In Israel at the Western Wall in 2016
In December of 2019, I heard there was going to be a huge celebration to honor the end of a cycle of Talmudic learning. It was something vaguely on my radar. I knew men who woke up at 4am to go study everyday before work. It wasn’t something that felt accessible to me, both with my limited Hebrew reading comprehension and being a woman.
What is Daf Yomi?
Daf Yomi (דף יומי) is a daily regimen of learning the Oral Torah and its commentaries (also known as the Gemara), in which each of the 2,711 pages of the Babylonian Talmud is covered in sequence. A daf, or blatt in Yiddish, consists of both sides of the page. Under this regimen, the entire Talmud is completed, one day at a time, in a cycle of seven and a half years. Tens of thousands of Jews worldwide study in the Daf Yomi program, and over 300,000 participate in the Siyum HaShas, an event celebrating the culmination of the cycle of learning. The Daf Yomi program has been credited with making Talmud study accessible to Jews who are not Torah scholars, contributing to Jewish continuity after the Holocaust, and having a unifying factor among Jews. - Wikipedia
What makes it exceptional for me to learn Daf Yomi? It may not be. It likely isn’t. However, this is what I know - the groups that learn Daf Yomi together are aimed at men. They are early in the morning so men can go before work. It’s a group of men, for men. That has never been a hurdle for me before. I have never been intimidated by study with men, I spent a year wearing a kippah and talit katan every day because it felt like it was an integral part of my Jewish observance. So why was this learning inaccessible? Because my life as a mother, wife, and business owner meant that finding a dedicated hour + every day to commit to learning complicated Jewish texts was just not feasible. Especially since I would have to figure out childcare everyday because most learning are before daycare starts.
I first learned that a woman in Israel was doing this for her second cycle with students and publishing a weekly podcast. When I learned about the podcast, I knew I could make this happen so I committed. Just knowing I would be doing this with other women, in my own time, it became accessable. I decided then that would commit to learning Daf Yomi.
But my own Type A brain was getting ready to sabotage me. I set up everyday in my office, during my workday for an hour + with the text in front of me, a spreadsheet for notes, and Rabbanit Michelle Cohen Farber’s podcast. It generally took me more than an hour. And I didn’t always have that hour. And I certainly didn’t have two or three hours to catch up from shabbat and Sunday PLUS the daily learning. I was getting caught in my own ambition. I found myself avoiding it… I found myself 60 dafim (pages) behind. I thought, I will never catch up… I will constantly have this deficit of so many days… I will always be behind. Not to mention that I also committed to a NACH Yomi cycle (this is also a daily learning program, specifically aimed at women, to read Prophets and Writings in the Tanach) which is every day for two years.
I had barely started and I was already too overwhelmed.
Then I stopped myself. Why do I have to take notes? Why do I have to have my text always in front of me? I can always look things up later. Why not take this gift that Rabbanit Farber is giving me and weave it into my daily life. This so clearly illustrated to me why women are not required to do time-bound mitzvot. So much falls on our shoulders every day. The mental load, decision fatigue, work, children, spouses, parents, families, finances… so much is required of us every day… G!d knows this and thus, we are not required to do the things that have to be done at a specific time.
So I took Rabbanit Farber’s podcast and brought it into my every day. I usually listen in the car on the way to appointments, at my desk while doing mindless data entry, on headphones while I wash dishes or fold laundry. I admit, all the complex concepts don’t always stick and I have had re-listen to sections when I’m confused because I stopped in the middle to go into the grocery store. But I am keeping up. And I am inspired every day by a robust group of women around the world.
All of this came crashing into each other today. I told my husband that today we would have a zoom session to celebrate finishing a large book. It’s called a Siyum for Masechet Shabbat. Masechet Shabbat has 157 pages (really each page is two pages). This is a big deal. Not to mention that the zoom broadcast for the regular learning is on Israel time and so I don’t ever get to learn together with the other women.
This morning my husband took our five year old and our nine year old nephew to a wildlife refuge nearby. They were going to get home 10 minutes before the Siyum. The two boys and our 2.5 year old daughter needed lunch then nephew was being picked up, husband and son had to go to a haircut, and daughter had to go down for a nap. All during the one “time bound” thing I wanted to do to celebrate my learning.
Let me tell you how it went -
I joined 10 minutes late. On my laptop speaker. My headphones wouldn’t connect. I zoomed (ha pardon the pun) around prepping three kid lunches and got the kids eating. Got the headphones working on my phone (vs laptop). One ear listening to the Siyum. One ear listening to three kids and my husband. Responding to them all (on mute on zoom of course). Refilling plates. Washing dishes. I ignored the 2.5 year old long enough that she took a “bath” in peanut butter. Scrubbed her with wipes and took her upstairs while trying to coordinate my sister-in-law coming to get nephew (she was running late) and my husband and son out to their haircut. Then I was wiping a tiny tushy on the potty, putting on a nap diaper and PJs… and it struck me!
This is the ultimate in female learning. I couldn’t envision how I could do this because we are taught learning happens sitting down with a book in front of you. In a class, in a group, on your own - we see learning through a specific lens. Learning the last daf of masechet Shabbat while putting on butt cream and rocking my baby to sleep? I’d never seen that before. I didn’t know/think I could do that. But I am.
So there you go. My first public declaration of this - I plan to finish the entire Talmud in seven more years. And in about a year and a half, I will have finished reading every page of Nevi'im and Ketuvim (Prophets and Writings). Over the course of my life I know I have read the entirety of Torah but if I can make time to read and learn from Bereshit (Genesis) through Devarim (Deuteronomy) I will have read and learned the major texts of my faith. Outside of Orthodoxy and rabbinical school, this is not something that many Jews do. Most of us hear a portion of the Torah once a week at services and I was very content with that for a long time. What changed?
My children. My children changed me. They will be attending Jewish Day School and I want to be a literate Jew with them. Please G!d one day, I will discuss and debate these topics with them. Come to think about it… my son will be almost Bar Mitzvah when I complete the Daf Yomi…