While the Tanach may be the bedrock and “point of departure” for Judaism as both a religion and a culture, it is the Talmud, especially the Babylonian Talmud (the Talmud Bavli), that is the best encapsulation of how Jews for the past two-thousand-odd years have related to the Torah and, thus, how we have lived as Jews.
The Talmud Bavli was compiled in the sixth century CE (the less-used Jerusalem Talmud, the Talmud Yerushalmi, was compiled about a hundred years prior) and collected the thoughts, teaching and arguments of the great Jewish rabbis of the previous six centuries. Comprised of the Mishna (itself compiled in 190 CE by Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi) and the Gemara, the commentary on the Mishna by the rabbis who came after it, the Talmud has been at the heart of Jewish learning ever since.
The bulk of the Talmud deals primarily with halachic matters, usually in the form of debates between rabbis and rabbinic schools, but these legal arguments are also often interspersed with what is known as Agadata: an apparently chaotic swirl of thoughts and opinions on everything from philosophy to mysticism, psychology to history, mythology to social criticism. One of the most profoundly brilliant aspects of the way the Talmud was compiled and presented is that, despite the fact that the rabbis of the Talmud often lived centuries and many miles apart, it presents these arguments as if they are happening between contemporaries. This gives it both a sense of immediacy and timelessness by creating the illusion of great scholars sitting eye-to-eye in yeshiva, arguing over the tiniest details of biblical exegesis and halachic minutiae, in the way that talmidim have been doing ever since.
It is a text that, over the first few centuries after the destruction of the second Temple and our expulsion from the land of Israel, radically reformed Judaism by doing the unthinkable and turning the oral Torah into a frozen, largely unchanging text, while at the same time transforming a religion built around the physical Temple into something built around the metaphorical Temple of our mind, a Temple that Jews could carry with us wherever we happened to find ourselves in the world, and the key to our continued survival.
Aiming to capture some of the freewheeling and fluid nature of the Oral Torah in written form (an impossible attempt but a crucial one), the Talmud is, by the standards of a traditional legal text, a supreme mess, as it jumps with abandon from topic to topic, even genre to genre, with seemingly neither rhyme nor reason. Rather than a failing, though, this “messiness” is at the very heart of the Talmud's enduring resonance throughout the centuries. As Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo puts it, and I paraphrase: because of the way it is structured, going from in-depth legalistic discussion to profound philosophical ideas to nuggets of relationship advice, the Talmud represents nothing less than life itself.
This preamble should, I hope, give some idea of the supreme importance of the Talmud to Jews of all stripes throughout the past two millennia, but it should also make fairly clear the challenges inherent in learning it.
We're Teaching Our Kids What?
Talmud study makes up some 90% of the curriculum in any yeshiva (and a continuously increasing role in some seminaries too, as the past century has seen a groundswell of support for girls and women learning Talmud), and is the focus of all Jewish day schools where post-matric yeshiva attendance is expected or at least highly desired. At these schools, the switch from a focus on Chumash and/or Mishna study to a full-on immersion in Talmud happens anywhere between the ages of ten and thirteen. This is, if you stop for a second to think about it, fairly mind-boggling, but is something we take for granted because of just how central a part the Talmud plays in the life of any religious Jew and just how much passion so many have for it.
While secular subjects are very much tailored according to the age, maturity and learning levels of not just each grade but often to numerous sub-groups within each grade, when it comes to religious studies our expectations are amazingly different. Thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys, and increasingly girls, are thrown head-first into studying something that was written fifteen hundred years ago, mostly in a long-dead language (the Mishna is written in relatively more familiar post-biblical Hebrew, but the Gemara is written in archaic Aramaic), and with almost no punctuation. And that is just the formal aspects of it. It is a bewilderingly difficult text to get one's head around, all the more so as it deals with subjects that are often esoteric to your average 21st-century teenager, but we expect our kids to “just go with it” in a way that we would never dream of doing with secular subjects.
This is not, Heaven forbid, a knock on the Talmud or its centrality to Jewish religious education. I have hopefully already made clear by now why the Talmud is so invaluable to post-second-Temple Judaism. We do, however, sometimes need a bit of perspective on something that we take all too easily for granted but is, ultimately, just a stone's throw away from teaching Aristotle in the original Ancient Greek to ten-year-olds.
Finding New Solutions to Very Old Challenges
Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, an educator in Monsey, New York, during the course of his years teaching Gemara to eighth-grade boys, came to the realization that he, like so many rebbeim, was guilty of taking exactly that for granted. At least one-third of his students were not grasping even the most basic aspects of Talmud study, despite having spent two to three years studying Gemara in previous years. Here, in this notably frum suburb of New York, a good portion of his students would go through their entire childhoods and adolescences in schools that place a particularly strong emphasis on Torah study but, at the end of the day, would graduate without the “basic abilities to learn even a single blat of Gemara.”
Rabbi Horowitz came gradually to realize this huge gap between his expectations of his students and the grim reality, but it was crystallized for him under the most extraordinarily mundane of circumstances. On a certain occasion, he found himself on a 45-minute car ride to an airport with a small group of carpet makers who, throughout the journey, were talking endlessly among themselves about their specific craft, laughing at in-jokes that only they would get. Their intention was not, presumably, to alienate the rabbi among them, but the result nonetheless left him feeling utterly bewildered and isolated throughout that forty-five-minute drive. The realization that this is exactly what many of his students must feel, day in and day out, for hours at a time, hit him with the full force of the greatest epiphanies. The next day at school he “addressed the students, begging them to forgive him,” and from that day on his teaching style shifted drastically. He threw all assumptions out of the window about where his students were holding and, along with discussing the basics of each subject before going into it, he created an open and inviting space for his students to ask any question they wanted on what they were learning, no matter how seemingly basic.
Bright Beginnings
No longer interested in getting through as many pages of Gemara in as little time as possible, Rabbi Horowitz slowed things right down and started to concentrate heavily on teaching his students the language of the Talmud so that, though they might get through less Gemara with him, they would finally be equipped to actually study it, with relative ease (as easy as Talmud study can ever get), on their own, with chavrusas, and throughout the rest of their lives. It would also turn something that they were supposed to love into something that they actually would love.
He inevitably received some pushback from parents who had their own ideas about how Gemara learning was supposed to go, but Rabbi Horowitz would sit down with both parents of new students and those he had been teaching a while, and patiently explained why his open, back-to-basics approach would benefit their children immensely. Ultimately, Rabbi Horowitz was proven entirely right, as his new methods resulted in major changes in his students, igniting a newfound passion for Talmud and ensuring that even those who once struggled in his class were able to come to grips with a page of Gemara.
Along with the none-more-crucial step of slowing down his classes and focusing on Talmud on a metatextual rather than purely textual level, he focused on three specific areas of Talmud study that would affect different kids differently, and started to grade them on these three areas individually rather than as a single mark. Specifically, to learn a page of Talmud on even the most basic level, three skills are required: an ability to read without punctuation, an ability to translate Aramaic and old Hebrew, and an ability to follow the flow of the Talmud's very particular form of logic. One builds on the next, to be sure, but he immediately noticed that some students who had great difficulty following the structure of the Gemara's logic were quite easily able to translate the text and read it fluently without punctuation, while other students could just as easily do the precise opposite.
With his new teaching style more than proving itself a wild success, Rabbi Horowitz started to put plans into place for a book that would spread his unique but very elemental approach to Talmud education to not just young high school students but anyone starting to learn Gemara for the first time. He fully acknowledges the way that something like ArtScroll's series of translated, commentated Gemaras has made great inroads in making the Talmud accessible to even the newest learners, but he wanted his book to work as a companion to ArtScroll by specifically focusing on giving new learners the tools to become independent Gemara scholars, intimately familiar with the inner workings of any page of Talmud.
Rabbi Aron Spivak, a former student of Rabbi Horowitz who was initially brought into his yeshiva to teach those who were struggling with their learning, would write the book while Rabbi Horowitz himself handled its editing and production. With Rabbi Spivak's compassionate, fluid writing in tow, Rabbi Horowitz began to piece together what would become a short introductory book to the Talmud as a whole, called Bright Beginnings: Hachana L'Gemara, and a two-volume teaching guide to tractate Brachos, entitled Bright Beginnings Hascholas Gemara Brachos Workbooks, Volumes I and II. These books started life as black-and-white printed sheets, but after years of road testing they were released in fully illustrated, brightly coloured and elaborately produced textbooks that would make the study of Talmud as accessible as humanly possible.
Within these pages, Rabbi Spivak breaks down each page of Gemara into smaller, more manageable “bites,” providing translation, punctuation and test questions on each section, and providing a systematic overview of what each bite is saying and, more crucially, how it goes about saying it. These books, which are a follow-up to similar introductory guides to Chumash, have already sold in their thousands as hard copies to 200 yeshivas throughout the world.
This feature also profiles Rabbi Dovid Newman's Vhaarev Na programme and its eight-step approach to chazara. That section is not reproduced here.
