The plot of Balaam’s story is simple enough: Balak sends Moabite emissaries to hire him, but it takes some convincing because God has told Balaam not to agree to curse Israel. When Balaam finally relents, he cannot understand why his donkey refuses to walk in a straight line, eventually just lying down in the road. As Balaam hits the donkey, the donkey speaks—which seems not to be all that surprising to Balaam—and it is revealed that a divine messenger has been blocking the donkey’s path the whole time.

The messenger gives Balaam permission to go on to Moab, but on the condition that the prophet speak only what God tells him. Upon arriving, Balaam doesn’t curse the Israelites as Balak requested, but blesses them. Furious, Balak demands Balaam do what he was hired to do, but Balaam again blesses Israel. And so on repeatedly, from different vantage points and with different words, but always with the same outcome.

Here then, in the middle of Israel’s trek through the wilderness, we find an extended discourse not just on Israel’s blessedness, but even more so on the nature of prophecy and the power of the word.

The Bible is generally opposed to what we might call non-standard forms of divination: sorcery, witchcraft, and the like. These are forbidden not because they are some sort of false magic, but because they are in fact effective. So too with words of blessing and curse, even from a foreigner.

Balak knows that Balaam’s words are effective. “He whom you bless is blessed indeed, and he whom you curse is cursed,” Balak tells him in Numbers 22:6. So too, implicitly, does God, who instructs Balaam not to curse Israel “for they are blessed.” Words have real power in the Bible — oaths are binding, blessings are permanent. Balaam’s story is built on the recognition that a word of curse could spell Israel’s doom, even if that word came from a foreigner. Even if that word had been bought and paid for.

But Balaam also reveals that the true prophet cannot say just anything. As he says repeatedly, “I can utter only the word that God puts into my mouth.” Balaam is obedient to the divine will—indeed, he even goes so far as to refer to Israel’s deity as his own. Balaam thus also symbolizes the extent of God’s power and influence.

That power and influence is manifest at this particular moment in Israel’s story. Here, as Israel has become so numerous and is about to enter the promised land, Balaam comes to fulfill the promise God made to Abraham in Genesis to bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him. Balaam uses identical language here: “Blessed are they who bless you,” he says. “Accursed they who curse you.” Balaam even echoes God’s promise that all the peoples of the earth shall be blessed through Abraham, saying, “May my fate be like theirs.”

Though a foreigner, Balaam holds a lasting place in Judaism. His words—“How fair are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel” (Num 24:4)—are part of the regular prayer liturgy and adorn synagogue sanctuaries around the world. Yet despite what appears in these chapters to be an unstintingly positive portrayal—of a foreigner who is compelled to say only what Israel’s deity tells him, who is true to God rather than following Balak’s money—a tradition runs through the Bible that understands Balaam to have been almost entirely the opposite.

In Deuteronomy, we read that though Balaam was hired to curse Israel, it was God who turned the curse into blessing — as if Balaam wanted to curse Israel, but failed. Even worse, according to Numbers 31, the Israelites killed Balaam when they conquered Midian because Balaam incited them to worship foreign gods.

This weird mixture of positive and negative press is mirrored in the rabbinic literature, which both praises — or at least respects — Balaam as a recipient of the prophetic spirit, and condemns him as evil and, following the brief biblical allusions, as being responsible for Israelite apostasy.

The ambivalence that surrounds the depiction of Balaam may be a reflection of ambivalence around the status of foreigners in ancient Israelite and early Jewish society; a reticence, perhaps, to give too much credit to a non-Israelite, or to admit the possibility that God might have spoken through a foreigner. Whatever the reason, Balaam’s reputation remains somewhat up in the air, even as his words remain part of the Bible and Jewish liturgy to this day.

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Troubling theological questions simmer beneath Eicha’s surface. These questions relate to God’s nature and to the manner of the relationship between the community and God. Can humans understand God’s ways? Is God an ally or an enemy? Are the people’s sins responsible for the calamity or is it disproportionate and unjust? Is the nation defiant or remorseful? Ashamed or outraged?

These are the critical topics in the book, illustrating the intersection between emotions and theology and outlining a blueprint for coping with pain and loss.

The structure of the book both reflects and encourages theological complexity, offering two divergent approaches to suffering. In one approach, humans come to terms with God’s actions and recognize God’s justness. In the other, humans resist reconciliation and maintain a defiant posture of incomprehension and outrage.

The first approach is reflected in the book’s first and last chapters, which focus on procuring an admission of culpability from the nation. These chapters struggle with suffering — but they also struggle with sin, with the guilt and shame that accompany a confession. In the first chapter, Jerusalem acknowledges God’s righteousness and declares that the destruction occurred “because of all of my sins.” Similarly, Chapter 5 progresses toward an assumption of responsibility, with the community finally proclaiming, “Woe to us for we have sinned!” These chapters arrive at a measure of theological equilibrium, regarding sin as the cause of suffering and concluding that the world makes sense and God is just.

Chapters 2 and 4 suggest quite the opposite. Guiltless children die alongside their righteous leaders and anger is directed toward God, who lobs punitive actions angrily and disproportionately. These chapters depict the incomprehension of humans who struggle with God’s active role in their suffering. If the peripheral chapters of the book project some measure of comprehension, these chapters reflect bewilderment and outrage.

How can one book produce such different perceptions of God’s role in human suffering? The structure of the book indicates that the two opposing approaches co-exist in tension.

Chapters 1 and 5 illustrate the need to rely on simple faith, on the belief in God’s justness, and in a meaningful pattern of relationship between God and the Jewish people. Without this type of faith, the world is dark and absurd, incomprehensible and evil. Moreover, by adhering to this approach, Israel can understand how to repair its relationship with God and restore order to its world.

Nevertheless, Eicha does not rest upon facile answers. Chapters 2 and 4 face the world’s tragedies with stark frankness. Pat answers cannot explain the death of children, mass tragedy, illness, and suffering. Yet these too are part of the human experience and the relationship with God. Chapters 2 and 4 make room for the complexity of the human condition and the inability to comprehend God’s ways.

How is it possible to maintain a relationship with God within such a disquieting paradox? How does one balance simple faith in a divinely ordered world with dismay and anger over its cruelty and unfairness?

This possibility depends upon a willingness to live with complexity and uncertainty, but also upon humility and tenacity, the steadfast determination to maintain faith in both God’s goodness and human resilience.

This we see from the middle chapter, Chapter 3, which is the core of Eicha and its ideological crux. In its middle section (verses 21-39), the chapter describes a sufferer contemplating the theological and philosophic implications of suffering. In reflecting upon God’s nature, the sufferer detects not a wrathful God, but benevolence, kindness and loyalty.

The kindness of the Lord has not ended, His mercies are not spent.
They are renewed every morning— Ample is Your grace!

And later:

For the Lord does not reject forever,
But first afflicts, then pardons In His abundant kindness.
For He does not willfully bring grief or affliction to man,
Crushing under His feet all the prisoners of the earth.

These verses of hope surround the very epicenter of Eicha – the middle verses of the middle section of the middle chapter — whose subject turns abruptly from God to human beings. At the apex of the book, God does not appear at all. Instead, the individual considers the lessons that he may draw from calamity.

The section opens with this verse: “It is good for a man, when young, to bear a yoke.” This is actually the third of three consecutive verses that begin with the word tov (good), tantalizing the reader with the optimistic notion that good lies at the heart of the human experience.

Why is suffering good? Eicha does not explain how it arrives at this startling conclusion, leaving it instead to the individual to determine how pain can be constructive, a conduit to character building and a deepened relationship with God. The sufferer directs the reader to accept hardships with equanimity and regard suffering as beneficial and ennobling. At Eicha’s deepest point, it puts its faith in human resilience and the ability to survive in a broken world.

Eicha’s structure mirrors a whirlwind, its placid center engulfed by swirling misery. This design represents the shape of the sufferer’s theological experience. Two parallel rings enfold the sufferer, representing the tangled fluctuation between theodicy and outrage. Oscillating between these contradictory approaches is critical to contending adequately with the theological questions presented by loss.

Yet within the surrounding turbulence, the sufferer can find tranquility in their innermost being. Humans have the ability to combat the onslaught of hostile forces that swirl around us by drawing on the hope and faith that lie at their core. In this way, Eicha weaves a magnificent portrait of the resources and resilience that lie deep within the human soul.

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Read the full text of the Book of Lamentations in Hebrew and English on Sefaria.

The prophet basically blames Jewish immorality and idolatry for the tragedy. Yet there is a fascinating outburst in Lamentations 3 in which the believer, as it were, accuses God of being the enemy — like a lion lying in ambush to destroy his victim. The prophet comes close to losing his faith (“I thought my strength and hope in the Lord had perished”) before the memory of God’s past kindnesses restores it — barely.

The Book of Lamentations is read softly at first. The volume of the reader’s voice builds to the climax, which is sung aloud by the entire congregation: “Turn us to you, O Lord, and we will return. Renew our days as of old.”

Reprinted with permission of the author from The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays.

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The Torah and the Bible

The Torah, Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim) collectively make up The Hebrew Bible (what Christians refer to as the Old Testament). The Bible is often referred to by the Hebrew acronym TaNaKh (usually spelled Tanakh, or Tanach). Numerous editions and translations of the Bible and the Chumash (the text of the Torah) can be purchased online. However, you can also read (and search) the entire Bible (along with many other major Jewish texts) in Hebrew and English translation free of charge on Sefaria.

The Weekly Torah Portion

Readings from the Torah, which are divided into 54 weekly Torah portions (each one is called a parasha, or parsha), are the centerpiece of the Sabbath morning service. My Jewish Learning offers a summary, featured commentary and more than 10 additional commentaries for each Torah portion. Find more weekly Torah commentaries here.

During the Torah service, the Torah scroll is taken out and the weekly portion chanted or read aloud. The Torah scroll, also known as a sefer Torah, is hand-written on parchment according to numerous specifications by a sofer (scribe), a specially trained individual.

The Torah’s stories, laws and poetry stand at the center of Jewish culture. They chronicle God’s creation of the world, the selection and growth of the family of Abraham and Sarah in relationship to God in the land of Canaan, the exile and redemption from Egypt of that “family-become-nation” known as Israel, and their travels through the desert until they return to the land of Canaan. Along the way, Israel enters into a covenanted relationship with God, and God reveals many of the rules for governing a just society and for establishing appropriate worship.

The Torah’s Five Books

The English names for each of the Torah’s five book are actually Greek, and like the Rabbinic names for the books, they describe the contents. The common names for the books come from a significant word in the beginning verses of the book. The following are the names of the five books and a brief summary of each (click on them for longer summaries):

Genesis (“Origins”)/Bereishit (“In the Beginning”)

Genesis tells the story of creation, Noah and the flood, and the selection of Abraham and Sarah and their family as the bearers of God’s covenant.  Stories of sibling conflict and the long narratives of Jacob and his favorite son Joseph conclude with the family dwelling in Egypt.

Exodus (“The Road Out”)/Shemot (“Names”)

Exodus tells of how the family of Jacob grew and then was enslaved in Egypt.  The baby Moses, born of Israelites but adopted by Pharaoh, becomes God’s prophet who, after bringing 10 plagues down upon Egypt, leads the Israelites through the Red Sea to freedom and to the revelation at Mount Sinai. The story of the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, which follows soon after the revelation at Mount Sinai, is almost obscured by lengthy materials on the building of a sanctuary (tabernacle) in the wilderness.

Leviticus (“Laws of the Levites”)/Vayikra (“And God Called”)

Leviticus deals mostly with laws of Israelite sacrificial worship. Related rules include the basis for Jewish dietary laws (kashrut) and issues of purity and impurity.  The holiness code, which describes a sanctified communal life, is a highlight of the book.

Numbers (“The Census”)/Bamidbar (“In the Wilderness”)

Numbers begins with a census of the Israelites and the tribe of Levi. A group of Israelites spy out the land of Canaan; their discouraging report sends them back into the desert for an additional 38 years, during which the Israelites continue to behave badly, rebelling against the authority of Moses and his brother Aaron, and having illicit relations with Moabite women.

Deuteronomy (“Second Law”)/Devarim (“Words”)

Deuteronomy is Moses’ final message to the people of Israel before they cross over the Jordan River into Israel. Moses reminds the people of how God has redeemed the people from Egypt and of the details of the covenant between Israel and God.  In stark language, Moses describes the rewards for observance of the laws of the covenant and the punishment for disobedience. Finally, Moses passes along his authority to Joshua who will lead the people into the land.

Origins of the Torah

Traditionally, the Torah has been seen either as a document that was entirely revealed to Moses by God on Mount Sinai (along with the whole of the Oral Torah, i.e. the Mishnah and other works of Rabbinic literature which build upon the written Torah) or that Moses completed the Torah during the trek through the wilderness (including what was revealed on Mount Sinai). Historians and literary critics, noting historical inaccuracies and duplications that indicate a composite text have suggested that the Torah includes sources from the period of King David and King Solomon (around 1000 BCE), from the seventh century BCE during the reign of King Josiah, and from the sixth century BCE during the Babylonian exile.

Connection Between the Torah and the Prophets

In the works of the prophets, and in many of the writings, narrative elements from the Torah like the exodus from Egypt are re-used to make new points. Laws from the Torah like the specifics of Sabbath law prohibitions are also commented upon and expand their scope in later works. Another set of connections between the Torah and the Prophets is indicated by the weekly Prophetic portions (Haftarahs), which are paired with each of the 54 weekly Torah portions.

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In Jewish tradition, Elijah is the one who will announce the coming of the messiah and the redemption of Israel, a fact celebrated in a song traditionally sung during the Havdalah service at the close of Shabbat, which prays for Elijah’s return “speedily in our time.” Some also sing this song during the Passover Seder, as they invite Elijah into their homes to drink from a cup of wine poured just for him, and during ritual circumcisions, as a newborn male is brought into the covenant between God and the Jewish people.

Although his story spans only a handful of chapters of the Bible and there is no biblical book that bears his name, Elijah’s legacy surpasses that of virtually all his colleagues. But who was Elijah and how did he come to earn such a prominent place in Jewish tradition?

Elijah’s Hebrew name literally means “my God is Yahu,” a form of the biblical name of God, symbolizing perhaps his zealousness for God and his efforts to keep the Israelites from straying from God’s path. He hailed from Tishbeh, a town in Gilead, east of the Jordan River in present day Jordan, which makes him an outsider of sorts in the king’s court in northern Israel, where he was sent to deliver God’s message.

Elijah’s time as a prophet coincided with a period in which the Israelite people have been led astray, induced to worship the foreign deity Baal, who they believed was a bringer of rain. A defining moment comes when Elijah summons the people to Mount Carmel and challenges the prophets of Baal to offer a sacrifice without the use of fire. The prophets call out to Baal repeatedly, but to no avail — their sacrifice remains unconsumed.

In response, Elijah places a sacrifice upon the altar and douses it with water. He calls out to God and summons a fire from the heavens which consumes not only the sacrifice, but the stone altar and surrounding earth as well. Transformed for the moment, the people proclaim that God alone is the true God — a peak moment for Elijah.

But it turns out to be short-lived. The people’s faith wavers and the king’s wife Jezebel seeks to have Elijah killed. Fearing for his life, Elijah flees to the desert, where, in a moment that echoes the revelation at Sinai, God sends a shattering wind, an earthquake, and then a fire. Elijah does not encounter God in any of these powerful phenomena, but in the calm that follows, when he hears a “still, small voice” — and within it, he finds God. For theologians, this moment is an archetypal one, underscoring that Spielbergian special effects are not a prerequisite for a revelatory encounter with the Divine.

Elijah’s powerful moment of intimacy with God in the desert does not restore him and he is unable to continue serving as prophet. He seeks out Elisha, who assumes his role as God’s spokesperson to the kings of Israel.

On the face of it, Elijah’s story is not unique for a biblical prophet — others also perform miracles, chastise the people, face resistance and retribution and have personal experiences of revelation that bring them closer to God. Yet, Elijah’s story sets him apart from his peers and helps explain the unusually prominent place he has come to occupy in the Jewish imagination.

The chapters in which he appears are among the most dramatic in all of the Bible. Elijah’s zealousness for God, his prophetic angst, and his existential loneliness have an intensity that is unmatched by other prophets. The Torah declares that “never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom God encountered face to face.” But Elijah’s encounter with God makes him a close second — except for the one way in which Elijah’s intimacy with God surpasses even that of Moses.

When his time on Earth comes to a close, Elijah does not die; rather, the Bible reports that God transports him to the heavens on a fiery chariot. While God honored Moses by attending to him at the moment of his death, it is Elijah who is invited into the divine realm.

While the Book of Kings provides little explanation about this curious feature of Elijah’s story, his journey to the heavens has captured the imagination of many early interpreters of the Bible, who began to develop visions of Elijah’s unique afterlife. Already in the Second Temple period, his role as the harbinger of divine redemption was noted by the biblical prophet Malachi.

The rabbis of the Talmud imagined Elijah sitting intimately with God in the heavenly court and traveling back and forth between the divine and human realms. These stories, and those that followed, depict an Elijah who continues to take interest in the world he left behind, offering assistance to those in need and seeking out the one who will usher in the messianic era.

Elijah became a part of not only the Jewish past, but the Jewish present and our hopes for the Jewish future. Chance meetings with a stranger that led to a fortuitous reversal of fortune were spun into tales of personal encounters with Elijah. Over the centuries, Jews came to look out for Elijah at times of difficulty in the hope of personal or communal redemption.

And so, Elijah became part of our ritual life. We sing of him as Shabbat comes to an end in the hope that in the new week he will announce that redemption is at hand. We welcome him into our homes during Passover, the holiday that celebrates our redemption. We look for him as we bring a newborn into the covenant, in the hopes that the newborn child might be the messiah who will usher in the era of our redemption. And those of us who have been fortunate enough to encounter him along the way tell the tales of how he assisted us at a time of need.

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Psalm 137 is recited on the eve of Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of both Temples. It opens the liturgy, and sets the tone for the day. The liturgy of Tisha B’Av includes a wide array of kinot, poems of sorrow and mourning, giving voice to themes of exile and longing. But this ancient psalm, older than the kinot, captures the pain of exile from the Land of Israel perhaps most eloquently of all. The psalm is short — only nine verses — and can be divided into three parts, each with its own themes and challenges for today’s spiritual yearners. The first four verses read as follows:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars we hung up our lyres,

for our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement:

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

How can we sing a song of the LORD on alien soil?

In these opening lines, we can hear the sadism of the locals as they mock the newly-arrived Israelites: “Sing us one of those spirituals from the Old Country…” Some scholars remark that the Israelite response, “How can we sing… on alien soil?” reflects another aspect of loss: the poet, like many of the exiles, is wondering whether the God of Israel can hear or act when the people are no longer in their homeland. Perhaps prophecy and prayers only “work” when the People of Israel are located in the Land of Israel? This is more than a rhetorical question: the exile commemorated on Tisha B’Av is not only about distance from a physical place, but also from God. That distance is the cause of pain and loneliness that is reflected in the psalm.

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither;

let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you,

if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.

Here, the pain of loss melts into resolve. The poet doesn’t know if God has forgotten, but the poet has not forgotten! The Temple in Jerusalem was the place where God and the people found great intimacy. The memory of this closeness is what Tisha B’Av is ultimately about: not a longing for sacrifices, but for the intimacy with God that worship evoked.

These lines are reflected in some well-known Jewish customs. In many times and places, Jews would leave a wall of their home unfinished or unpainted. This was a reminder that wherever the householder lived, it was still a place of exile until Jerusalem and its people would once again be whole. This practice is first described in the Talmud, Bava Batra 60b.

Another famous Jewish ritual reflects these verses: breaking a glass at a wedding. After all, surely the moment a couple is married must be their “happiest hour.” Shattering a glass at this moment reminds onlookers of the work still to be done, although perhaps this couple’s love is a step in bringing unity back to a fragmented world.

The final verses of the Psalm throw the reader a moral curveball:

Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall;

how they cried, “Strip her, strip her to her very foundations!”
Fair Babylon, you predator,

a blessing on him who repays you in kind

what you have inflicted on us;

a blessing on him who seizes your babies

and dashes them against the rocks!

The violent revenge fantasy of these lines is painful to read (smashing our enemies’ babies on the rocks!); many of us wish it wasn’t there at all! In fact, many liturgies don’t print them, closing the poem after verse 6, about keeping alive the memory of Jerusalem. What might we do with these harsh words?

It is not our task to validate these violent revenge fantasies, but we can seek to understand them. The poem doesn’t claim that anyone ever did these awful things. Instead, these words reflect the anger of the victim. Imagine the victim in a concentration camp — or consider your own feelings walking through Yad Vashem or the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Is anger not a valid emotional response? Can these feelings help us empathize with other oppressed peoples, and understand that suffering and oppression easily translate into rage? The imaginary deeds we would never justify, but the seething hurt behind these sentiments make the passage extremely, and uncomfortably, powerful.

All this reflects the deep spiritual power of Tisha B’Av. We remember that, no matter where we may be, we live religiously in a state of Exile. We long for a reconciliation with God and with one another. And, through our fasting, our mourning, our kinot, and this psalm we become more compassionate with those who suffer. Because we’ve been there, too, in our Jewish history.

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In the wake of the Temple’s destruction, Judaism transformed from a religion of sacrifice to a religion of prayer and Torah study. Indeed, the rabbis of the Talmud, who lived centuries after the destruction, declared explicitly that without a Temple, Torah study and prayer took the place of sacrifice in Jewish worship. Nearly 2,000 years later, they remain utterly central to Judaism.

So some may be surprised to learn that the Talmud (Taanit 30a) prohibits Torah study on Tisha B’Av:

The Sages taught: All mitzvahs practiced by a mourner are likewise practiced on Tisha B’Av: It is prohibited to engage in eating, and in drinking, and in smearing oil on one’s body, and in wearing shoes, and in conjugal relations. It is prohibited to read from the Torah, from the Prophets, and from the Writings, or to study from the Mishnah, from the Gemara, and from midrash, and from collections of halakhah, and from collections of aggadah.

Alongside fasting and engaging in acts of self-indulgence and comfort (moisturization and footwear were counted in this category in the ancient world), Jews refrained from studying sacred literature. But why?

The answer is that Torah study brings pleasure. As Psalms 19:9 has it:

The laws of God are just, gladdening the heart,

the commandments of God are lucid, making the eyes light up.

But wait! The Book of Lamentations, one of the five megillot, is read in synagogue on Tisha B’Av. Doesn’t this violate the prohibition against Torah study?

According to the Talmud (same page, Taanit 30a) a few books are an exception to the “no Torah study” rule. Lamentations, a series of poetic laments for the destruction of Jerusalem, which is obviously fitting for the occasion, is on the list. Also included in the exception: Job, a book about the suffering of the righteous, and certain passages of Jeremiah that lament the destruction of the first Temple and upbraid Israel for their faithlessness.

Over the centuries, Jews have often understood this passage in the Talmud to mean not that Torah study is forbidden on Tisha B’Av, but that it must be restricted to passages that are mournful. Indeed, in addition to reading Lamentations, Jewish recite regular daily prayers including passages from the Torah — for instance, the Shema (even though this passage is not mournful). In synagogue, they also read Torah (the reading for Tisha B’Av is Deuteronomy 4:25–40, which describes the destruction of the Land of Israel) and haftarah (Jeremiah 8:13–9:23).

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While there are older Jewish mystical traditions, Sefer Yetzirah is the first book of what might be called proto-Kabbalah, the school of Jewish mysticism that emerged in the 13th century. Sefer Yetzirah has its own sacred structures and ways of understanding the world that differ in significant ways from the kabbalistic understanding, but many of its concepts significantly influenced later Jewish mystical tradition and practice.

Scholars debate when Sefer Yetzirah was written, proposing dates as early as the first century of the Common Era and as late as the 9th century, though recent scholarship suggests a date sometime in the 6th century CE. In Jewish legend, the book’s authorship is attributed to the patriarch Abraham, though many scholars now believe the book had multiple authors. Further, there are many manuscripts of Sefer Yetzirah with varying texts. There are three major versions: the Short Recension, the Long Recension, and the Saadyan Recension, named after the commentary written on it by Saadia Gaon. One theory is that the book was written in north Mesopotamia, though other locations (such as Israel or Egypt) are also possible. 

The book describes God’s process of creating the universe using “32 paths of wisdom” — essentially, channels through which God’s creative intention manifests in various aspects of creation. These paths include the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which God engraves into the fabric of existence, as if carving stone tablets. The remaining paths are the ten sefirot, better known in later mystical tradition as the ten emanations (or attributes) of God. 

In Sefer Yetzirah, sefirot appears to mean something like “dimension.” The ten sefirot are fundamental dimensions of the physical universe, a kind of frame within which the concrete aspects of creation can unfold. There are two lists of the sefirot in Sefer Yetzirah, and they differ somewhat — both from each other and those of later Kabbalah, which suggests the book’s diversity of authorship. We might call these two lists dimensional (dealing with the dimensions of the cosmos) and elemental (describing the fundamental substances of the cosmos).

In one rendering, they are beginning and end (the dimension of time), good and evil (the dimension of person), and north, south, east, west, up and down (the dimension of space). In the other rendering, the sefirot are divine breath, breath, water, fire, north, south, east, west, up and down. As the process of creation progresses, Sefer Yetzirah uses the sefirot to describe a kind of cosmic temple, a cube-like space that God creates and then carefully seals to create an ordered world. God resides within this sacred world-space, which then fills with the phenomena created by the letters and sefirot. 

Unlike most paradigms of Jewish mysticism, Sefer Yetzirah directs the mystic to contemplate the physical universe rather than hidden worlds and is thus a more practical guidebook than the Zohar, the best-known work of Jewish mysticism. The book frequently addresses the spiritual practitioner directly, inviting the reader of the book to engage in meditation (particularly visualizing or pronouncing various permutations of letters, which is a practice of combining letters in sequence so as to produce meditative and/or magical effects) and discipline the consciousness in order to fully understand its concepts. 

Professor Tzahi Weiss has suggested that Sefer Yetzirah is unusual for its time in its disinterest in law and Torah commentary and is thus not a rabbinic book — that is, the writing and concepts have little in common with the Judaism developed by the Talmud. There is relatively little quoting of verses, no legal discourse, and none of the back-and-forth conversation typical of rabbinic text. Rather, the book speaks in brief poems, often addresses the reader, and has a universalist flavor, focusing on the individual relationship with the Creator rather than the collective covenant between God and the Jewish people. The book’s response to the destruction of the Second Temple is to imagine a cosmic temple that can be found anywhere, via contemplation of the Hebrew letters, as opposed to the rabbinic response, which was to locate sanctity in the sacred text. Still, by using both the language of engraving letters and the language of temple building, Sefer Yetzirah connects sacred text (the letters) with the world (the cosmic Temple).

The book’s impact on the medieval texts of Kabbalah was considerable. The sefirot, the power of Hebrew letters, and the notion of an organic connection between the transcendent divine and the physical world — all these originate with Sefer Yetzirah and would come to permeate later kabbalistic works such as Sefer HaBahir and the Zohar. Another concept from Sefer Yetzirah is God’s partnership with an entity that meditates between physical and spiritual realms and is also a part of the divine. Sefer Yetzirah calls this entity “Wisdom” and later kabbalah uses the term shekhinah, among others. Kabbalistic commentaries have frequently focused on reconciling the kabbalistic picture of God and the cosmos with the somewhat different picture painted by Sefer Yetzirah.  

Over time, there have been many questions about the genre and intention of the book. The medieval sage Saadia Gaon’s commentary treats Sefer Yetzirah like a book of philosophy, while the kabbalists treated it as a description of how to move divine realms. Some contemporary scholars understand the book to be connected to Jewish magical literature, citing the talmudic passage (Sanhedrin 67a) that mentions the sages using a book called “The Laws of Creation” to make a person via magic, or noting the parallels with Jewish magical artifacts like incantation bowls. Indeed, some believe the book can be used to create a golem, a human-made life-form. The book is so unusual in genre that it is hard to situate, but various scholars have suggested it may have been influenced by Gnosticism, Syrian Christianity, Sanskrit understandings of grammar, and more.  

Sefer Yetzirah has not been much studied by contemporary Jews. This is perhaps due to its cryptic brevity and its differences from better-known Jewish genres from midrash to medieval Kabbalah. Yet the book offers a fresh look at Jewish mysticism in which the divine can be found not in transcendent or hidden realms, but on earth, in the physical qualities of the cosmos. Sefer Yetzirah’s meditative practices often feel postmodern, inviting the practitioner to become, like the engraved letters, a hollow channel for the forces of being. The book’s rich imagery and exploration of the mysteries of creation are a gift to contemporary Jews and beyond.  

The post Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Says your God,

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

And declare to her

That her term of service is over, 

That her iniquity is expiated,

For she has received at the hand of the Lord

Double for all her sins.” (Isaiah 40:1–2)

Telling the scattered remnants of a defeated and despairing nation, exiled to the victors’ capital, that their exile is about to end, that the way will suddenly open up for them to return home, that the God who punished them with that downfall is now eager to forgive them and raise them back to their former glory — that is the hopeful but challenging task of the prophet who speaks in the second part of the book of Isaiah. 

After the destruction of Jerusalem and exile of the Jewish people to Babylon, the prophet offers a message of hope and encouragement. He ultimately accompanies those who begin the return to Zion, now offering them a vision of a universal House of God. There, Deutero-Isaiah envisions, all humankind will praise and thank the one true God. Compared to other biblical books it presents an emphatic monotheism: it’s not that Israel’s God is the mightiest, but that no other gods actually exist. But it’s also sociologically inclusive in that other nations will share in that Temple.

How Many Isaiahs?

Though it’s a single book with a single name, the author of Isaiah 40–66 is not the same as the author of the first 39 chapters (and, indeed, many scholars discern a third hand in chapter 56–66). Careful and open-minded readers of the book of Isaiah as far back as the medieval interpreter Abraham ibn Ezra nine centuries ago have noted that chapters 40 and beyond seem to date from two hundred years later than the time of the 8th-century BCE kings whose reigns are listed in chapter 1 as the time of the book’s namesake prophet, Isaiah son of Amoz. References to the 6th century’s King Cyrus of Persia, promises of imminent restoration, and the universalist spirit of chapters 40–66 all point to a time after the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE for the composition of those chapters. That block of text has been dubbed by scholars “Deutero-Isaiah,” literally meaning “the second Isaiah.” Some have suggested that even those later chapters are the work of several writers, but recent scholarship has highlighted a unity of style and reference across the prophecies in those 27 chapters.

Liturgical Use

Deutero-Isaiah provides all seven of the Haftarot of Consolation recited on consecutive Shabbat mornings in the weeks following the Tisha B’Av. The first of them, the Haftarah of Shabbat Nahamu (the Shabbat immediately following Tisha B’Av), begins with the verses quoted above. One can hear in them a rejoinder to the lament voiced more than once in Eicha (Lamentations), read on Tisha B’Av, that Jerusalem has no consoler (menahem), no one to offer words of comfort in her time of defeat and mourning (Lamentations 1:2, 9). The prophets words seem to offer a direct rebuttal to Lamentations:

“Truly the Lord has comforted Zion,

Comforted all her ruins;

He has made her wilderness like Eden,

Her desert like the Garden of the Lord” (Isaiah 51:3)

“Raise a shout together,

O ruins of Jerusalem!

For the Lord will comfort His people,

Will redeem Zion” (Isaiah 52:9)

Did Isaiah’s message of comfort work? It appears that the message of consolation fell on disbelieving ears. This is, after all, the people who are quoted by Ezekiel (37:11) as saying, after the fall of Jerusalem and their exile to Babylon, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is gone; we are doomed.” Another of their poets had depicted their utter loss, upon arrival in Babylon, of belief in any collective future: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we remembered Zion.” (Psalm 137). Deutero-Isaiah is aware of this hopelessness, and seeks to counter it:

“Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

The Lord is God from of old,

Creator of the earth from end to end,

He never grows faint or weary,

His wisdom cannot be fathomed.

He gives strength to the weary,

Fresh vigor to the spent.

Youths may grow faint and weary,

And young men stumble and fall,

But they that trust in the Lord shall renew their strength

As eagles grow new plumes.

They shall run and not grow weary,

They shall march and not grow faint.” (Isaiah 40:27–31)

Many verses from Deutero-Isaiah have found their way into Jewish liturgy, expressing as they do a religious worldview closer than many other biblical voices to the theology of rabbinic Judaism. God’s exclusive and universal rule is a regular theme, one that is echoed more than once in the language of the Aleinu prayer. The Yotzer Or blessing that is the first piece of liturgy (after the call to prayer) in the Shacḥarit (morning) service each day of the year, draws almost verbatim from Isaiah’s language (with one significant theological adjustment).

Deutero-Isaiah originally comforted those who were exiled in Babylon, but the message of consolation has helped sustain the downtrodden and dispersed Jewish people throughout its history, into modern times.

“Whereas you [Jerusalem] have been forsaken,

Rejected, with none passing through,

I will make you a pride everlasting,

A joy for age after age.” (Isaiah 60:15)

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The biblical Book of Amos does little to undermine this stereotype. This prophet preaches God’s wrath with some of the most vivid and violent poetry the Bible has to offer. “The Lord roars from Zion, shouts aloud from Jerusalem,” he says at the beginning of the book, “and the pastures of the shepherds shall languish, and the summit of Carmel shall wither.” Amos 1:2

Amos is one of the Twelve Minor Prophets, the last volume of the prophetic books (the second section of the Hebrew Bible). His career unfolded during the seismic eighth century BCE. At the time, the Israelites had already split into two kingdoms: the northern kingdom of Israel, consisting of ten of the twelve Israelite tribes, and the southern kingdom of the tribe of Judah, which also included the tribe of Benjamin. In Amos’s day, these two small kingdoms were contending with the meteoric rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose influence and dominance spread across the entire region. The threat of Neo-Assyrian conquest cast a long shadow over Israel’s and Judah’s affairs. Not long after Amos, the mighty empire destroyed the northern kingdom, sweeping the ten tribes into an exile from which they would never return. The southern kingdom was merely subjugated. It survived, but only in diminished stature.

Though Amos hailed from the south, his prophetic career unfolded in the north. The authorities there did not take kindly to this outsider’s proclamations of divine wrath, which must have been quite politically subversive. What leader enjoys hearing that on their watch their society has provoked God’s fury? In one famous confrontation, Amaziah, a northern priest, told Amos to go back where he came from. Amos 7:10–17

Yet while it is unsurprising that the authorities feared Amos’s words, it is remarkable that the prophet himself seemed to be terrified of them as well. He presents his prophecy not as his own words bubbling up from within, but rather as God’s words rushing in uncontrollably from the outside. “A lion has roared, who can but fear?” he asks. “My Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy?” Amos 3:8 Amos takes no smug delight in what he says. It is simply the only possible response to his encounter with God.

This rage is the dominant characteristic of the Book of Amos. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss Amos as one-dimensional “fire and brimstone.” Contrary to the anti-Jewish stereotype, Amos’s God is furious with Israel not because the people have failed to uphold the intricacies of hairsplitting laws. Rather, he is furious with them because they have flagrantly flouted the most basic standards of human decency: “Because they have sold for silver those whose cause was just, and the needy for a pair of sandals. [Ah,] you who trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the ground, and make the humble walk a twisted course!” Amos 2:6–7 God rages against the powerful who oppress the powerless. For Amos, divine wrath is inseparable from divine justice.

Amos’s clearest call for justice is this declaration: “But let justice well up like water, righteousness like an unfailing stream.” Amos 5:24 These are the most famous words in the book because, millennia later, Martin Luther King, Jr. took them up as a religious rallying cry for the civil rights movement. However, the oft-neglected context of the verse is crucial. Just beforehand, Amos screams on God’s behalf:

I loathe, I spurn your festivals, I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies. If you offer Me burnt offerings—or your meal offerings—I will not accept them; I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatlings. Spare Me the sound of your hymns, and let Me not hear the music of your lutes. But let justice well up like water, righteousness like an unfailing stream. Amos 5:21–24

These verses are shocking. One would assume that God always desires lavish, enthusiastic worship. But Amos tells us that when worship is paired with injustice, God has nothing but contempt for it. Such worship is not only ineffective, it is infuriating––an active insult to God. Do the Israelites really think they can appease him with offerings of flesh and grain while the impoverished go hungry in the streets? Do they really think their celebratory songs can drown out the cries of those whom they oppress? This is the prophet’s most radical claim about divine justice and divine anger: moral rot poisons every pretense to piety.

The Book of Amos shows that the accusation that Jews worship a wrathful God is not negative, however negatively it is intended. God’s wrath blazes so fiercely because, not in spite of, God’s abounding compassion––specifically, his compassion for those who need it most: the weak and marginalized. Wrath and compassion are not mutually exclusive. They are two sides of the same coin; the former gives teeth to the latter, making it more than insipid sentiment.

This was true in Amos’s day, and it is true in our own. The Book of Amos is therefore not just a condemnation of the Jewish people. It is also, and more importantly, a challenge to them. When injustice reigns—when the most vulnerable of society are oppressed while their powerful tormenters get off scot-free—who would not be wrathful? When God has spoken, who would not prophesy?

The post Amos: Channeling the Wrath of God’s Justice appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

If you look up the verse, it reads: “Take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and emmer. Put them into one vessel and bake them into bread. Eat it as many days as you lie on your side: three hundred and ninety.”

Why is God telling Ezekiel to lie on his side for over a year while he eats the bread? Keep reading and the story gets stranger and stranger.

God asks Ezekiel to do a series of unusual things, each with a specific meaning. He should take a brick, draw Jerusalem on it, and then pretend to attack the miniature city. He should lie on his left side for 390 days as punishment for 390 years of sinning in the northern kingdom of Israel. Then he should lie on his right side for 40 days as punishment for 40 years of sinning in the southern kingdom of Judah. God is very clear about the ratio: “I impose on you one day for each year.” Ezekiel 4:6

Finally, the special bread. God commands, “‘Eat it as a barley cake; you shall bake it on human excrement before their eyes.” Ezekiel is understandably upset about the idea of eating food cooked over a fire that burns human excrement. He negotiates with God to use cow dung instead.

What is God doing? What is Ezekiel doing? Why does this strange story about food, excrement, and extreme acts of lying down appear in the Bible at all?

Prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible perform symbolic actions, like Ezekiel does here. God commands these acts as a kind of holy attention-seeking. Prophets are conduits for messages from God to the people of Israel. Sometimes they communicate the message through poetry or through dramatic confrontations with political leaders. And sometimes they lie on one side of their body for 390 days.

We might imagine Ezekiel performing these actions in the heart of Jerusalem, warning that the beautiful and holy city around him will be destroyed. But actually, Ezekiel becomes a prophet when he is already in exile. In the opening verse of the Book of Ezekiel, we learn that God gives him his first prophetic vision “in the community of exiles by the Chebar Canal” — that is, in Babylonia.

Ezekiel prophesies at a moment of extreme tension and uncertainty. The Babylonian empire has been threatening Jerusalem for some time. A first wave of Jewish leaders, including Ezekiel himself, has already been driven into exile. What Ezekiel predicts is that things will go from bad to worse. No compromises or intermediate measures are going to save the city. Jerusalem, including the holy Temple, will be completely destroyed.

In Babylonia, Ezekiel is part of a community of former leaders and wealthy people who have experienced extreme whiplash: from the heights of society in their homeland to the depths of exile abroad. His message of bad news might be a hard sell for these already bereaved and vulnerable exiles. And perhaps that is why Ezekiel, at God’s urging, takes ever more extreme measures to gain their attention.

We might compare Ezekiel’s actions to performance art. Like a performance artist, Ezekiel’s actions would be considered extremely strange in any normal context. Understanding their meaning requires being present with him in space and time; the message lies not just in what he does, but how he does it. And like many performance artists, Ezekiel provides an easy target for mockery. He gets your attention, but he can’t actually convey what he intends without you taking him at least a little bit seriously.

What exactly does Ezekiel (or God) expect the exiles to do with this message? They can’t take up arms to protect Jerusalem. They are poor and defeated and stuck in Babylonia. Jerusalem will be leveled. The message would seem to be aimed at shaking the exiles from their denial and getting them to recognize that the destruction was not random: God is punishing the people for their sins. If this is true, then in some way they still control their fate. Accept their punishment, and the people can still in the future return to their land.

Ezekiel intervenes at a crucial inflection point in the history of the Jewish people. Every other ancient people conquered by a more powerful nation eventually came to accept the conquering nation’s god. If the Babylonians destroyed your temple, then their Marduk must be more worthy of respect than the divinity that was supposed to protect you. The Jews, starting with this advance group of exiles, reject this way of thinking. Their God is the only God. When they suffer, it must be by God’s design and for a reason that is intended to help them grow.

Ezekiel’s prophecies grow more hopeful over the course of the book, even if they never get less strange. His most famous vision presents a valley full of dry bones. At God’s urging, Ezekiel says to them, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! Thus said the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live again. I will lay sinews upon you, and cover you with flesh, and form skin over you, and I will put breath into you, and you shall live again. And you shall know that I am the Lord!” Ezekiel 37:4-6

This vision becomes the very image of God’s promise to redeem the people. They will regain hope, individually and as a community, when things seem most dire. Ezekiel communicates this message in his inimitable style: earthy, bodily, almost gothic, and impossible to drive from your mind.

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Many such royal prophets are merely passing through. Gad, for instance, is more an answer to a Bible trivia question than a well-known figure. Some, however, have earned a significant place in the history of biblical interpretation. Nathan is one such prophet.

Like all royal prophets, Nathan’s personal story — his birth, family and death — is of no importance. What matters is not who he is, but what he says — and to whom. Nathan has the honor of delivering two of the most famous prophetic speeches in the history of Israel’s kings.

The first is in II Samuel 7, when King David expresses his desire to build a house for God, what would have been the first Temple. It is Nathan who tells David no. But in doing so, he promises David an everlasting royal house — that is, a dynasty: “Your house and your kingship shall ever be secure before you; your throne shall be established forever.” II Sam 7:16

Nathan also proclaims that David’s son — the as-yet unborn Solomon — will be the one who builds the Temple. It is thus Nathan who voices the widespread biblical claim to the eternal Davidic kingship over Israel, and Nathan who announces the construction of the Temple, the center of Israel’s worship.

Nathan’s second great speech comes a few chapters later, in the wake of David sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband Uriah killed in battle. God, we are told, is not pleased with David’s adulterous and murderous behavior. Nathan is sent to deliver the message. He does so in the form of the most famous parable in the Hebrew Bible, that of the poor man’s lamb:

The LORD sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said, “There were two men in the same city, one rich and one poor. The rich man had very large flocks and herds, but the poor man had only one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He tended it and it grew up together with him and his children: it used to share his morsel of bread, drink from his cup, and nestle in his bosom; it was like a daughter to him. One day, a traveler came to the rich man, but he was loath to take anything from his own flocks or herds to prepare a meal for the guest who had come to him; so he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.” II Samuel 12:1-4

The pathos of Nathan’s story drives David to vow vengeance against the rich man of the parable, which gives Nathan the opportunity to deliver one of the great lines of the Bible: “You are the man!” He follows this with the divine resolution that David would spend his days at war, that he would have his wives taken from him by a usurper, and that the child born of this illicit tryst with Bathsheba would die. Once that child has died, however, David and Bathsheba have another son, this one favored by God. Nathan names the child Jedidiah, but he is better known by the name Bathsheba gives him: Solomon.

Nathan’s third and final appearance in the narrative does not entail a major speech, but does contain another confrontation with David and another shift in the course of Israel’s history. This encounter takes place at David’s deathbed, as the king’s eldest son, Adonijah, has laid claim to the throne. Nathan schemes to ensure that it is Solomon who succeeds David — first bringing in Bathsheba, and then going with her to David to “remind” him that he had already chosen Solomon as his heir. The crisis of succession ends with Solomon becoming king, anointed to the throne by Nathan and the priest Zadok. Nathan will not appear again in the narrative.

In only three biblical passages, Nathan’s words are so memorable, and his speeches so influential, that his place in biblical history is secure. Nathan acts as a stand-in for the reader: rooting for the establishment of David’s dynasty, angry at David’s treatment of Bathsheba and Uriah, and concerned that it will be Solomon who ascends the throne. For the reader who knows how the story is supposed to go, it is Nathan who ensures that it gets there.

Nathan also serves, especially in his second appearance, as the moral voice. His outrage at David’s actions is palpable; he accuses David in a way that no one else in the story can. Indeed, throughout David’s kingship, it is perhaps only Nathan who can bend his will, as he does in each of his encounters with the king.

From the perspective of the story, then, Nathan is essential. The observant reader may note, however, that Nathan’s three appearances all have something else in common: They all have to do with Solomon. Nathan first appears to predict that Solomon will be the one to build the Temple. He appears again at Solomon’s birth. And finally, he enters the scene to ensure that David picks Solomon as his heir.

We may go further: Nathan always makes sure that no one can take Solomon’s rightful place. Nathan prevents David from building the Temple. He condemns David and Bathsheba’s first-born to death. And he removes Adonijah from his rightful place in the royal succession. Nathan may be David’s moral conscience, but in practical terms he is also the shepherd of Solomon’s rise to the throne. Once accomplished, his role — and his presence in the text — is complete.

Though Nathan is known to us as David’s prophet, he should perhaps better be known as Solomon’s. At the very least, we may understand that Nathan’s prophetic mission was on Solomon’s behalf first and foremost. This in no way lessens his status: the successful transition from David to Solomon is at the center of the biblical ideas of the united monarchy, the Davidic line, and the Temple in Jerusalem. Nathan is the prophetic architect of Israel’s glory days.

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But if the carburetor goes out or the fuel pump fails or a part is recalled, you’ll probably need to bring the car to a shop, where a mechanic will pull out a different thick paperback book, called a repair manual. Unlike the operator’s manual, which goes to great lengths to conceal the inner workings of the car, the repair manual shows its reader exactly how the car works in all of its complexity, with detailed drawings of each system and expanded views of every screw, washer, pin, and gear assembly.

Jewish tradition works the same way. The Jewish owner’s manual consists of those texts that help us use the tradition in everyday life. They are meant for consumers. These include the prayer book, the Passover haggadah, the High Holiday machzor, and even the Bible.

The Jewish repair manual are those texts that help us fix the tradition when it stalls on the side of the road. Like all technical manuals, these were initially intended not for the masses, but for the relative few who would devote their careers to getting under the hood of the tradition. For Judaism, that repair manual is the Talmud.

The Talmud is not a code of Jewish law, though there’s plenty of law in it. Nor is it a collection of Jewish wisdom, though there’s a lot of wisdom in it, too. Nor is it a compendium of Jewish lore, though it’s chock full of stories. The Talmud is a manual for repairing, modifying, upgrading, and improving the Jewish tradition when components of it are no longer serving us well.

The Talmud’s creators understood that religious traditions exist to answer our basic human questions and to help us create frameworks to fulfill our basic human needs — the most important of which is the need to grow into the fully human beings we have the potential to become. They also understood that people grow and change faster than traditions do, so our traditions will inevitably stop working unless we have ways of tweaking them along the way — sometimes radically.

The Talmud is a curriculum for educating and empowering those who will do this kind of upgrading in every generation. It is the gift of the sages of the past to the sages of subsequent generations. “Listen,” they’re saying. “This is how we took the parts of the tradition we inherited that no longer worked for us and made them better. We don’t know what parts of the tradition will stop working in your generation, but we trust you to know that. Stand on our shoulders. Use our methodology. Be courageous and bold, like we were, and know that what you are doing may seem radical, but is deeply Jewish — and deeply traditional.”

This is the meta-message on every page of the Talmud. But to access it, you have to learn how to read deeply. Much of the discussion in the Talmud revolves around intricate cases of Jewish law, but that’s just the surface content. What’s being pointed to is not the details of the cases, but the legal principles and methodologies derived from them.

The Talmud, in fact, is no different from any legal casebook. In law school, students are required to buy casebooks — thick anthologies, elegantly bound, with gold lettering on their covers, that contain hundreds of historic, precedent-setting cases. There’s the well-known case in which a locomotive struck and killed a pedestrian at an uncontrolled street crossing, and the case of the tugboat that broke free of a dock and killed a sailor. But the point isn’t to teach about locomotives and tugboats, and no law student would think that it is. The particulars of these cases aren’t what ultimately matters. What matters are the legal principles derived from the cases. The goal is to teach the lawyers of the future how to think like lawyers — how to deduce principles that can be used in new cases, how to think in complex ways about new complex problems. The Talmud is doing exactly the same thing.

That might lead to the conclusion that the Talmud is the product of religious insiders, but in fact the Talmud records the voices of those who were on the margins of Jewish life during the late Second Temple and post-Temple periods — those who were both critiquing a Judaism that was failing and creating one that would work better. To do so, they invented and put into practice a system of mechanisms, principles, and rules-of-change that would guide them and future generations in the project of upgrading the tradition according to their new insights and lived experiences, one which might better serve the world of the future.

The core innovation that made this new system possible was the concept of svara — moral intuition. The sages of the Talmud named svara a source of Jewish law equal to the Torah in its power to overturn any aspect of the received tradition that violated their moral intuition or that caused harm that they could no longer justify, rationalize, or tolerate — even if it was written in black-and-white in the Torah itself. The sages’ trust in svara is what drives the evolution of the entire tradition and can be found on every page of the Talmud — if you know to look beneath the particulars of the locomotives and the tugboats.

And it is the refinement of the Talmud learner’s svara which is the Talmud’s ultimate goal. To paraphrase the philosopher Moshe Halbertal, the Talmud is not a normative document, but a formative document. It is designed not to tell us what our behavioral norms should be, but rather to form us into a certain kind of human being.

The text of the Talmud is intentionally pieced together in such a way that the very act of learning it becomes a spiritual practice unto itself, one which was designed to shape the learner into a morally courageous, empathic, resilient, flexible human being, one with the capacity to tolerate contradiction, paradox, complexity, and uncertainty. The act of learning Talmud is the Jewish tradition’s core spiritual technology designed to help the learner become this kind of person.

For two millennia, only Judaism’s mechanics and engineers had access to this technology. Only a small fraction of our community was empowered to utilize the spiritual, moral, and intellectual resources of Talmud study to become the kinds of people the Jewish tradition would have us be, and to bring our insights and life experiences to bear on the project of upgrading the tradition itself.

Today, for the first time in Jewish history, we have the opportunity, every one of us, to roll up our sleeves and participate in the creation of the Jewish future. The Talmud is a gift entrusted to every one of us by our Jewish ancestors who hoped we would find within it the tools to make ourselves, our tradition, and the world around us, better. So consider this an invitation to take a seat at the table where the tradition of the future will be created. By all of us.

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Traditionally read during the fall festival of Sukkot, Kohelet is the most honest book of the Bible because it speaks to those Jews (and others) who have outgrown the idea of a supernatural God who writes books, chooses one people from among all others, and dabbles in real estate. It may be the Torah for our time because it offers a way to live well in the wild world we experience every day.

Read the entire text of Ecclesiastes in English and Hebrew on Sefaria.

Kohelet refers to God as HaElohim, literally “The God.” His understanding of God leaves no room for a self-conscious and willful supernatural being who creates and governs the world. Kohelet is more of a naturalist who sees God in, with, and as the universe.

Kohelet’s world isn’t a fantasy realm where God rewards and punishes according to some divine standard, but rather our world where bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, and that’s just the way it is because things happen.

At the heart of Kohelet’s teaching is the notion of havel, a Hebrew word most English translators render as futility, vanity or meaninglessness. Read this way, Kohelet appears to be a nihilist. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

Havel also means dew, vapor or breath. When Kohelet says havel havalim, hakol havel (“Utter futility! All is futile”), he is saying that life is impermanent, without a fixed nature, as temporary as morning dew. Life is, as someone once said, just one thing after another.

This is how Kohelet puts it:

Everything in this world has its moment,
a season of ripening and falling away:
Moments of birthing and moments of dying;
moments of planting and moments of reaping.
Moments of killing and moments of healing;
moments of demolition and moments of building.
Moments of weeping and moments of laughing;
moments of mourning and moments of dancing.
Moments of scattering stones and moments of gathering stones;
moments of embracing and moments of distance.
Moments of seeking and moments of losing;
moments of clinging and moments of releasing.
Moments of tearing and moments of mending;
moments of silence and moments of talking.
Moments of loving and moments of hating;
moments of warring and moments of peacemaking.
(Translation from Ecclesiastes Annotated & Explained, by Rami Shapiro)

That life is a series of moments, each one flowing into the next, doesn’t mean life is meaningless, only that life is fluid. Reality is like the tide flowing in and flowing out. The flowing tide isn’t without purpose, but its purpose isn’t other than its flowing.

Kohelet’s world is purposeful in the same way: The purpose is in the happenings themselves and not some abstraction foisted upon them. To put it another way, there is no meaning to life, life itself is meaningful.

Living well in Kohelet’s world requires knowing what moment you are in. Is this a time for laughter or tears? Love or hate? Kohelet isn’t elevating one moment over another. He isn’t saying laughter is better than tears, or love is superior to hate. He is simply noting that laughter happens and tears happen and love happens and hate happens.

The key is to relax into what is happening rather than seek to change what is into something else by appeals to God or acts of will. You cannot change what is. You can only relax into it, knowing that it will, of its own accord, soon change into something else.

This is like being caught in a rip tide. According to oceanographer and rip tide expert Jamie MacMahan, most rip tides flow in circles from the shallows to the breakers and back again. It’s impossible to know which part of the circle you are in. If you swim against the tide, you’ll be exhausted and drown. If you swim parallel to the beach, which is the standard advice, you still have a 50/50 chance of swimming against the tide and drowning. The best way to survive is to relax and allow the tide to release you as it flows back in. It seems counterintuitive, but the science bears this out.

What MacMahan says about rip tides, Kohelet says about life. Relax into what is and it will carry you into what is next. This too seems counterintuitive. We are taught, as Dylan Thomas put it, not to go gently into that good night, to rage and struggle and pray and bend reality to our will. You can do this if you wish, and you will lose — but only, as Byron Katie puts it, 100 percent of the time.

So how do we live well in a fluid world, a world without certainty, surety, and security? Kohelet’s instruction is simple, practical and, to me, compelling. Eat simply, drink wisely, find work that gives you joy, and cultivate a few loving friendships (Ecclesiastes 2:24; 4:8–12). For some, this is too private, too much about “me” and not enough about “us.” But this is too narrow a reading. What is good for the individual is good for society at large, and Kohelet is calling us to create a world where everyone has access to healthy food, clean water, joyous work, and the freedom to love whomever they love.

This is why Kohelet is the Torah for our time. It provides an honest assessment of life and how best to live it without recourse to jealous and violent gods, corruptible clergy and kings, jingoistic tribalism, and xenophobic ethnicity. And because it does, it scared the crap out of those who put the Bible together.

Claiming that Kohelet was promoting fake news, they added alternative facts to the end of the book in the hopes of perverting the message of Kohelet and prevent it from being enacted by the people:

The sum of the matter, when all is said and done:
Revere God and observe His commandments!
For this applies to all mankind:
that God will call every creature to account for everything unknown,
be it good or bad. Ecclesiastes 12: 13-14

This desperate attempt by the powers that be to deny the wisdom of Kohelet only attests to its truth. Read the book for yourself and see if this is not so.

The post Kohelet: Torah for the 21st Century appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

He was both hero and anti-hero. David, as depicted in the Hebrew Bible is, above all, a man of profound contradictions. He is described as “a man after God’s own heart” by one biblical author, and “a bloodstained fiend of hell” by another. The word “Satan” is used in the Hebrew Bible to describe David as an adversary. He is depicted as feigning madness in a cowardly attempt to avoid the wrath of the king of the Philistines. And he carried off the wife of a man named Nabal after shaking him down for flocks and herds under threat of violence. “God do the same to me and more,” vowed David as he and his army approached the estate of Nabal, according to the earthy translation of the King James Version, “if I leave alive until morning a single one who pisses against the wall!”

David might have been bisexual. David has always been a focus of speculation when it comes to the love that “passes the love of women.” This is how the Bible characterizes the love between David and Jonathan, the son of the first king of Israel, Saul. The rest of the biblical narrative depicts David as an insatiable collector of women, including other men’s wives, but some modern readers prefer to take the ancient text at face value: “We have every reason to believe that a homosexual relationship existed,” argues Tom Horner, Bible scholar and Episcopal priest, with rare bluntness. “Seminary professors must consider it, as well as must the diagnostician of ancient male love.”

“Speak truth to power” originates with David. It started with David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba, a beautiful woman married to a soldier named Uriah. After spying Bathsheba bathing, David seduced her and she became pregnant. To cover the affair, the king called Uriah home to sleep with his wife (so he would think the child was his), but Uriah loyally chose to stay with his troops. So David sent Uriah to the front to be killed and married Bathsheba. The prophet Nathan memorably confronts King David with treachery: “Uriah the Hittite [Bathsheba’s husband] thou has smitten with the sword, and his wife thou has taken to be thy wife. Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from thy house.”

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The post Fourteen Things You Need to Know About King David appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

The unusual preposition — be-tachtit (“at the foot of”) — is understood in the Midrash to mean that the Jewish people were literally standing under the mountain. That is, at the moment God speaks the Ten Commandments, God also uproots Mount Sinai from the ground and holds it over the people, as if to say, “If you accept the Torah, fine; if not, here shall be your grave.” Avodah Zarah 2b The implication is that the Jewish people accepted Torah only through coercion.

The description of the ensuing events only reinforces that interpretation. The thunder, lightning, and thick clouds that accompany God’s presence on Mount Sinai terrify the people Exodus 20:14 and they beg Moses to be their intercessor.

Many Jewish communities will commemorate this moment during the holiday of Shavuot. The event is often referred to as z’man matan torateinu (“the time of the giving of our Torah”) and some celebrate its anniversary by staying up all night in study. But given both the biblical and rabbinic understanding of that moment, we may well wonder about the celebration of a “gift” both forced and fear-inducing.

Another Shavuot custom may provide some insight: the recitation of the Book of Ruth, which many communities read on the second day of the holiday.

The short story revolves around the deep relationship between the heroine and her Bethlehemite mother-in-law, Naomi, forged after the death of the latter’s husband and two sons. As she journeys back home, Naomi urges her daughter-in-law to stay in her native Moab, but Ruth refuses, speaking these iconic words: “For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God” Ruth 1:16.

These words can be read in dialogue with the story in Exodus. They certainly show no less commitment than the joint affirmation of the Israelites at Sinai: “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and obey.” Exodus 24:7. Indeed, Ruth’s declaration is understood as evidence of her taking the covenant upon herself. In the rabbinic imagination, she becomes the prototypical convert. Just as the Jewish people all gathered together at the mountain in the desert in the presence of the God of Israel, so too does Ruth cling to Naomi on the road in Moab, invoking the God of Israel.

But the contexts are very different. The animating value in the book of Ruth is chesed (lovingkindness) and loyalty that surpass the simple duty implied in the Israelites’ dispassionate response of na’aseh v’nishma (“we will do and obey”). After all, Ruth’s pledge to Naomi ends with the ultimate vow: “Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried” Ruth 1:17. Later in the book, Naomi returns her daughter-in-law’s care and concern, the wealthy landowner Boaz shows kindness and generosity to both women, and all three find joy in the birth of Obed.

Even God is different. In Exodus, God is a loud, physical force that moves mountains. In the book of Ruth, God is the quiet but inexorable activity that moves the characters from emptiness to fulfillment.

It is perhaps for this reason that there is a practice of saying Ruth’s words each morning when laying tefillin, her credo of devotion and faithfulness recited as the boxes are placed between the eyes and on the arm — literally taking the words of Torah upon oneself. The ritual conjures the image of Ruth speaking to Naomi as they journey, each having lost her husband, two women cleaving to each other in hope for a better future together. It is an act of making oneself a partner in God’s ongoing work in the world.

Ruth’s relationship to Naomi and to Torah can be a model for our own orientation to the celebration of Shavuot. In Exodus, the Israelites experience an overwhelming display of power and might that leaves them shaking in fear and desiring to distance themselves from what may emerge from those clouds around the mountain. In the book of Ruth, she — no less in the dark — bravely and wholeheartedly faces what may come down the road.

Shavuot is called “the time of the giving of the Torah” rather than “the time of the receiving of the Torah.” The sages point out that the giving took place on one day to one people, but the receiving takes place at all times and in all generations.

As we celebrate the giving of the Torah on Shavuot, may we may act each day with the love and intimacy modeled by Ruth in the receiving of Torah.

The post What Ruth Can Teach Us About Celebrating Shavuot appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

It is a perennial question almost every Jewish educator confronts, particularly in the autumn when Jews the world over restart the annual cycle of Torah study. A mere four weeks into the cycle, we read about our forefather Abraham, a paragon of kindness, being told by God to acquiesce to the demands of our matriarch Sara and banish his other wife and that woman’s firstborn child. Immediately thereafter we encounter God’s request of Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac.

These stories are not exceptional, but instead set the stage for a general ideational thrust whereby morality does not always seem be God’s metric for evaluating the legitimacy of God’s own demands. Conscientious readers, as a result, are horrified. How could a kind and loving God make such cruel demands of people? Where is God’s morality?

These questions grate on the contemporary reader’s conscience, but the discomfort these troubling stories generate is predicated on a paradigmatic fallacy.

A story is told about a well-known Hasidic rebbe, Rabbi Zusha of Anipoli (1718-1800), who was asked by a student to help resolve the theodicy dilemma. “Rabbi,” he said, “can you explain why there is evil in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“Evil?!” the teacher responded, looking baffled. “As far as I can tell, there is no evil. I have only experienced goodness in my life.”

The retort makes an important epistemological point. Reb Zusha’s interlocutor assumed that evil exists. The rabbi’s response indicates that he doesn’t share this assumption.

Applying Reb Zusha’s question to the current question, one might ask: “Immorality?! God cannot be immoral.”

To assume that any biblical story showcases God’s immorality is wrong. To expect divine adherence to our moral standards assumes that God is the best kind of human possible, by a factor of infinity. God is us, magnified. If moral perfection is a prerequisite for human greatness, then God, all the more so, needs to conform to the highest (human) moral code.

But that is incorrect. The reason God is God is not that God is better than we are. It is actually the other way around: God is God because God is not us. God transcends humanity. Human attributes are not attributable to God. God is neither kind nor mean, neither harsh nor forgiving, and — as regards our dilemma — neither moral nor immoral. God is amoral.

When we read stories that to the human eye seem immoral, we are using the wrong metric, inappropriately applying human criteria to evaluate divine behavior. God is beyond those categories. The demands made by God on human beings may appear capricious from a human perspective, but they are not immoral.

But what of the rest of the Torah, where the do’s and don’ts are spelled out? There too the reader encounters seeming divine obliviousness to contemporary moral standards. The examples cited above happened in the past and don’t make any demands on our behavior. But what of demands to do things which from a human perspective are immoral?

God commands us to kill innocents and allows us to take advantage of those who are dependent on us for their safety and wellbeing. Deuteronomy 13:13 commands us to indiscriminately kill all the inhabitants of a condemned city, regardless of their individual culpability. Exodus 21:7 tells us that a father has the right to sell his daughter as a maidservant.

Here the challenge is far more difficult. We are no longer evaluating God’s own morality. These are instances where humans are entitled or even enjoined to act immorally.

For those committed to Orthodox belief, our response is necessarily limited. These commandments cannot be excised from the text or assumed to have been inserted by anyone other than God.

One solution is to circumvent the problem, rather than solve it.

While these commandments indeed are problematic in the abstract, historical circumstances have conspired to render most of them immaterial. As such, they no longer have the power to make ethical demands on our conscience. Their applicability disappeared when we lost sovereignty and, as a result, have now been extracted from our religious purview. It is as if they do not exist. History eliminated their relevance, perhaps permanently. Presumably, even with the restoration of full Jewish sovereignty, those troubling laws will not be reactivated.

Such a claim, of course, is predicated on a metaphysics which believes that God operates in history. The historical events which caused the suspension of the “immoral” commandments therefore are not a fluke or accident, the divine hand played a role in them. One can perhaps assume that their elimination occurred with God’s acquiescence.

This is hardly the only solution to these perplexing questions, nor is it predicated on a universal understanding of Jewish beliefs. But it is one legitimate approach that can help the contemporary reader reconcile some of the overwhelming conflicts between our deeply held beliefs and strongly felt moral convictions.

As the late Rabbi David Hartman correctly pointed out, rabbinic Judaism does not champion “a” theology. It instead presents us with a smorgasbord of theologies. None of them will suffice on its own, answering all questions all the time.

The post How to Handle Troubling Jewish Texts appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

In addition to the myriad editions of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Tanach) available in book form, the entire Bible can be read in Hebrew and English on Sefaria, an online resource that enables users to search by keyword and provides links to commentaries and other related materials. Below, we outline the contents of the Bible, with links to our articles about each section.

Bible Overview

Torah

Prophets (Nevi’im)

Writings (Ketuvim)

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Overview

Along with the numerous articles linked to throughout this guide, the following provide some general information about the Bible, its origins, scholarship on it and the Jewish tradition of commentary.

What is the Hebrew Bible (Tanach)?

Approaches to Bible Commentary

Creating the Canon

Women in the Bible

Did God Write the Bible?

Did Moses Write the Torah?

Modern Source Criticism of the Torah

Torah

The Torah is divided into the five books below, and each book is divided into about 10 portions. There are 54 portions in total, and the Jewish community reads one a week over an annual cycle that begins each fall on the holiday of Simchat Torah. To find out this week’s portion, visit My Jewish Learning’s homepage. We also have a special index page for each portion, which includes a detailed summary of both the portion its related Haftarah reading; a quiz, links to the full text and  commentaries from a variety of perspectives.

The full list of portions can be found here.

Learn more about what a Torah portion is.

Why the Torah is read on an annual cycle.

Where to find more commentaries on the weekly Torah portion.

How to write a dvar Torah, or commentary on a Torah portion.

Genesis (Bereshit)

Genesis Quiz

Exodus (Shemot)

Exodus Quiz

Leviticus (Vayikra)

Leviticus Quiz

Numbers (Bamidbar)

Numbers Quiz

Deuteronomy (Devarim)

Deuteronomy Quiz

Prophets (Nevi’im)

Each week a reading from the Prophets, called a Haftarah, is read after the Torah reading. Each Torah portion is paired with a specific Haftarah, which is listed on My Jewish Learning’s page for that portion.

The Latter Prophets

Joshua

Judges

Samuel

Kings

Isaiah

Jeremiah

Ezekiel

Hosea

Joel

Amos

Obadiah

Jonah (read on Yom Kippur)

Our Prophets, Ourselves: Jonah, Judgment and the Act of Repentance

Jonah’s Lesson in Divine Mercy

Why We Read Jonah on Yom Kippur

Jonah, the Jew

Jonah: Success or Failure?

VIDEO: What’s the Book of Jonah Really About?

Micah

Nahum

Habakkuk

Zephaniah

Haggai

Zechariah

Malachi

Writings (Ketuvim)

Many of the books, or chapters, in Ketuvim, are associated with Jewish holidays, when they are read. In these cases, the holiday is listed in parentheses after the book name below.

Psalms

Psalms As the Ultimate Self-Help Tool

Proverbs

Job

The Book of Job and the Paradox of Suffering

The Book of Job: A Whirlwind of Confusion

Song of Songs (Passover)

Ruth (Shavuot)

Lamentations (Tisha B’Av)

Ecclesiastes (Sukkot)

Esther (Purim)

Daniel

Ezra

Nehemiah

I Chronicles

II Chronicles

The post Your Guide to Reading the Hebrew Bible appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Daf yomi (pronounced dahf YOH-mee)  is an international program to read the entire Babylonian Talmud — the main text of rabbinic Judaism — in seven and a half years at the rate of one page a day. Tens of thousands of Jews study daf yomi worldwide, and they are all quite literally on the same page — following a schedule fixed in 1923 in Poland by Rabbi Meir Shapiro, the founder of daf yomi, who envisioned the whole world as a vast Talmudic classroom connected by a global network of conversational threads.

The current Daf Yomi cycle began on January 5, 2020. Sign up here for an accessible daily Daf Yomi email from My Jewish Learning!

A page a day doesn’t sound too daunting, until you consider that each Talmudic page is actually a double-sided folio comprised of multigenerational conversations among the rabbis of the first few centuries of the Common Era, dealing with everything from what to do if your camel knocks over a candle and sets a store on fire  to the consequences of embarrassing another person while he is naked.

The Talmud is divided into 37 volumes, known as tractates, each of which deals with different aspects of Jewish law, from vows to marriage to the logistics of offering sacrifices in the ancient Temple. But the subjects of the tractates are in part only nominal, because the Talmud is a highly discursive text, proceeding by association rather than by any rational scheme. Every page presupposes knowledge of other pages, which is why it is difficult to start learning without prior background. But every page connects to conversations on other pages, and so once you have started learning, it’s almost impossible to stop.

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions by those who are thinking about embarking on this wild seven-and-a-half year journey through one of the most quirky, irreverent, surprising and intriguing works in the Jewish literary canon:

Do I need to be religious — or Jewish — to study Talmud?
Can I study Talmud even if I have little or no Hebrew background?
What version of the Talmud do you recommend I use, and where can I find it?
What resources and study aides are most helpful?
Does it make sense to start in the middle of a daf yomi cycle, or should I wait for the next cycle to begin?
One page a day, seven days a week, is quite a relentless pace. Do you have any tips for staying on schedule? What if I fall behind?
What keeps you going on days when you have no motivation to learn or begin to lose interest?
How do you keep track of everything you learn?
What might I get out of studying daf yomi?

1. Do I need to be religious — or Jewish — to study Talmud?

Absolutely not! The Talmud deals with all aspects of Jewish life, but you don’t need to be a practicing observant Jew to appreciate the subjects under discussion, many of which have broader and more universal resonance, such as what our obligations are when we chance upon an object that someone else has lost. Although the Talmudic rabbis followed the Torah’s commandments, their theological orientation was often so bold and heretical that some of their statements may be best appreciated by those who are not themselves devout. And unlike later works that followed from it, the Talmud is not a law code intended to tell Jews how to behave but a record of rabbinic legal conversations in which many of the questions are left open and unresolved. It is a text for those who are living the questions rather than those who have found the answers. And so if you are a thinking, questioning person who does not take anything at face value, then Talmud study may be for you.

2. Can I study Talmud even if I have little or no Hebrew background?

Yes. The Talmud is actually written in a combination of Hebrew and Aramaic, which was the lingua franca of Jews living in Babylon (now Iraq) during the first few centuries CE. But it is available in multiple English translations, both in print and online. Many passages in the Talmud involve Midrash (rabbinic interpretations of biblical passages) and a close reading of biblical sources; certainly knowledge of Hebrew is helpful in appreciating the linguistic connections the Talmud frequently draws. But Talmud can be studied on many levels – it is often compared to a sea because of its vastness and depth, and as with a sea, you can skim the surface, swim underwater, or become a deep-sea diver and learn about all the flora and fauna on the ocean floor. You can learn superficially or deeply, and yes, some of that depends on your level of Hebrew.

3. What version of the Talmud do you recommend I use, and where can I find it?

The version of the Talmud that has become most standard and most widely studied in traditional settings is the Vilna Shas, first printed in 1835. This is what people commonly imagine when they picture a page of Talmud — a block of Hebrew text in the center of the page surrounded by marginal commentaries. But there are also more accessible versions of the text, such as the modern Hebrew edition published with the very helpful commentary of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, which is currently being translated into English as the Koren Talmud Bavli and available for free online at Sefaria.org. (Sefaria also offers a direct link to the current day’s page of Talmud from its homepage.) Artscroll publishes a translation that will be best suited to traditional Jews, and the Soncino commentary—available for free online at www.halakhah.com — is readable if somewhat archaic.

4. What resources and study aides are most helpful?

There is a vast array of English-language daf yomi podcasts consisting of recordings of daf yomi classes taught by rabbis and other scholars ranging in length from the five-minute daf yomi shiur (lesson) to lessons that are well over an hour long. The standard daf yomi podcast is probably about 45-50 minutes. One very accessible, clear explication of the daily page, is Michelle Farber’s dafyomi4women, which, though taught by a woman to a group of women in Raanana, Israel, is as valuable for men as for women. A number of websites, such as the Orthodox Union’s Daf Yomi Resources Page, offer various supplemental materials, such as summaries and commentaries, for the daf yomi.

And finally, if you are interested in reading secondary sources that will introduce you to the world of the rabbis and the nature of Talmud as a literary genre, you might consider such books as Ruth Calderon’s A Bride for One Night, a collection of fictional tales based on Talmudic narratives; Binyamin Lau’s The Sages, a collection and interpretation of stories about various Talmudic figures, organized chronologically; and my own book, If All the Seas Were Ink, a memoir of seven and a half years of daf yomi study that is at once a guided tour of the Talmud and a deeply personal tale of love and loss.

5. Does it make sense to start in the middle of a daf yomi cycle, or should I wait for the next cycle to begin?

A new daf yomi cycle begins only once every seven and a half years — the next cycle begins on June 8, 2027. But we begin a new tractate covering a new topic every few months, and so you can start at the beginning of a tractate without feeling lost. Numerous daf yomi calendars, such as this one, are available online, and you can also download daf yomi calendars to your phone.

6. One page a day, seven days a week, is quite a relentless pace. Do you have any tips for staying on schedule? What if I fall behind?

The key to sticking with daf yomi is to find a way to incorporate a bit of learning into your schedule every day, but this learning can take many forms. The rabbis in Tractate Taanit teach that “a person should always be pliable like a reed, and not rigid like a cedar” (Taanit 20a). It helps to be flexible about what it means to learn the page. Some days you may be able to sit down and read the page itself, along with related commentaries and study aides; other days you may have time to listen to a podcast while driving to work or folding the laundry. The point is learning every day, not how you do it. If you fall behind, it helps to have a specific day of the week designated for catching up. It also helps to learn with a study partner or as part of a class, because then you are accountable to someone else. Of course, you are always accountable to the schedule of daf yomi, which is sort of like a treadmill — it just keeps moving forwards, and you need to keep running. It is exhausting at times, but it also keeps you on your toes.

7. What keeps you going on days when you have no motivation to learn or begin to lose interest?

A commitment to learning daf yomi is sort of like a marriage — you’re in the relationship for the long haul, even if most days there are no passionate sparks. Sometimes it’s hard to find anything meaningful or relevant on the page, but perhaps it helps to imagine those pages as the context for the more exciting material that will follow a few days later. Without the context, you cannot fully appreciate that fabulous story about the man who mistakes his wife for a prostitute, or the unicorns that could not fit into Noah’s ark. On pages where the topics seems less interesting, it sometimes it helps to pay attention not just to what the rabbis are saying, but to how they transition from one subject to the next, such that a discussion of sex with a virgin suddenly morphs into a discussion of how to avoid hearing something untoward by sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears—as if to suggest that all acts of penetration are one and the same. To learn daf yomi, you have to allow yourself to be carried along for the ride — and while it’s almost never smooth sailing, some days are certainly bumpier than others.

8. How do you keep track of everything you learn?

Learning daf yomi is a bit like zooming through a safari on a motorcycle – there is so much to take in, and yet you are moving ahead at a rapid clip. There are many ways to take stock without slowing down. You might write about something you’ve learned (see, for instance, my own daf yomi limericks), or draw a picture summarizing something on the daf (see these incredible sketches). You may simply write notes in the margins, summarizing what you have learned. In my case, many years of marginal notes scribbled in my volumes of Talmud became the basis of a memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink.

9. What might I get out of studying daf yomi?

When I first started learning, I didn’t think the Talmud could possibly have anything to say to me personally. But I discovered that when you learn deeply and allow yourself to listen carefully to what the text has to say, you find yourself living against the backdrop of the Talmud — such that the text is a commentary on life, and life is a commentary on the text. The rabbis teach in Tractate Eruvin (54a) that “one who is walking alone his way and has no companion should occupy himself with the study of Torah.” At first the Talmud was my companion during a rather lonely stretch of life. But through my study of Talmud, I overcame a difficult period in my life and found a way forward. And so I followed the Talmud, but the Talmud has also followed me through the various twists and turns my life has taken — through divorce, dating, aliyah (immigration to Israel) marriage, pregnancy and motherhood. I invite you to join me in this journey.

The post 9 Things to Know About the Daf Yomi (Daily Page of Talmud) appeared first on My Jewish Learning.