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  To my parents

  Who taught me

  It is a tree of life

  And to Daniel

  Who taught me

  Be happy, hold fast.

  Said Rabbah: Even though our ancestors have left us a scroll of the Torah, it is our duty to write one for ourselves.

  —BABYLONIAN TALMUD, SANHEDRIN 21B

  It’s a funny thing that people are always quite ready to admit it if they’ve no real talent for drawing or music, whereas everyone imagines that they themselves are capable of true love, which is a talent like any other, only far more rare.

  —NANCY MITFORD

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The names of several of the people in this book have been changed. While this is a true story, I have tried to protect the privacy of the people I have written about, who appear here more as characters than as real people. Anything I say about these individuals is far more revealing of myself than of them.

  INTRODUCTION

  One Day Wiser

  The house was quiet and the world was calm.

  The reader became the book …

  —WALLACE STEVENS

  It is early in the morning—the house is quiet and the world is calm, and I steal out of bed and tiptoe to the bathroom. I wash my hands and reach for my toothbrush, but in the predawn light it is hard to distinguish my turquoise toothbrush from my husband’s white one, so I hold them up to the faint rays of sunlight struggling to make their way through the window. I put on my slippers and open the door as quietly as possible—my twins sleep in the bedroom across the hall, and if one of them stirs, my gain will be canceled out by my loss. The rabbis of the Talmud say that every night is divided into three watches—in the first watch, the donkeys bray; in the second watch, the dogs bark; and in the third watch, the mother nurses her child and whispers to her husband. But my husband and children are blessedly still asleep; no dog whets its tongue, and I don’t even hear the first honks of morning traffic from the highway down the hill as I open the volume of Talmud waiting for me on the couch. This quiet is part of the meaning, part of the mind, my access to the perfection of the page. King David, too, used to study while it was still dark, roused by the dancing of the wind on the strings of his Aeolian harp at exactly midnight. But David, like all kings, had the luxury of sleeping three hours past dawn, whereas I must soon begin my day. I know that I have to learn quickly, that the Talmudic page is like a ruined Temple and that Elijah will hurry me along if I linger. I lean over the page, want to lean, want most to be the scholar to whom this book is true. And just when the reader is becoming the book—just when I think I can hear the Holy One Blessed Be He wailing like a dove, moaning the destruction of the Temple and the banishment of His children from His table—I realize that the moaning is in fact my daughter, and she is hungry and crying, and it is time for another watch to begin.

  * * *

  My commitment to studying Talmud began nearly a decade ago, on another early morning, when my friend Andrea and I were running hills—the only kind of running one can do in Jerusalem. The air was cool and crisp, but we were already sweating in the knee-length shorts we wore in deference to the city’s unwritten modesty code. As we huffed and puffed up the steep hill to the Knesset, I turned to Andrea and joked, “We will ascend Jerusalem at the height of our joy”—a paraphrase of a biblical verse recited at traditional Jewish weddings. I thought briefly about how I’d recited those words at my own wedding one year earlier, a moment I winced to recollect. But my quotation made Andrea think of the text and not its marital context, or so it seemed, because she turned back to look at me, a few paces behind, and casually remarked, “Did I tell you? I’ve started learning a page of Talmud a day.”

  My jaw dropped. “What did you say?” I pushed myself to keep up because I wanted to hear more. The Andrea I knew enjoyed hanging out in bars, reading paperback thrillers, and staying in shape. It was hard to imagine why she’d be interested in the Talmud, a vast compendium of Jewish law and narrative dating back to the first few centuries of the Common Era. The Talmud is famous for its nonlinear argumentation, sprawling digressions, and complex analysis of the finer points of Jewish religious law. A far cry from the latest Stephen King. What business did Andrea have with the Talmud?

  “It’s called daf yomi,” she told me, and I recognized the phrase, Hebrew for “daily page,” though it’s more accurately translated as “daily folio,” since every page of Talmud consists of two sides, back and front, with no square inch lying fallow—each page brims with printed Hebrew letters, leaving only the narrowest margins. Just recently there had been a widely publicized daf yomi celebration in Madison Square Garden, with thousands of Jews gathering to mark the completion of their study of the Talmud. They were mostly men in black suits and white shirts, with corkscrew curls hanging down over their ears. “Anyone can do it,” Andrea added, as if reading my thoughts. “You go through a page of Talmud a day, and you finish in seven and a half years. How cool is that? In seven and a half years you’ve read what is arguably the most important book of Jewish law.”

  “But why?” I asked her. “Why do you care so much about Jewish law? I mean, you don’t keep Shabbat, you’ve dated non-Jewish guys—why do you want all these rabbis peering over your shoulder?”

  “Because they’re not just talking about legal stuff. They’re arguing with their wives, insulting their students, one-upping their colleagues—and when talking about law, they’re not telling you what to do. They’re figuring it all out, invoking not just the Bible but also folk tales, fables, and cultural myths. On yesterday’s page I read about the three entrances to hell—one of which was in Jerusalem.” Andrea smiled at me from beneath the brim of her baseball cap.

  “I guess,” I said, wondering where exactly that gateway to hell was located as we wove through the streets of the ancient city. “But what do you hope to get out of it? All that Talmud, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Andrea said and shrugged, rivulets of sweat trickling down her shoulders. “I think it’s partially the thrill of the challenge. You know, like running a marathon. It’s fun to set impossible goals and then slowly make them more possible.” I thought of the story of the great second-century sage Rabbi Akiva chipping away at a mountain stone by stone, gradually uprooting it and casting it into the Jordan River (Avot de Rabbi Natan, version A, chapter 6). It is a metaphor for how this sage, who began learning relatively late in life, came to master the whole Torah. But that was Rabbi Akiva.

  We finished running by 7:00 a.m. and parted ways, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what Andrea had told me. What would it be like to take on a seven-and-a-half-year project? It was almost impossible to imagine my life in seven and a half years. Would I still be living in Israel? Would I still feel saddled by the pain and shame I carried around with me? Would I finally manage to “move on,” as everyone kept assuring me I would? “Time
does not bring relief / you all have lied,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay in a sonnet I often quoted to myself. Time did not bring relief but seemed to stretch inexorably, and I couldn’t bear the thought that in seven and a half years I might still be grieving.

  At the time I could barely get through the days, let alone commit to getting through the entire Babylonian Talmud, a text divided into six orders (or sections), 37 tractates (or volumes), and some twenty-seven hundred pages. But then I thought about how moving on is about putting one foot in front of the other, or turning page after page. If every day I turned a page, then eventually a new chapter would have to begin.

  One chapter would lead to another, and then another, and before long I’d have completed an entire tractate. What a healthy relationship to time, viewing it not as a mark of age but as an opportunity to grow in wisdom. If I learned a page a day, then instead of resigning myself to being one day older, I could aspire to be one day wiser. Eventually I learned that this is in fact the Jewish view of time: the rabbis teach in tractate Avot (5:23) that five is the age for studying Torah, ten is the age for studying Mishnah, and fifteen is the age for studying Talmud.

  At that point I was nearly twice the age stipulated in Avot, but as we learn elsewhere in that text, “If not now, when?” (1:14). Perhaps it was time to step on the treadmill and let the pull of the daf yomi schedule carry me along. At least I might stop feeling so stuck and ashamed of how the past year had unfolded. The previous summer Paul and I had married and immediately boarded a plane for Israel. I left my job and my community in New York to follow him—all too willingly—to a place I did not know. In the romanticized version of the Exodus story related by the prophet Jeremiah, the Israelites follow God through the wilderness, and God later tells them, “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown” (Jeremiah 2:2).1 I loved Paul and followed him to a land barren of family and friends, a land where I’d have to try to put down new roots. But by spring, the season of growth and rebirth, any love we’d known had been uprooted, like a patch of grass ripped out of the soil. Paul and I soon cut off all connection, and I was on my own. Days would go by when I spoke only to the lady who checked coats at the library or the man at the corner store who sold me my milk and bread.

  Even Andrea, one of my few friends, soon became too busy to jog with me. But the Talmud teaches that “[o]ne who is walking on his way and has no companion should occupy himself with Torah study” (Eruvin 54a). And so I did, in incremental steps. When I began learning daf yomi, I did not even own a volume of Talmud, nor did I buy one right away. Heading out to the bookstore seemed too presumptuous, as if in buying Yoma—the volume that the daf yomi community was up to at the time—I were committing to the full seven and a half years. After so recently marrying and divorcing, I was reluctant to commit to anything. And so instead I found a podcast with a daily fifty-minute class on the daf, and I started listening on my morning runs.

  Sometimes it was difficult to keep track of the line of argumentation without the Talmud page in front of me, but I followed the directional cues of the text as I wound my way through the city. The names of the streets in Jerusalem are organized thematically with each neighborhood depicting a particular historical period, set of characters, or field of scholarship. The leafy hills of Rehavia are named for medieval biblical commentators; the narrow alleys of Baka are named for the twelve tribes; and the quaint side streets of the German Colony are named for nineteenth-century European rabbis. I did not follow a predetermined course when I jogged; instead, I followed the text wherever it led me. I took a left on Rabbi Akiva and then a right on Hillel and noted how, in a moment of concession, Rabbi Hisda turned into Rabbi Meir at a quiet intersection.

  Eventually one morning I ended my run at a religious bookstore, where I was conspicuously both the only woman and the only runner. (At least my sporty bandana looked like a modest head covering.) Acting quickly, I pulled out some bills from my pocket and left with my own copy of tractate Yoma. Yoma is Aramaic for “the day,” and this volume of Talmud deals with Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. But I studied it on unremarkable summer evenings, as the sweltering days cooled off into clear, bright nights. I sat in bed next to an open screenless window with the Talmud perched on my bent knees, reading its marginal notes and adding my own, the moonlight casting a glow on my page.

  In the classic printing of the Talmud, which dates back to nineteenth-century Vilna, the Talmudic text appears in the center of the page and is surrounded by commentaries in the margins. I learned not from this classic printing but from an edition published by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, whose modern Hebrew commentary explicates and elucidates the text. Hebrew is the language of the oldest sections of the Talmud (which also includes Aramaic, the lingua franca of the rabbis who wrote it), and it is the language of the Jewish people living in the modern State of Israel, where I was making my home. But the Talmud is also a book of the diaspora, and Jews studied it for two thousand years wherever in the world they found themselves. Even when Jews did not have a homeland, and even when hardly any Jews spoke Hebrew, they continued to study Talmud. I had immigrated from the diaspora, and by studying Talmud in Hebrew in Israel, I was in my own way bringing the text back home.

  However, one need not know Hebrew to study Talmud, a text that is available in multiple English translations. One need not even be Jewish, or at all religious. Indeed, sometimes the rabbis are so bold and heretical that their statements may be best appreciated by those who are not themselves devout. “Were it not written, it would be impossible to say it,” they sometimes warn, and then go on to twist a verse written in the Bible into a startling theological conclusion. Unlike later works that followed from it, the Talmud is not a law code intended to tell Jews how to behave but a record of rabbinic legal conversations in which many of the questions are left open and unresolved. It is a text for those who are living the questions rather than those who have found the answers.

  Still, that is not to say that I didn’t try to figure it all out for myself. My copy of Yoma—and of all subsequent volumes, which I continued for a long time to purchase one by one—became filled with penciled notations that rained down the margins: question marks where I was confused, exclamation points where I was taken by surprise, boxed summaries of the major topics under discussion, and underlined references to other texts that came to mind while I was learning. Various passages of Talmud resonated with works of literature I’d studied previously—as an undergraduate at Harvard, as a graduate student at Cambridge, and as a book editor and literary agent in New York and Jerusalem. I’d spent my whole life reading books, but here was a book I could imagine spending my whole life reading.

  A teacher once told me that nothing is as exciting as the next page of Talmud, and this rang true for me. The Talmud is a highly discursive text, proceeding primarily by association rather than by any rational scheme. Often there is no way of knowing how the stream of rabbinic consciousness will flow from one page to the next: the text meanders from a discussion about marking time to the dating of legal documents to a map of the night sky on the eve of the flood—all in the space of the opening pages of tractate Rosh Hashanah. The Talmud surprised me at nearly every turn, and while there were topics I found less interesting than others, there was something that caught my eye on almost every page—a folk remedy employed to heal an ailing sage, a rude insult leveled at one rabbi by another, a sudden interjection from a rabbi’s angry wife. Often I was less focused on what the rabbis were discussing than on how they transitioned subtly from one subject to another, such that a discussion of sex with a virgin suddenly morphs into a discussion of how to avoid hearing something untoward by sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears—as if to suggest that all acts of penetration are one and the same. I found myself carried along for the ride, caught up in the flow of the argumentation and tossed around like a rough wave when the back-and-forth between the ra
bbis became particularly stormy.

  I began to feel increasingly at home in the world of the Talmudic rabbis, who spent their time gathered in study groups to learn and debate the Mishnah. Contemporary scholars disagree about the social role the rabbis occupied. Were they a class of intellectual elites or just isolated members of society? At least some had day jobs, like Rabbi Yohanan the sandler and Rabbi Yitzhak the smith. The more prominent sages, like Rav and Rabbi Yohanan, were the heads of large Talmudic academies with numerous disciples. As I got to know the individual rabbis through my encounters with the text, many became as familiar to me as old friends: Ben Azzai, who loved studying Torah so much that he couldn’t bear to sacrifice precious learning time to raise a family; Rabbi Eliezer, who left his family’s huge farming estate against his father’s will to go learn Torah in Jerusalem; and Rabbi Yehoshua, who developed his love of Torah in the womb because his mother used to pass by the study house when she was pregnant with him. I’d been working in book publishing for years, but driven by my interest in the Talmudic sages, I began moonlighting as a translator of rabbinic biographies. I learned about the individual rabbis, as well as about their wives and daughters and the women in their communities who sought their guidance.

  As a woman, I grew excited about the possibilities open to me when encountering this text that for fifteen hundred years has been regarded primarily as the province of only the male half of the population. In the past few decades, more women have begun studying Talmud, both in the yeshiva, an institution for the religious study of Jewish texts, and in the academy—but this is only a recent phenomenon, and there are still very few women with enough years of learning under their belt to rival their male counterparts. I was raised with a strong feminist sensibility. My father served for decades as the rabbi of an egalitarian synagogue in which men and women participate equally in the service, and my mother worked as a top executive in the Jewish nonprofit sector. My parents always taught me that women had the same intellectual capacities as men. The Talmud, though, teaches otherwise.