My Life Raft

The Time I Almost Gave Up Daf Yomi

As told to Margie Pensak by Daniel Gibber

O

n the surface, I had my Judaism in perfect order. I grew up fully shomer Shabbos on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; went to Manhattan Day School, Yeshiva University’s MTA high school, Yeshivat Shalavim in Israel and then Yeshiva University. I could check off every box, was fully frum — but I wasn’t connected in a serious way to learning or davening.

I’m sure my grandparents would have expected better. My maternal grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, was a major talmid chacham who probably went through Shas ten times during his long life. He would get up every morning at 4 a.m., until the age of 101, to learn daf yomi. My paternal grandfather, Isadore Gibber, was a noted Torah supporter who had no yeshivah background and lived in Monticello, not exactly a center of Torah learning. For most of his life, he wasn’t immersed in learning — but then, after retiring at age 80, he started learning daf yomi. He spent many, many hours every single day going through the daf and trying to understand it; it became his project. Some days, he spent as many as six to ten hours toiling over that day’s daf until he understood it. If he had trouble, he’d call one of my cousins to explain it to him. At age 88, he finished the entire cycle and the whole family made a catered siyum haShas. Some even flew in for the event.

But even though I had a solid religious background and personal role models among my own family, once I got out of college and started a job, the challenges of the workplace and of growing a family made it very easy to drift away from learning and a serious connection to Torah. For many years, my main learning consisted of occasionally opening up a sefer to help one of my boys prepare for a test.