An Open Book

In this Season of the Siyum, among the many tens of thousands of words written about daf yomi are those that have appeared in the Jewish media beyond the frum community, and they are revealing in their own way.

In Tablet, for example, a New Jersey Reform clergyman named Benjamin David wrote about having just finished the daf yomi cycle, which, he acknowledges, isn’t “the kind of thing most Reform rabbis are expected to do… I was an outlier, a fact I learned to embrace.” Reading his essay, it’s easy to be dismissive of the idea of “reading all 63 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud,” and how it challenged his “ability to study for at least 15 minutes every day no matter what the day brought: illness, emergencies in my congregation, funerals that necessitated hours of driving, snow days, and the ever-present voice that had had enough of such a project.”

However much or little his experience may have resembled that of a frum learner of the daf, there’s something inspiring about him describing himself as “the only one in the pediatrician’s waiting room with Tractate Yoma in one hand and my kid’s winter hat in the other…. When you study Talmud every single day for seven-and-a-half years, the pages become a part of you. You are holding a tractate so often it becomes an appendage…. I studied on my 15th wedding anniversary. I studied the day my grandmother died. I studied on Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, and Purim.”

Later on, he writes movingly that the “most uplifting part of my daf yomi experience came when I had cancer… [which] resulted in a month in the hospital to receive a most aggressive form of chemotherapy, followed by 17 rounds of radiation. It might have marked the end of daf yomi for me but actually the opposite is true. Through all of it I studied and with great devotion, even with nurses scrambling around me and my vitals being taken multiple times every hour…. I was still part of this sacred community, even while cloistered in the oncology wing at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.”