonist, Lawrence–a fundamentally decent man but no one’s patsy–who exhibits remarkable courage and astuteness as he navigates this complex political landscape–gets tempted, for a brief moment, by the dark side. Having not wanted the papacy at all, he is hell-bent on rooting out corruption and sin, until a window of opportunity briefly opens for him. Earlier in the film, Bellini tells Lawrence that every Cardinal has already secretly picked the name by which he would like to be known as Pope, and Lawrence replies: “I haven’t.” But when the Conclave machinations suddenly thrust Lawrence into a situation where he has a realistic shot at the papacy, he quietly admits to Bellini: “John. . . I would choose John.”
What happens at the end sheds a lot of darkness and light on the proceedings, and I won’t spoil it here. It is a masterpiece that can teach us all about the heaven and hell that we can put each other through when egos get in the way, raising the complicated questions whether full divestment from ego is ever possible.
If you like nerding out on legal interpretation principles, today’s your day and b.Sanhedrin 59 is your page! In a nice, self-contained argument, the sages debate two important legal principles.
The first issue has to do with the criminal energy required for an act and for an omission. Generally speaking, as Graham Hughes explains in this 1957 article, the law in general is preoccupied not only with the things we should not do, but also with the things we ought to do. But to make it a crime to refrain from doing something–essentially to demand action–is to ask a lot from people, and therefore any criminal omission must come equipped with some justification for setting the duty to act: a special job or relationship or set of circumstances. Expecting strangers, for example, to actively intervene to save lives they do not have a special connection to, is setting the bar very high, which is why the new slew of Good Samaritan 911 laws regarding drug overdoses merely excuse any 911 callers reporting an overdose from any criminal action for drugs, to incentivize them to call, rather than place an obligation on people to call and a sanction for not doing so.
The discussion of this principle in the context of the Noahide obligations starts in a peculiar manner. Resh Lakish says it is an offense for a non-Jew to observe the Sabbath. Ravina expounds: descendants of Noah are not supposed to take a religious day of rest at all–even, say, on a Monday (this, I’m sure, is news to every Christian and Muslim person in the world!). Anyway, yes, this is a bit ridiculous, but check this out:
The sages think that this Sabbath prohibition business is overreach. When issuing commandments beyond our own religious jurisdiction, we cannot overextend too much: the Noahide obligations must only apply to שֵׁב וְאַל תַּעֲשֶׂה (“sit and don’t do”) – in other words, they must only forbid acts. By contrast, penalizing omissions – קוּם עֲשֵׂה (“arise and do”) – goes too far.
So now, of course, we have to look at the Noahide obligations and ensure that they all criminalize acts, not omissions, and there’s an immediate problem: וְהָא דִּינִין קוּם עֲשֵׂה הוּא, וְקָא חָשֵׁיב? The obligation to establish courts requires gentiles to take considerable action! How can it be included in the Noahide obligations list, then? The response is that it encompasses both an act and an omission: קוּם עֲשֵׂה וְשֵׁב אַל תַּעֲשֶׂה נִינְהוּ. The omission is failing to establish courts; the act is committing injustice.
This is not quite how modern criminal law would look at this. If an implicit act is folded into every omission by way of an undesired result (e.g., letting someone drown is an “act” as well as an omission, the failure to save them), then there are no real omissions, are there?
But the fact that we’ve just engaged with the issue of gentiles obeying a commandment that seems to single Jews out (Shabbat) leads the sages to discuss other such cases, such as studying Torah. According to Rabbi Yohanan, gentiles are forbidden from studying Torah; ״תּוֹרָה צִוָּה לָנוּ מֹשֶׁה מוֹרָשָׁה״, לָנוּ מוֹרָשָׁה וְלֹא לָהֶם (the Torah is for us, not for them). Doing so is akin to stealing the Torah from those who are entitled to it (מִיגְזָל קָא גָזֵיל לַהּ). Rabbi Meir disagrees: from the use of the word אָדָם (person) in the mandate to study, rather than a more exclusive term, he learns that gentiles are permitted to study Torah and if they do so, they are like the High Priest. On first sight, this can be pretty amusing; not that you need me to tell you this, but any gentiles who are following along are very much welcome to study as much Torah as they like! I like reading other religions’ texts, too! You’re not stealing anything; there’s plenty of text to go along. But on second thought, I imagine that if there’s something animating this conversation, and it could be a scenario in which neighbors of these stricken and exiled Jews take a look at Jewish texts to find reasons to berate Jews and incite against them, and this might be a way of lashing out by putting on a show of power.
Which is where the page shifts gears to another interesting legal question. The pretext for that is the Noahide prohibition to consume limbs or blood torn from a living animal (factory farms, please take notice). This prohibition appears twice in the text: once in application to the sons of Noah and once at Sinai. Rabbi Hanina ben Gamliel asks–why the repetition?
The underlying assumption is that the law–the Torah–does not repeat things merely for emphasis; any repetition has a justification. All the more so when the repetition is addressed to different crowds. Which suggests the following principle according to Rabbi Hanina: כׇּל מִצְוָה שֶׁנֶּאֶמְרָה לִבְנֵי נֹחַ וְנִשְׁנֵית בְּסִינַי – לָזֶה וְלָזֶה נֶאֶמְרָה – the repetition indicates that the obligation applies to both Jews and non-Jews. But there is another way to look at it: repeating a Noahide commandment at Sinai might be interpreted as an intent to shift that obligation away from the Noahides and toward the Israelites: מִדְּנִשְׁנֵית בְּסִינַי – לְיִשְׂרָאֵל נֶאֶמְרָה וְלֹא לִבְנֵי נֹחַ. The first approach seems to govern: idol worship, for example, was repeated in both places, and they learn that gentlies were liable for it as well as Jews.
But what about Noahide commandments that were not repeated at Sinai? Some sages think that the obligation is then transferred to the Israelites; others (the position I find more logical) is that the obligation only applies to the folks who were commanded it, i.e., the gentiles, not the Israelites.
Several examples follow in which behaviors that appear to be permitted to Jews are forbidden to gentiles, and excused by the different contexts of the behavior (circumcision? reproduction?) And there are numerous wrinkles to the interpretive principle. Perhaps repeating them at Sinai is by way of explication that, from now on, they only apply to the recipients of the covenant? Or perhaps not repeating them at Sinai should be interpreted as keeping their original application–to Jews and gentiles alike–intact?
This brings us to an interesting conversation about eating meat. Rabbi Yehuda says that Adam was not allowed to eat meat, as the vegetables were permitted to both humans and animals, but the animals were not explicitly permitted to humans. What, then, do we do with fish, given the biblical permission וּרְדוּ בִּדְגַת הַיָּם (and have dominion over the fish of the sea)? The sages say: the dominion is for the sake of using animals for labor, rather than for eating. In case you’re now cracking up, like me, imagining a construction sign that reads FISH AT WORK, you’re not alone. The gemara itself asks: דָגִים בְּנֵי מְלָאכָה נִינְהוּ? and then, וְעוֹפוֹת בְּנֵי מְלָאכָה נִינְהוּ? meaning – does it make sense to expect fish and birds to work? What kind of labor dominion might you have over fish and birds? After trying to figure out what sort of labor one can possibly do with geese and chickens, Rabbi Shimon ben Menasia provides the following awesome ode to a snake:
As it is taught in a baraita that Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya says: Woe over a great attendant that has been lost to the world; as had the snake not been cursed that it should go on its belly, there would have been two fine snakes at the disposal of each and every one of the Jewish people. One he would send to the north, and the other one he would send to the south, to bring him precious sandalbonim, a type of precious stone, and other precious stones and pearls. Moreover, he would attach a strap under his snake’s tail like a harness to an animal, and use it to take dirt out to his garden and to rebuild his ruin, as he does with other animals. This demonstrates that the snake was capable of performing labor.
But our relationship with the snake has been irrevocably spoiled, as anyone who has read Genesis knows, and Rabbi Yehuda ben Teima has a theory of what went wrong:
Adam, the first man, would dine in the Garden of Eden, and the ministering angels would roast meat for him and strain wine for him. The snake glanced at him and saw his glory, and was jealous of him, and for that reason the snake incited him to sin and caused his banishment from the Garden. According to this, evidently Adam would eat meat. The Gemara answers: There the reference is to meat that descended from heaven, which was created by a miracle and was not the meat of animals at all.
That’s the end of our daf today, and I’m off to prepare a vegan breakfast that even snakes will covet.
Today’s page continues the peculiar conversation about the legal obligations that the Torah places on people who presumably have nothing to do with the Torah: gentiles, who according to the previous page must obey the Noahide Obligations. The sages are still hard at work delineating the limitations of these obligations, and elucidating the connections between the moral standards that apply to Jews and non-Jews–and in today’s page, this requires them to step their toes into a hefty question that provokes heated debate today, too: who is a Jew?
The porous connections between Jews and Gentiles are present in various literary precursors to the Talmud: apocryphal books, Qumran scrolls, especially the sectarian writings, and the book of Acts in the New Testament. As Moshe Lavie explains in a 2013 article, the initial elucidation of obligations for non-Jews wasn’t perceived in apocryphal texts as separate from the covenant with Jews, but rather as part of the continuing negotiation and commitment between God and humans in general, part of the historical progression of rights and duties toward the Abrahamic and Sinaitic covenants. In Qumran sectarian texts, there is a separation between the sect members’ obligations and those who apply to everyone else–Jews and other Noahides alike. It is only in the talmud that the distinction ossifies into a Jews-vs.-Gentiles framework of obligations.
But even in Talmudic times, the separation was far from settled. In a 1979 article, Jewish law scholar Ze’ev Falk writes about the extent to which the mishna, tosefta, and talmud are concerned not only with mixed families, but also with the application of Jewish family law to foreign families. He starts off with the important reminder that, contrary to what might appear from the text, intermarriages were extremely common (which is why the decree to end them, and divorce non-Jewish women and children, during the Ezra and Nehemia times was perceived as such a dramatic and traumatic rift.) Later, in exile, Falk explains that assimilation led some Jews to adopt various foreign customs, including, in one case involving Alexandrian assimilationists, kidnapping women in the market as an informal way of ending their previous marriage and starting a new one. This method of family formation was prohibited to Jews, but was a not-uncommon Roman custom. To ensure that these folks were not getting caught in halakhic violations, Hillel would write them quick divorce decrees and “kosherize” what they had done via custom.
Intermarried people were not the only liminal characters in the Jews-vs.-Gentiles analysis. In a 2017 article, Yedidah Koren explains the Tannaitic creation of an in-between category, “Israel uncircumcised” (ישראל ערל), who is on some sort of probationary period.
Perhaps the existence of these liminal categories–intermarried people, assimilationists, “Israel uncircumcised,” etc., somewhat ameliorate the absurdity of a stricken people in exile creating this megalomanic set of rules that apply to the people around them who probably couldn’t care less. And perhaps this is precisely why they did it–to form a counternarrative of power, absurd as it may seem, to lift up the spirits of those around them, serving the same function that the wacky Sefer Toledot Yeshu will serve in Medieval times. Indeed, in her terrific dissertation on Jewish/Gentile relations in the Talmud, Sigalit Ur examines 220 rabbinic stories, all of which share the fantastical, farfetched narrative feature of Jews dramatically triumphing over gentiles and having their comeuppance.
Anyway, let’s get to it. Most of today’s conversation is concerned with the question raised by Rabbi Meir: Should gentiles be liable for incestuous behavior that is forbidden to Jews? The liminal case they are concerned with has to do with a convert who was conceived when his parents were gentiles, but born after his mother had already converted. Here’s how the initial opinions shake out:
The “birthright” jurisdiction of the convert follows the matrilineal line: marrying your stepsister on your dad’s side is valid, but marrying your stepsister on your mom’s side (the “Jewish side”, if you will) is wrong. Rabbi Meir extends this rule to any female relatives on the patrilineal and matrilineal sides, respectively. Note that the complicated Jewish rituals for marrying one’s brother-in-law after losing one’s husband (יבמה) or getting out of it through a ceremony (חליצה) do not apply to non-Jews: וּמוּתָּר בְּאֵשֶׁת אָחִיו, וּבְאֵשֶׁת אֲחִי אָבִיו, וּשְׁאָר כׇּל עֲרָיוֹת מוּתָּרוֹת לוֹ.
Now we start dealing with the sort of scenario that the cat dragged out of the soap opera channel. What of a non-Jew who married a mother *and* her daughter? כּוֹנֵס אַחַת וּמוֹצִיא אַחַת (he chooses one and divorces the other). But if one of them dies, is he allowed to remain married to the other? Opinions vary, and the sages build their argument relying on the Genesis 2:24: עַל־כֵּן֙ יַֽעֲזׇב־אִ֔ישׁ אֶת־אָבִ֖יו וְאֶת־אִמּ֑וֹ וְדָבַ֣ק בְּאִשְׁתּ֔וֹ וְהָי֖וּ לְבָשָׂ֥ר אֶחָֽד׃ (the verse talking of a man leaving his home to be of “one flesh” with his wife). The sages try to parse the terms אָבִ֖יו (his father) and אִמּ֑וֹ (his mother) to figure out who needs to be left. Rabbi Eliezer wants to read these simply: they do mean “father and mother”. Rabbi Akiva reads into the word “father” the term “also father’s wife” to imply a prohibition on paternal relatives as well.
But as it turns out, the Torah stories are rife with stories involving people marrying their relatives, which now have to be explained away in creative ways. For example, in Exodus 6:20, Amram, Moses’ father, marries his aunt Yokheved; the sages reason that she was his paternal aunt. When Abraham and Sarah pull their “she’s my sister” stunt on Abimelekh (wild story, Genesis 20:12), Abraham stresses that Sarah is his paternal sister (אֲחֹתִי בַת אָבִי הִיא אַךְ לֹא בַת אִמִּי) and therefore the marriage is fine. The gemara concludes that nieces are akin to sisters, and the same rules apply.
Along the way, the text reminds us of some moral prohibitions encompasses in the words וְדָבַק (and he clung) and אִשְׁתּוֹ (his wife). These, as I never tire to explain, are men of their time and place, and they have rather limiting opinions on who can count as a spouse and on what forms of clinging are and are not within the approved norm.
Toward the end of the page we let go of the incest conversation, for now, and discuss some garden variety violence.
Even though this conversation is set specifically in the context of a gentile striking a Jew, it does bring up more universal ideas on what counts as an offense. Resh Lakish, who according to agaddah knew something about organized crime from personal experience, says that anyone who even lifts his arm to strike, before completing the offense, is already labeled רָשָׁע, evil. Z’eri cites Rabbi Hanina as relaxing the penalty some and merely labeling him as חוֹטֵא, a sinner. Lovers of substantive criminal law can parse this stuff in several different ways. One is the proposed distinction between an attempt and a completed offense, where the different labels represent different degrees of sentence severity. The other might mirror the common law definitions of assault and battery; assault does not involve an actual offensive touch, but is nevertheless a completed offense consisting of putting the victim in a state of realistic apprehension regarding the potential for violence. A third take could be that the terms רָשָׁע and חוֹטֵא refer merely to sentencing. And indeed, the next move involves the appropriate punishment. Rav Huna goes for a poetic punishment – he who lifts his arm will have his arm chopped off – and he gets there in a very creative way: Job 22:8 says, וְאִ֣ישׁ זְ֭רוֹעַ ל֣וֹ הָאָ֑רֶץ וּנְשׂ֥וּא פָ֝נִ֗ים יֵ֣שֶׁב בָּֽהּ׃ (“the land belongs to the strong.”) But Rav Huna reads it in a different way: the strong-armed person belongs in the earth. Rabbi El’azar seems to think that Rav Huna’s creativity is overrated, and that the verse should be understood literally as referring to the conquering of land, not to actually being buried in it.
We continue with the ambitious project of enforcing theoretical law on nonplussed foreigners in tomorrow’s page.
In the previous page, the sages started discussing whether death sentences for various transgressions apply to non-Jews as well, leading them to reexamine and carefully delineate the scope of the Seven Noahide Obligations (שבע מצוות בני נח) from Genesis 9 1-7:
Some language in our page goes as far as Adam, saying that when God spoke to him and Eve in the garden of Eden and “ordered” him things, it was these Noahide obligations that were being issued. I hope the audacity of this exegetical adventure is clear. If we are following the biblical narrative, these commandments, or requirements, are issued to the first human inhabitants of the planet, at a point at which there are no distinctions between Israelites and non-Israelites, Jews and non-Jews. Thousands of years (presumably) later, after Israelite and Judahite kingdoms rose and fell, we have sages in exile not only proclaiming that the prohibited behaviors still apply to their neighbors (in Babylonia!), but also that the biblical punishment for their violation is execution. This is a truly wild expansion of biblical jurisdiction, and it’s especially cheeky considering that the list was expanded from its biblical version (don’t eat blood from a live animal and don’t kill people) to a list of seven. The list changes depending on which school of sages you prefer, but it includes seven (or more) of the following: The seven, then, are: establishing courts, refraining from blasphemy, refraining from worshipping idols, refraining from incest, refraining from killing, refraining from stealing, and refraining from eating the limbs of a live animal. The extensions proposed by certain sages are the prohibition against drinking blood from a live animal (no vampires, d’ya hear?), castrations, witchcraft, and mixing textile and seeds.
The sages ascribe the origin of these obligations to one verse in Genesis 2–the first divine instructions issued to the first humans in the Garden of Eden (and thus applicable to all humans). The original verse is וַיְצַו֙ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֔ים עַל־הָֽאָדָ֖ם לֵאמֹ֑ר מִכֹּ֥ל עֵֽץ־הַגָּ֖ן אָכֹ֥ל תֹּאכֵֽל׃. From וַיְצַו֙ (“ordered”) they deduce the court establishment obligation; from יְהֹוָ֣ה (God’s explicit name), the prohibition on blasphemy; from אֱלֹהִים (God), the prohibition on idolatry; from עַל־הָֽאָדָ֖ם (“on Man”) the prohibition on murder; from לֵאמֹר (“as follows”) the prohibition on incest; and from אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל, the invitation to eat fruit, the prohibition of eating limbs and blood from living animals.
This raises some interesting questions about the extent to which Jews are held to higher standards than non-Jews. For example, does a gentile who makes an idol, but does not actually worship it, deserve death? Apparently, Jews in this situation do not, so, a fortiori, gentiles do not either. Another verse suggests that, in addition to the basic Noahide cable package, the Jews receive the platinum package, which includes the obligations of judgment, keeping Shabbat, and honoring one’s parents.
Amidst the support for various Noahide obligations, the sages quote Genesis 9:3, where God offers Man the following buffet: כְּיֶרֶק עֵשֶׂב נָתַתִּי לָכֶם אֶת כֹּל, “like the green herbs I have given you all.” This one I find especially interesting because of the writings for and against vegetarianism and veganism in Jewish law. The sages, who obviously want to eat meat and have no problem with gentiles eating it, too, say that the verse uses the term “like” to compare things available for eating to natural weeds. The fact that cultivated vegetables aren’t mentioned implies that eating meat is fine. Only tearing limbs from animals is not allowed, and even this has an exception: crawling animals (שְׁרָצִים).
Here things turn, as Gen Zers might say, “extra”: the sages start conversing over which Noahide obligations merit an execution. Then, there are relaxed criminal proceedings tilted toward the prosecution in cases of Noahides: only one judge is required, and only one witness must be heard. Let’s set aside the question which Jewish court would presumably enforce these obligations, because at this point Jewish courts were non-existent and didn’t enforce anything against Jews either. Thing is, it turns out that several modern rabbis believe that these things still apply and should be preached to non-Jews, and that there are some non-Jewish groups that identify as Noahide and follow these obligations.
Another interesting twist to all this is the idea that incest operates differently for Jews and for non-Jews–it’s a choice-of-laws problem, if you will. A couple of pages ago, the sages were arguing, with gusto, over which family relationships were forbidden; now we are told that the rules for gentiles are according to their own terms (and who would enforce this?).
The talmudic discussion of these issues is an interesting precursor to an extended enforcement of basic universal norms to the ultimate Noahide Obligations violator: the jurisdictional challenge that Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazis’ “final solution” to the “Jewish problem”, raised at the beginning of his 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Back when he had committed the alleged crimes, he argued, he could not have even imagine that, one day, the State of Israel would exist and exercise jurisdiction over him. Moreover, jurisdiction was exercised extraterritorially: Eichmann was kidnapped from Buenos Aires and brought to Israel to face trial. As Leora Bilsky explains in an interesting article, the jurisdictional claim in the Eichmann trial lay in the liminal boundary between domestic and international criminal law. Eichmann was tried domestically, under an Israeli law that applied only to Nazis and their collaborators, but the jurisdictional determination considered the whole world as the political community interested in justice being done.
We’re already on Page 56 and I realized that I haven’t provided a sufficient introduction to what I’m doing with this project, so here’s a belated introduction.
One of the most studied texts in the Jewish canon, and arguably the bread-and-butter of religious education in Jewish yeshivot, is the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli), a compendium of legal arguments, intertextual tapestries, storytelling, and much more, produced and redacted by Jewish scholars who lived throughout the Babylonian Empire, likely between the Third and Sixth Centuries, while the territory that we would today identify as Iraq was under Roman and then Sassanian governance. After the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, this became the prominent center of Jewish culture, which now had to pivot from Temple-centered worship to text and Torah interpretation.
The Hebrew Bible, as we know it today, is not one book, but many books, whose compilation, editing, and reduction took centuries. It consists of works of many genres and, save for a few notable examples, the dates of composition do not correspond to the dates depicted in the narrative. During the Second Temple days and beyond, Jewish sages known as the Tana’im interpreted the legal framework of some biblical books, producing rules and regulations (halakha) and also some stories (aggaddah). The resulting collection, the mishna, and some accompanying texts from the same era, the baraita and the tosefta, are widely believed to have coalesced around 200 AD (this is traditionally regarded as the life project of Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi). Later sages, notably Rav Ashi and Ravina but probably many others as well, compiled a work that includes the mishnaic content and the gemara, which consists of plenty of commentary, legal argument, further storytelling, and further intertextual creativity. The gemara reflects the work of several generation of sages: the Amoraim (4th, 5th century) and the Savoraim (6th century). The latter group are thought to have completed the final redaction of the text.
If you open a Talmud page today, you will typically find the original content in the middle: the mishna quote, in rabbinic Hebrew, followed by an account of logical, legal, and theological arguments, jokes, tragedies, and pretty much everything else, in rabbinic Aramaic. In the wide margins of the page you’ll find commentary from various Medieval, Renaissance, and sometimes modern exegetes and commentators, with the most prominent and famous commentary coming from Rashi and written in special script.
In the early 1920s, a new custom emerged: beyond the traditional study of this central text in religious yeshivot, there would be a worldwide schedule for studying the Talmud, assigning everyone interested, all around the world, a daf yomi (a page a day). Many religious institutions offer a lesson (shi’ur) on the daf of the day, and there is a proliferation of resources, including a plethora of podcasts and videos, dedicated to daf studies. Many of these promise to get you through the daf in 15 minutes a day and go over each and every logical twist, including some of the exegesis in the margins. If you follow through, you can expect to get through the full SHAS (an acronym for Shisha Sdarim, the six books of the Bavli) in approximately seven years.
My approach to this enterprise is a little bit different. I was raised in a secular Israeli home, with classical liberal values, and while there is a lot of perennial wisdom in the Talmud, there are plenty of things there that I don’t see much point in dragging, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Also, some pages are full of interesting content worth getting into in depth, while others are, from my perspective, duds. I also don’t believe in reading the daf just for the sake of getting through it, unless we get something out of it.
Here are some of the things that I look for: I think the Talmud is a phenomenal tool for developing logical, critical thinking. By following the different strands of argument and taking a steel-man approach to each, one can learn how to apply various forms of logic to any area of policymaking or opinion formation. One also learns how to fortify one’s argument through intertextual references, and different approaches for how texts can or should be read. I also think that the Talmud shows us that many of the questions we face today troubled our ancestors as well, and we can learn something from the constructs they used to approach these problems. It’s also a great education in how to support macro-level logic—rules with universal application—with anecdote, story, or metaphor. And, it’s a phenomenal education in viewpoint diversity, as very often the question is never settled and you’re left with respect for the various opinions expressed.
Anyway, those are the goals I have when I engage in daily Talmud study. Some days are longer and some are shorter; some are funny and some are sad or irate; sometimes I go to traditional sources and sometimes to literature, current events, musical works, or popular culture. Because what we find in the text mirrors what we look for, those of you who are regular readers can probably guess what tends to grab my interest: I’m a law professor who is also a second-career rabbinical student, and I’m especially interested in courtrooms, prisons, punishment theory, social movements, public debates, the value of art and artistry, and bits that are comical or quirky.
To make this more widely available and useful, I’m cross-posting these daf posts to a new Substack – I hope I’ll have the fortitude to get on with it, because after all, this is a very niche undertaking. For now, and probably forever, the subscriptions to that newsletter will be free, so you can follow along here or there.
I hope you find this useful and educational. So, buckle up, friends, it’s going to be a long and interesting ride.
