In late 2019, I came upon an article about Daf Yomi — the practice of reading a page of the Talmud every day over the course of seven and a half years — and decided to sign up for a daily email promising to shepherd me through the text, that famously dense compilation of arguments among ancient rabbis. My wife was diagnosed with cancer a year earlier, and after grappling with big questions about mortality and fate, I was looking for a bit of spiritual direction.
The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is Judaism’s foundational holy book, but it’s not a cohesive manual for daily life. That’s where the Talmud comes in. A 63-volume collection of interpretation, storytelling and debate about how best to live in accordance with the precepts laid out in the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud is the primary source of Jewish religious law and practice. Less-observant Jews, like me, often regard it with mystification and awe, leaving the studying to our more orthodox cousins.
My religious education focused mostly on community and values like Tikkun Olam (healing the world) and Rodef Shalom (pursuing peace). Growing up, I went to Hebrew school on Thursday afternoons, celebrated most of the big holidays and memorized the Torah portion for my bar mitzvah one phoneme at a time. I met my Jewish wife through Jewish summer camp, and we do our best to light the Shabbat candles with our kids every week. In spite of all this, before I started Daf Yomi, my relationship with the actual texts behind all that culture and history was superficial at best.
I started receiving my Daf Yomi emails just before the pandemic. As the world locked down, that “daily dose of Talmud” gave structure and meaning to an otherwise blank expanse of days. I found an unexpected joy in the Talmud’s humanity and community-minded ethic.
But the most important lessons, for me at least, were in the ritual of reading. It became transformative, returning day after day to the same debates, doing my best to engage with a text that for over a thousand years has instructed Jews in the importance of productive argument and paying careful attention to even the smallest of details, like marriage rites or what to do with an unruly ox. Though the Talmud is an ancient text, steeped in the mores of a very different world, the underlying values don’t feel so foreign to me. The rabbis were almost always guided by a sense of fairness and justice, an urge to protect the most vulnerable and to preserve the sanctity of human life. This last principle is encapsulated in a Talmudic maxim that, in its earliest iteration, reads: “Whoever destroys a single life is considered by scripture to have destroyed the whole world.”
In the days immediately following the attacks of Oct. 7, the Talmudic rabbis felt like a comforting reminder of Jewish resilience. But in the later weeks and months, as the horrors of Oct. 7 gave way to a brutal Israeli bombing campaign, my relationship to the Talmud began to curdle. I tried hard to disentangle Daf Yomi from the bombs, from my grief and anger at those who seemed to value retribution over the sanctity of human life and the pursuit of peace. While I would like to say the Talmudic rabbis are inherently opposed to violence and oppression, the reality is that the Talmud — like the entire Jewish tradition, like any religion — is big and messy enough to contain both charity and cruelty. This capaciousness can be infuriating. Yet if I’ve learned one thing from four years of Daf Yomi, it’s the importance of sitting with such tensions, digging into the weft of contradiction and arguing passionately for what you believe.
A year later, now, with much of Gaza in ruins and tens of thousands of people killed — tens of thousands of worlds destroyed — I’m still struggling with these questions. Most days, frankly, the only answer I have is to keep reading, to keep returning to the text no matter how angry or ashamed or grief-stricken I might be, to keep wrestling with the tradition I find myself in, to keep pushing it toward those principles the Talmudic sage Hillel summarized when asked to teach the entire Torah to a student standing on one foot. “That which is hateful to you do not do to another,” he said. “That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Go study.”
I’d like to think Hillel and the other Talmudic rabbis would appreciate my stubborn attempts to make sense of faith in the midst of crisis — in part because they so valued debate, and in part because the Talmud itself was born of crisis, compiled at a moment of catastrophe. Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., Jews were forced to reimagine their religion without the temple that had for centuries served as its center. All those arguments on subjects like whether adjoining rooftops constitute public or private space serve a larger goal: a radical reimagining of practice and faith, a new way of thinking about personhood, mutual responsibility and coexistence. That process of rebuilding and rethinking continues even now, with every person who grapples with the text.
The rabbis may not have answered any of my big existential questions. Perhaps that was an unfair expectation. But I’m glad to have them with me, day after day, like next-door neighbors arguing good-naturedly on a front porch. They help keep me grounded in my values, while reminding me that, even in the most profound crisis, it’s possible to imagine new ways of being, new political structures, new models of coexistence and mutual support. In fact, this is when the reimagining is most urgent.
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