Talmud study isn’t just for men

Farber found that typically Gemara classes where she lived were only weekly events, too far apart to “progress Talmudic knowledge”. And so, back in 2012, she took matters into her own hands, when she opened up her daily classes at home. “Most women are intimidated by the text especially at a later stage of life,” she offers. “I wanted people to learn and be engaged with the text. It’s the basic text of our religion and so many women don’t have access to it.”

She first fell in love with Talmudic study at just 14 while a student at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn, one of the first Jewish schools in America to offer it for girls. In Israel she obtained a degree in Talmud and Bible Studies from Bar-Ilan University while learning Gemara on the Scholar’s Programme in Jerusalem’s Midreshet Lindenbaum. Since 2003 she has been the rebbetzin of the synagogue Kehillat Netivot which she co-founded with her husband, Rabbi Seth Farber.

The mother of five, who made aliyah from Long Island, 25 years ago, is also the co-founder of Hadran, a non-profit umbrella organisation that encourages and provides educational resources to women who want to study Talmud.

The Talmud is the original written version of the oral law. The Talmud Bavli — known as the Gemara — is the record of some of the rabbinical discussions, mostly written in Aramaic. The Gemara’s tractates amount to 2,711 double-sided pages, covering diverse topics including, ritual, agriculture, marital relations and civil law.

Daf Yomi was the brainchild of Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Poland in 1923 as a way to unite the Jewish people. How great, he thought, it would be for a Jew travelling for fifteen days from Israel to the US. He arrives in New York and finds Jews learning the very same daf as he is. “Could there be greater unity of hearts than this?”

Farber acknowledges that the internet has been a game changer for sharing Torah learning. She produces an English and Hebrew daily podcast. “It is accessible by woman all over the world who are busy with their professional lives and want to have some Torah in their lives. I called it dafyomi4women because I wanted women to find me.”

She now understands how learning the same passage, on the same day, anywhere in the world has such a powerful way of creating, what Rabbi Meir Shapiro called, a “unity of hearts”.

“You are talking about the same things. The connection between people around the world is remarkable.”

Contrary to popular belief, the Talmud is not a law code of rules, but actually a record of rabbinic legal conversations about minutia in Jewish law in which many questions are left open and unresolved. Farber endeavours to make these discussions relevant to women. Where, for example, the medieval commentator Rashi uses the names Reuven and Shimon, she uses Ruth and Naomi, who happen to be two of the students in her class. What she particularly likes about the learning is that, no matter their background, everyone brings their life experience and insights into their reading of the text, making it a very colourful debate.

For writer Ilana Kurshan, the previous daf yomi cycle of 2005-2012 was very comforting in the aftermath of a painful divorce. Her best-selling book, If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir , linked the daily study with the twists and turns of her life journey. This time round, Kurshan, who has since remarried, learns her daf yomi by listening to Farber’s podcast, while she is biking, jogging or cooking.

“I was continually fascinated by all the overlaps between the pages I was learning and whatever was happening in my life,” she explains.

One of the first tractates she learned, Succah, is about the temporary huts built during Succot to remember the children of Israel’s desert wanderings.

“I learned that tractate shortly after my divorce, during a time when I moved around from one rental apartment to another, afraid to commit to signing any long-term contract. As I learned Succah, I thought about what it meant to live in a temporary home and to struggle to find meaning amid transience. The project of building a temporary home, which is the subject of much of this masechet, became a way for me to reflect on the meaning of home at a time when so much in life seems uncertain and unstable.”

Kurshan, a mother of four, believes there is something exciting about women engaging with the Talmud, since the text was traditionally studied only by men considered themselves experts in women’s anatomy, physiology and psychology. “Now more and more women are encountering this text that for 1500 years has been regarded primarily as the province of only the male half of the population, and they are discovering that the Talmud — though ploughed through by generations of male scholars — remains fertile ground for gleaning new insights.”

The learning of the Talmud is a cycle. It ends with the tractate debating the women’s menstrual cycle and starts again on January 5 with the affirmation of Jewish identity, in discussions on when to recite the Shema at night.

Women partaking in the January 5 Jerusalem event, either in person or by live-stream, can sign up to “adopt a daf” . They will be allocated a random page to learn, supported by a podcast and translation, in time for the siyum.

Women’s seminaries and high school students have also taken part and many will be attending the siyum, and classes have started up for individuals and groups.

“The siyum will celebrate the unity of women’s learning around the world,” says Farber. “This will inspire many more women to take on learning, as Gemara can be accessible and relevant. For the continuation of the Jewish people, women need to be part of the learning process.”

 

To adopt a daf visit www.hadran.org.il