What Fresh Heaven Is This?

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.