There has been an explosion of online Jewish educational opportunities in the past few years, starting during Covid and accelerating after October 7th, and I’ve subscribed to all kinds of newsletters as a result, and quickly unsubscribed when I realized that the mysticism of the Zohar or the history of the Golem wasn’t as fascinating as I’d hoped. Recently, two different groups sent out introductions to the study of Talmud (the collected commentaries of generations of rabbis on the Hebrew Bible), and since I know almost nothing about it, I said yes to both.
I only had one rabbi in high school who was willing to teach Talmud to girls, and he was still very careful about which sections to bring to us; I remember one class on the laws related to covering your hair when you get married, for example. The boys, on the other hand, started to learn Talmud in seventh grade, or earlier. The equivalent for girls was a class called “Jewish Law,” where we learned all of the rules for how to live an orthodox Jewish life, but not the reasons why, or who decided. The few times I’ve tried to read a page of Talmud by myself, translated into English of course because I don’t know Aramaic, I didn’t feel inspired to learn more. Every piece I came across seemed to be a variation of: your donkey falls into a pit on your neighbor’s land, which used to be your land before the boundary line was moved two feet to the right, and it is now unclear who is responsible for the vet bills. Well, not that argument exactly, but something like that.
The first Talmud newsletter that dropped into my inbox was based on the Daf Yomi schedule, a seven and a half year cycle where you study one page of Talmud each day, but instead of reading the page on your own this program included short daily essays explaining the day’s material. I read the first few days’ worth of essays, impressed by the variety of different perspectives offered, across different denominations and genders, but none of that could change that it was all still arguments over which donkey was born first, and how many chickens or goats you’d have to sacrifice to replace the value of the first born donkey. My eyes kept drifting off the page, and after three or four days of really, really trying, I had to unsubscribe.
I was even less optimistic about the Talmud Daily program from the 18Forty project at Yeshiva University, because instead of coming from multiple perspectives it was strictly Modern Orthodox in orientation, but the description said it was only one ten minute video a day for forty days and it called itself an introduction to the Talmud, rather than a translation or commentary, so I crossed my fingers and tried again. At the same time, I ordered a used copy of The Talmud for Dummies from Amazon, just in case. My bookshelves are already overcrowded, because I can find used copies of almost everything for cheap on Amazon, and as long as I’m already buying wee wee pads or chicken treats for the puppy dog, the shipping is free, so one more book couldn’t hurt.
From the first day of the Talmud Daily adventure, I chose to print out the transcripts rather than actually watching the videos, partly because I prefer to read but also because the rabbi teaching the class looks and sounds a lot like the rabbis I grew up with and I kept imagining him squinting across the screen at me wondering what the hell I was doing there. But after three days’ worth of transcripts, I realized that I still hadn’t read about a single donkey, and I started to relax, just a little. Of course, after I’d already signed up, I looked more closely at the fine print on the website and realized that what I’d initially read as “forty days,” was actually “forty weeks,” but I went ahead with it anyway.
My progress has been very slow, mostly because Talmud just doesn’t fit how my brain works. I was not the kid who memorized baseball statistics, or joined the debate team, or dreamed of going to law school. But it’s not only that the Talmud is focused on endless arguments between rabbis who never actually met each other, disagreeing intensely over how to translate the second word on the fifty-third page, because it changes the meaning of the universe entirely, but I also had to contend with the orthodox view that the Talmud is “The Oral Torah,” received by Moses on Mount Sinai along with the rest of the Hebrew Bible (even though I’m almost certain I only read about the Ten Commandments in that story). This idea, that the Talmud is as much the word of God as the Torah itself, is the basis for the legitimacy of rabbinic Judaism and all of the laws around ritual Jewish life, and I spent a lot of time in high school wondering if my rabbis and classmates really believed that God dictated everything, or if they held those beliefs more loosely, as a myth or a story, with an acknowledgement of the human hands involved in the process. It just seemed so strange that I was supposed to believe that not only had God dictated the first five books of the Hebrew Bible to Moses up on that mountain, including the story of his upcoming death, but then also threw in the rest of the prophets and writings and the oral tradition that would eventually be passed down from generation to generation and only written down between the years 200 and 500 of the Common Era. I mean, God is great and everything, but that just seemed like showing off.
To be fair, I do believe in God, a being I can’t see and can only experience through senses I don’t know how to describe, so I’m in no position to criticize someone else’s belief system. And there’s something incredibly reassuring in the idea that you could wake up each day knowing for sure what God expects of you; I just don’t happen believe it.
But I still want to understand the role the Talmud has played in shaping my people for so many generations, so I will keep trying to read this introduction one short transcript at a time, even as the mountain of pages keeps piling up. Maybe one day I’ll even reach the part where we read from the Talmud itself, and all of those donkeys, we’ll see how it goes.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
