In just over six weeks from now Chanukah will be arriving in mid-summer.
The great celebration of Torah known as the Siyum HaShas of Daf HaYomi will take place b’ezras Hashem on August 1 at the very same time that the quintessential manifestation of Yavan the Olympic Games reach their midpoint in London. It’s hard to imagine a clearer better-timed contrast than this between the radically divergent worldviews of Yerushalayim and Athens or a more bracing expression than this of an epic kulturkampf that first flared two millennia ago yet continues in full strength to this day.
And we need to be prepared both to give the media an understanding of what the Siyum is really about and even more importantly to use this opportunity to draw our estranged brethren nearer to Hashem. With this in mind I reprint here an updated version of a column I published in the Forward in 2005 just prior to the last Siyum HaShas written with a secular yet sincere audience in mind:
On August 1 large numbers of Jews will join together at locations across the country and around the world including 90000 strong at Met Life Stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands to celebrate an event called the Siyum HaShas. This celebration marks the completion of the entire Babylonian Talmud a culmination of seven-and-one-half years of study at an inexorable page-a-day pace known in Hebrew as Daf Yomi.
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