Read Out the Old, Read in the New

As the 7½-year Talmud study cycle ends with a global celebration, Jews are joining the next round in a host of new media.

BY: Larry Yudelson

The holy and the mundane, ancient wisdom and modern technology, quiet scholarship and glitzy p.r. all share a satellite-broadcast stage on Tuesday, March 1, as tens if not hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews mark the completion of a seven-year-plus cycle of daily Talmud study at gatherings from New York's Madison Square Garden to Los Angeles' Walt Disney Concert Hall, and dozens of other venues between.

They are celebrating the Siyum Hashas-Hebrew for "completion of the Talmud" of the Daf Yomi ("daily page") study cycle.

The celebration in Madison Square Garden is being sponsored by Agudath Israel of America, an organization representing the most fervently traditional portion of the Orthodox Jewish community. Live hookups are being arranged for an overflow crowd at New York's Javits Center, as well as the events organized by local Jewish groups across the country.

Another series of events, sponsored by a network of local kollels-seminaries where already-ordained rabbis continue their studies-is aimed at non-Orthodox Jews and is designed to dovetail with the main celebration. These celebrations, in cities including Phoenix and Atlanta, will be held under the umbrella of "Jewish Unity Live." They feature high-profile honorees such as Elie Wiesel and Hadassah Lieberman and Jewish entertainers such as Dudu Fischer and Andy Statman.

While most of the celebrants will be spectators, the accomplishment of the thousands of Talmud students participating in the study cycle is amazing. Starting back in 1997, they worked their way through Talmud, one page a day, for 2,711 days. If you imagine reading the "Encyclopedia Britannica" from cover to cover-several pages a day-you'll get a rough idea of what's involved in the regimen.

The Britannica analogy doesn't do the Daf Yomi justice, though, and not only because the Talmud, in Hebrew and Aramaic, lacks an index, alphabetical order, or even vowels. The road to the Siyum Hashas celebration stretches back not only to 6th-century Iraq-where the Talmud was compiled from centuries of rabbinic debates related to the Mishna, the 2nd-century work which was the first book of Jewish law-but, for Orthodox Jews, back another millennium and a half to Mount Sinai. It was there, Orthodox Jews believe, that God taught Moses the laws of the Mishna and the principles of the Talmud in an "Oral Torah" that was an inseparable component of the "Written Torah" known as the biblical Five Books of Moses.

Religiously, studying Talmud and participating in the 2000-year-old debate of the Talmudic rabbis and the subsequent commentaries of later generations whose words surround the Talmudic texts, is a way of engaging directly in the Oral Torah. It is possible to receive, and also contribute to, this treasure of divine wisdom.

So while the study of the Talmud (and its commentaries, and the commentaries' commentaries) has always been central to the rabbinical curriculum, Talmud study has remained a religious ideal too for those in other professions.

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