How The Talmud Can Change Your Life

A while back I started participating in a daily Talmud learning program. Founded in the 1920’s, the Daf Yomi program sought to bring world Jewry together regardless of religious observance, geographical region, or cultural heritage by having everyone study the same page – daf – of the Talmud together. It has been uniquely popular: from ultra orthodox groups learning in yiddish, to Modern Orthodox learning via Podcast, to completely unaffiliated Jews enjoying Miriam Anzovin’s Instagram reels in which she reacts to the daily teaching (but notably makes a point of stating she is not intending to teach but rather to give a truthful reaction. She listens to ones of the podcasts), Jews everywhere enjoy this daily bit of Torah. It is not meant for in depth study, that would take far longer, but rather to give learners a sense of background and grounding in their Judaism. It has been tremendously eye opening and enriching for my personal spiritual practice, with one exception: I kept wondering who in the world all these people referenced are.

The Talmud takes a lot for granted. Back in the day, all of this Torah was oral tradition and it was only written down in the mishna in the 3rd century CE and later the expounded on in the talmud somewhere around 500 CE. Before that, scholars knew vasts amount by heart, including the books of the original Jewish Bible. References fly fast and furious to biblical texts that the authors assumed readers would have at the tips of their fingers. As someone who received a firm grounding in the Hebrew Bible I was very pleased to see how many of these I was able to quickly recognize. However, when it came to references to all the biblical scholars in the misnah and Talmud I was totally and utterly lost. Possibly because as a person born female, I was not taught any of this in school as it wasn’t considered important for my education (although the actual Talmud contains numerous stories in which woman are shown to be knowledgeable, or lose court cases due to the fact that they were expected to have a working knowledge of Talmudic law and did not). So when I picked up Liel Leibovit’z book How the Talmud Can Change Your Life, I was delighted to see the chapters were arranged based on the life stories of the various pairs of scholars that regularly feature in the book.

Side note before we go further – very few woman are named in the Talmud, instead being referred to as the wife or daughter of a man who is named. If you want to learn more about these wonderful women, and grapple a bit with how the Talmud treats women – I highly suggest reading The Mad Woman in the Rabbi’s Attic.

Leibovitz, who reads the audio book himself, explores how the lives of these scholars and their decisions when compiling the Mishna and the Talmud can teach us relevant lessons for today. And indeed, the lessons are extremely relevant! There’s even one chapter that writer’s will love that deals with the universality of story and how the Talmud is an enduring work of literature. It shows us when to break and when to hold firm, how to make decisions regarding leadership, and such tough questions as how to root out the bias inherent in ones life’s work. It does so in the framework of both modern stories like the founding of the Dewey decimal system (yep, that’s the chapter about bias) and the lives of the Talmudic scholars.

The lessons were great, but the history of the Talmud was invaluable to me. You see, the Talmud is considered a book without a beginning or end. Sure, it’s organized into Tractates, and most children start learning with the portion on prayers (Tractate Brachot), but that’s a construct we impose on the text. You can jump into Daf Yomi at any point – and should start with the same page as the rest of the world is on! – and some scholars devote their lives to learning one or two tractates extremely in depth so as to be able to make practical rulings on the referenced contents. I myself jumped in at Tractate Gittin which deals with the laws of divorce. The Talmud throws around references to the other Tractates and scholars from a variety of time points, assuming you know exactly what they are referring to, even if in our modern order you haven’t got there yet. Because there is no “getting there”. You’re supposed to be continually learning them all. Which is kind of beautiful, but also very confusing for someone like me. Leibovitz’s summaries seriously helped me out and made my learning much more enjoyable.

I read this book via audio book, and it is my favorite kind of audio in which the author is also the narrator. Leibovitz’s accent when speaking Hebrew or Yiddish did occasionally throw me, mostly because people with a similar accent have previously forbidden me from learning Talmud. Leibovitz himself is clearly welcoming and encouraging all sorts of people to learn, regardless of gender or affiliation, so this was entirely about my past unfortunate experiences and I’m hoping it helps mend that particular hurt a little for me. His enthusiasm for the subject matter is clear, and he makes a great case for the relevance of Talmud to our modern lives.

If you are thining of starting some Talmud learning but not yet ready to commit, or if like me you are years in and still looking for some additional background, or even if you are up to speed on all of this but just want to hear someone else’s perspective, then How the Talmud Can Change Your life, will be an enjoyable read for you.

Find It: Amazon | Bookshop