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Aug. 6th, 2012 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI'm a little hesitant to make this post, but I suppose I ought to. The new Daf Yomi cycle began this past Friday and for the moment I'm attempting to participate.
Daf Yomi is a recent Jewish custom, perhaps a century old, of attempting to study a single page ('Daf') of the Talmud every day until you've made it through the whole thing, which takes roughly 7 years at that pace. Study can be done alone, in pairs called chavrutas, or in group lectures. The idea is that a daf is a small, manageable amount that people can study even if they're not isolated in a yeshiva setting studying all day. And the idea is that if we have a shared cycle, on any given day thousands of Jews will be studying the same page. It's a beautiful statement of religious unity. When the last cycle was completed last week, tens of thousands of people gathered at Giants Stadium to celebrate the achievement.
The Talmud, for those who are unaware, is the primary source of Jewish law outside the Bible. Jewish tradition separates the Torah given at Sinai into two parts: The Written Torah and the Oral Torah. According to a section of the Mishnah called Pirkei Avot, God delivered both to Moses at Mount Sinai and Moses began the continuous oral transmission of the Oral Torah by explaining it to Joshua, and Joshua in turn taught the council of elders, the first incarnation of the judiciary body that came to be called the Sanhedrin.
The Oral Torah was eventually codified first in the Mishnah by a Rabbi named Yehuda haNasi (Judah the Prince), and later in the Gemara, a sort of metacommentary on the Mishnah. But it's important to recognize what the Oral Torah is and isn't. The Oral Torah is not a set of laws that God transmitted to Moses but didn't want written down. We're not talking gnosticism and mystery cults here. The Oral Torah is a set of approaches to understanding laws. Neither the Mishnah or the Gemara consist of statements of law. They consist of statements of different Rabbis' opinions of the law, followed by arguments over those opinions. The purpose of studying Talmud is not to learn the laws of Judaism, but to learn how to interpret and understand the laws of Judaism. In a number of cases, after discussing different contradictory opinions, the Talmud does not identify which one is right, or even which one is followed. Sometimes the Talmud tells us that both answers are acceptable. Sometimes it says that there is a right answer, but we won't know until the Messiah comes. The Talmud models a number of different jurisprudential approaches in the opinions of its scholars. Famously, there are nearly a hundred different disputes alone between the school of Rabbi Hillel and the school of Rabbi Shammai in the Talmud.
Studying Talmud is an incredibly challenging and profoundly rewarding intellectual and spiritual exercise. It requires logical rigor, the ability to make creative leaps, fluency in deep Biblical esoterica, and a strong grasp of both Hebrew and Aramaic. I possess at least some of those things.
So I've started studying on the cycle, and will hopefully maintain the self-discipline to study a page every day. It's roughly a half-hour to an hour of time committed every day, depending on how difficult the subject matter is and how many secondary sources I consult to answer questions.
People- keep me honest! Ask me how I'm doing. Ask me to share things I've learned! Ask me questions.
Daf Yomi is a recent Jewish custom, perhaps a century old, of attempting to study a single page ('Daf') of the Talmud every day until you've made it through the whole thing, which takes roughly 7 years at that pace. Study can be done alone, in pairs called chavrutas, or in group lectures. The idea is that a daf is a small, manageable amount that people can study even if they're not isolated in a yeshiva setting studying all day. And the idea is that if we have a shared cycle, on any given day thousands of Jews will be studying the same page. It's a beautiful statement of religious unity. When the last cycle was completed last week, tens of thousands of people gathered at Giants Stadium to celebrate the achievement.
The Talmud, for those who are unaware, is the primary source of Jewish law outside the Bible. Jewish tradition separates the Torah given at Sinai into two parts: The Written Torah and the Oral Torah. According to a section of the Mishnah called Pirkei Avot, God delivered both to Moses at Mount Sinai and Moses began the continuous oral transmission of the Oral Torah by explaining it to Joshua, and Joshua in turn taught the council of elders, the first incarnation of the judiciary body that came to be called the Sanhedrin.
The Oral Torah was eventually codified first in the Mishnah by a Rabbi named Yehuda haNasi (Judah the Prince), and later in the Gemara, a sort of metacommentary on the Mishnah. But it's important to recognize what the Oral Torah is and isn't. The Oral Torah is not a set of laws that God transmitted to Moses but didn't want written down. We're not talking gnosticism and mystery cults here. The Oral Torah is a set of approaches to understanding laws. Neither the Mishnah or the Gemara consist of statements of law. They consist of statements of different Rabbis' opinions of the law, followed by arguments over those opinions. The purpose of studying Talmud is not to learn the laws of Judaism, but to learn how to interpret and understand the laws of Judaism. In a number of cases, after discussing different contradictory opinions, the Talmud does not identify which one is right, or even which one is followed. Sometimes the Talmud tells us that both answers are acceptable. Sometimes it says that there is a right answer, but we won't know until the Messiah comes. The Talmud models a number of different jurisprudential approaches in the opinions of its scholars. Famously, there are nearly a hundred different disputes alone between the school of Rabbi Hillel and the school of Rabbi Shammai in the Talmud.
Studying Talmud is an incredibly challenging and profoundly rewarding intellectual and spiritual exercise. It requires logical rigor, the ability to make creative leaps, fluency in deep Biblical esoterica, and a strong grasp of both Hebrew and Aramaic. I possess at least some of those things.
So I've started studying on the cycle, and will hopefully maintain the self-discipline to study a page every day. It's roughly a half-hour to an hour of time committed every day, depending on how difficult the subject matter is and how many secondary sources I consult to answer questions.
People- keep me honest! Ask me how I'm doing. Ask me to share things I've learned! Ask me questions.