If All the Seas Were Ink Read online

  The sages of the Talmud explicitly state that women are not obligated in the commandment to study Torah (Kidushin 29b), and Rabbi Eliezer declares that “anyone who teaches his daughter Torah teaches her frivolity” (Sotah 20a). But the Talmud includes a dissenting opinion, attributed to Ben Azzai, who insists that a man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah so that, were she to be rightfully accused of adultery, she would understand that though her merits might delay her punishment, it would inevitably come. As this example reflects, most of the women in the Talmud are sexual objects who are seduced or raped or subjected to virginity tests. Those few women who are depicted as learned—Yalta, Beruriah, Rav Hisda’s daughter—have surprisingly violent streaks, perhaps a testament to their force of personality. But they are rare exceptions in a text whose heroes are almost all men, not to mention men who considered themselves experts in women’s psychology and anatomy.

  As a modern woman reader of Talmud, I was fascinated by the rabbis’ assumptions about women’s attitudes toward marriage and children, and I wondered whether they still resonate with women today. After my divorce, I thought about whether it is still true, as the rabbis insist, that tav l’meitav tan du m’l’meitav armelu—that a woman would prefer to be married than to be alone, even if, as the rabbis go on to assert, her husband is “the size of an ant.” Does this principle hold in an age when, at least in many parts of the world, women can own property, live independently, and have children out of wedlock without undue social sanction?

  It soon became clear to me that by the Talmud’s standards, I am a man rather than a woman—if “man” is defined as an independent, self-sufficient adult, whereas “woman” is a dependent generally living in either her father’s or her husband’s home. In some ways this was a relief because I could regard the Talmud’s gender stereotypes as historical curiosities rather than infuriating provocations. The Talmud did not offend me because I was defying its classifications through my very engagement with the text. So many of the classical interpretations of the Talmud reflect gendered assumptions, and these texts have the potential to take on radically new meaning when regarded through feminine eyes. Though plowed through by generations of scholars before me, the Talmud was fertile ground for gleaning new insights and fresh perspectives.

  I kept a journal about what I learned, where I learned it, and what moved me most deeply. Learning daf yomi is like zooming through a safari on a motorbike; there is so much to take in, but you are moving along at an impossibly rapid clip. By writing, I was better able to remember some of my favorite passages. And so I set for myself the challenge of writing a limerick or sonnet corresponding to each page I learned. These poems served as mnemonics that enabled me to summon, even years later, those passages I’d particularly enjoyed, such as the following from the end of tractate Rosh Hashanah (35a):

  Rav Yehuda did not like to pray

  He preferred to learn Torah and say:

  “You may call my soul dirty

  But one day in thirty

  Is better than three times a day.”

  The rabbis of the Talmud, too, often relied on mnemonic devices, which were essential given the text’s oral transmission. Though in some ways I was rewriting the Talmud by rendering it in verse, in another sense I was doing just what the sages of the Talmud had done—I was trying to make my learning so much a part of me that I, like Rabbi Eliezer, might someday be able to refer to “my two arms, like two wrapped Torah scrolls” (Sanhedrin 68a)—as if I, too, could inscribe Torah on my heart.

  On the cover of my journal I wrote “Dyo ilu yamey,” a quotation from the Aramaic poem Akdamut,composed in the eleventh century and traditionally recited on Shavuot, the holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The author of the poem, Rabbi Meir bar Yitzhak, plays off a trope that appears in variant forms throughout rabbinic literature: “God’s eternal glory could not be described even if the heavens were parchment, and the forests quills; if all the seas were ink, as well as every gathered water; even if the earth’s inhabitants were scribes and recorders of initials.” My journal was an attempt to set my quill to parchment, to try and capture some of what I learned each day—always fearing that, as Rabbi Eliezer declared on his deathbed, “I skimmed only as much knowledge as a dog laps from the sea” (Sanhedrin 68a).

  Looking back now, I see that these journal entries unfolded as a record not just of my learning but also of my life, drawing from deep wells of sadness and fear and, with time, from overflowing fountains of joy. I began learning as a divorced woman living alone in Jerusalem, with no idea of what the future might hold. It took me a while—quite a few tractates—before I found my stride. (And yes, like T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who measured out his life in coffee spoons, I have come to measure out mine in tractates, referring to periods in my life by what I was up to in the Talmud.) Eventually I began to make a home for myself in Jerusalem, even though I was thousands of miles away from my family and closest friends. One day I saw a sign for a morning daf yomi class in a synagogue down the street, and I decided to join. I was the only woman, but the rabbi greeted me with a welcoming smile and I soon became one of the guys—the rest of whom were retired old men. After class the men went to pray in the synagogue sanctuary and I slipped my Talmud into my bag and headed to the local pool, where I swam laps while reviewing in my mind the page I’d just learned.

  Daf yomi, though initially a solitary pursuit, soon brought community into my life. Perhaps this should not have been surprising. Tens of thousands of Jews around the world learn daf yomi, and they are all literally on the same page. This is because daf yomi is not just about learning a page of Talmud a day. It’s about learning a specific page, the same page that everyone else is learning, following a schedule that was fixed in 1923 when Rabbi Meir Shapiro of the Lublin Yeshiva first conceived of the program. Rabbi Shapiro described his vision of daf yomi as a way of unifying the Jewish world:

  What a great thing! A Jew travels by boat and takes gemara Berachot [the first volume of the Talmud] under his arm. He travels for 15 days from Eretz Yisrael [the land of Israel] to America, and each day he learns the daf. When he arrives in America, he enters a beit midrash [study house] in New York and finds Jews learning the very same daf that he studied on that day, and he gladly joins them. Another Jew leaves the States and travels to Brazil or Japan, and he first goes to the beit midrash, where he finds everyone learning the same daf that he himself learned that day. Could there be greater unity of hearts than this?2

  For Rabbi Shapiro, the whole world was a vast Talmud classroom with students connected by a worldwide web of conversational threads. Invoking a similar image, the rabbis of the Talmud described the class as a vineyard, with students seated in rows like an orderly arrangement of vines. I experienced daf yomi as a way of inhabiting a virtual classroom, sitting in a seemingly empty row and learning by myself while at the same time sensing the ghostly presences of those in the front rows who had studied those same passages in previous generations. And there were other presences, too, because my row was not in fact empty; it was populated by fellow daf yomi learners sitting just a few seats over—on the other side of Jerusalem, in Bnei Brak, and farther down the row in Europe, America, Australia, and wherever in the world there were people of the book.

  Those connections only deepened. A year after I started daf yomi, I began dating again—just when I got up to the order known as Nashim (Women), a large section of the Talmud encompassing seven tractates that deal with issues of marriage and personal status. Over the course of Seder Nashim (the Order of Women) I fell in and out of love several times. Four years after my divorce I met the man I would go on to marry—who also began studying daf yomi—at a class on the weekly Torah portion, the section of the Torah that would be read in synagogue on the upcoming Shabbat. And so Torah became a companion, but it also brought my companion into my life. Daniel and I married just a few months after we met, and by our third anniversary we had three children, a son and twin daught
ers. When I finished my first daf yomi cycle at age thirty-five, our son was two and a half, our girls were approaching their first birthday, and I was stealing those predawn hours to learn before they woke up.

  Throughout it all, daf yomi has remained a constant in my life. I have never missed a day of learning, though that learning has taken different forms over the years. When I was single I learned over dinner, careful not to drip tomato sauce upon discussions about the sprinkling of blood on the Temple altar. Once I got married to Daniel we learned together, one of us reading the daf aloud while the other washed dishes or folded laundry. After our children were born, I came to the end of my learning not at the bottom of the page but whenever the baby woke up; the pages from these months are filled with sudden slashes that mark the points where I was interrupted. Then I picked up later, in bed, falling asleep with the rabbis still arguing in my head about just how late a person can recite the bedtime Shema prayer.

  And so I followed the text, but the text also followed me through the various twists and turns my life took. During particularly tough periods, on days when it was hard to remember why I bothered to get up in the morning, my daily Talmud study was an anchor, if not a life raft. Even if I accomplished nothing else that day, I managed to get through the daf. And on the most wondrous days of my life—when I gave birth to my children—daf yomi reminded me that I am, first and foremost, a reader and a lover of texts. I read Talmud aloud to each of my infants while they nursed at my breast, and they imbibed words of Torah with their mother’s milk.

  The Talmudic rabbis famously teach that “one is not obligated to complete a task, nor is one free to desist from it” (Avot 2:16). And so I kept learning regardless of where I found myself. Over the past seven and a half years, I’ve learned Talmud in libraries, cafes, airplanes, supermarket lines, and hospital waiting rooms. Whenever possible, I tried to learn with a pencil in hand so I could jot down my thoughts. Those pencil jottings formed the basis for this book, an effort to trace the path of my learning and living these past seven and a half years—from those initial jogs with Andrea, when I thought I’d never be happy again, to this morning, when I managed to fit in half a page before I heard my daughter’s cries. Seven and a half years ago I felt only despair for what lay ahead; looking back, I feel blessed by the lessons I have been privileged to learn—from the text, from the world beyond the text, and from the ever-widening intersection of text and life in which I write these words.

  A NOTE ON THE TALMUD

  The Talmud is the main text of rabbinic literature, covering the vast array of Jewish law and lore. It is in fact not one literary corpus, but two. There is the Jerusalem Talmud, compiled in the Galilee of the land of Israel, and the Babylonian Talmud, compiled in Persian-dominated Babylonia (now Iraq). It is the Babylonian Talmud that has been more widely studied in traditional Jewish circles and that is the subject of daf yomi study, and of this book.

  Written over the course of several centuries, the Talmud began with the Mishnah, a collection of legal statements from rabbis living in the land of Israel during the first two centuries of the Common Era. The Mishnah was compiled after the Temple, the centralized site of ancient Jewish worship and sacrifice located in Jerusalem, was destroyed by the Roman Empire in 70 C.E. Subsequent generations of scholars in the Galilee and in Babylonia interpreted and commented on the Mishnah, incorporating their own legal opinions as well as personal anecdotes and longer narrative accounts. They also quoted biblical verses to provide a basis for rulings in the Mishnah and to substantiate their own legal opinions. All of these rabbinic conversations formed the core of the Talmud, which was revised and redacted over the next four hundred years.

  The order of the Talmud follows the order of the Mishnah, with each section of Talmud commenting on a particular mishnah—the lowercase “m” is used to distinguish the smaller subsections from the entire capital “M” corpus. Together the Talmud and Mishnah comprise the Oral Torah, so called because it was transmitted orally for generations and not written down in its entirety until many years after its completion. Although the rabbis committed the Oral Torah to writing more than twelve hundred years ago, it is still referred to as the Oral Torah, and it is often studied aloud in partnership between two individuals. It stands in contrast to the Written Torah, the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Five Books of Moses. In the Talmud the term Torah is used to refer both to the Written and the Oral Torah, and so Torah study may refer to the study of Talmud as well.

  The Babylonian Talmud is divided into thirty-seven volumes, known as tractates, each of which deals with different aspects of Jewish law, from vows to marriage to sacrificial worship. The tractates are grouped into six broader sections known as orders, with the tractates in each order arranged from longest to shortest by the number of chapters. Nearly all the tractates consist of both halachah—legal material—and aggadah—homiletical, ethical, and narrative passages. Weaving together halachah and aggadah, the Talmud is one of the most intensely edited books in all of world literature, its legal passages juxtaposing the rulings of different sages and its stories reworked into tight literary units in which no detail is extraneous and little is transparent.

  Students of Talmud rely on commentators both ancient and modern to explain and interpret the text. The most famous and widely studied rabbinic commentator is the eleventh-century French rabbi known by the acronym Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac), whose running commentary covers almost the entire Talmud. But the project of explaining the Talmud is ongoing, and every new book about the Talmud is a commentary on the text.

  PART I

  The Order of Festivals

  YOMA

  Alone in Jerusalem

  When I began studying tractate Yoma, I hung a xeroxed map of the Temple inside the front door of my studio apartment—right in the spot where hotels generally feature a floor map with the nearest fire exits marked. Most of the tractate is essentially a guided tour of the Temple, following in the footsteps of the high priest as he enacts the various rituals of Yom Kippur. With each page of Yoma I tracked my path on the map as I wound through the Temple’s chambers and vestibules. I witnessed as the high priest slaughtered goats, sprinkled blood on the altar, and donned gold-and-white vestments with a breastplate and tinkling bells.

  My apartment was tiny and square, with a kitchen counter and mini-fridge against one wall, a bathroom in the opposite corner, and a desk along the adjacent wall beneath my only window, where I hung my laundry out to dry over a narrow ledge that my cultured European landlady generously referred to as a “Romeo and Yooliet balcony.” The floor was made of square tiles decorated in a green-and-brown floral pattern. There was no couch or armchair or other place to sit, but I so rarely had visitors that it didn’t seem to matter. My bed was lofted above the kitchen area up a steep and rickety ladder leading toward a high ceiling, and it wasn’t a proper bed but just a mattress that I’d purchased secondhand and transported home precariously on the roof of a cab. I had no proper bookshelves, so I stacked my books in the closet. Another stack of books served as a nightstand on which I rested my glasses if I remembered to take them off. Most nights I fell asleep reading with the lights on, my novel collapsed over my face like a tent with my nose marking my place.

  The heroine in one of Margaret Drabble’s novels revels in the “spinsterish delight” of crawling alone into bed with a book, and I could relate—not just at the beginning of the night but also at 3:00 a.m., when I woke up pleased to have those stolen mid-night moments to my conscious self; and in the early morning hours, when I arose before my alarm clock and read by the light streaming through my open window. I had books I would read only in bed; they lived under the blankets and waited patiently while I read more respectable volumes during daylight hours. Writing in bed, too, was a newfound pleasure. There were entries in my journal that I was able to write only under cover of darkness, as if I could not expose these negatives to the harsh light of day. And there were, if I was honest, many ne
gatives. But I was rarely honest.

  For a while I could not own up to the reality of my situation because I did not even know who I was. Each morning I walked mechanically to the library to continue working on the book about the Temple’s destruction I’d begun ghostwriting during the year my marriage fell apart. I was grateful that the material was not my own because I was incapable of original thought. I felt cut off from the ideas that had once animated me and from the emotions that had once transported me. One night Andrea came over to regale me with stories of her latest crush. “He works at the coffee shop where I’ve been writing my articles,” she gushed. “I mean, just to make some money on the side. He’s really a writer. He’s given me a draft of his novel to read, and it’s a love story! How much should I read into that?” I didn’t know what to tell her. Romantic love seemed like a thing of the past, a place where I had once lived and whose hills and valleys I could map out with complete accuracy, yet a place to which I was sure I would never return. I resolved that if I was destined to spend the rest of my life alone, then at least I should not feel lonely. While I remained warm toward the few friends I had, I treated myself with cool indifference. I imagined that if the temperatures within plummeted low enough, then any hopes I dared to harbor would scamper to the corners and die in the cold.

  Every so often, though, those feelings rose to the surface, and I had to confront what I knew to be true: That I have always been a hopeless romantic, and that my sense of romance is deeply bound up in my passion for literature. That I memorized “The Lady of Shalott,” Tennyson’s long ballad about unrequited love, when I was a teenager. That in college, I used to stroll along the Charles River at sunset reciting Byron’s “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving”—not to a man, but to whichever girlfriends were willing to put up with my romantic melodrama. That I dated several men in college and beyond, but I was still imagining myself as Anne of Green Gables, and none could measure up to Gilbert Blythe. That ultimately curling up with a good book always surpassed the inevitable awkwardness of real courtship, with its silly questions of what to wear and when it was OK to write back and how to interpret that passing glance. That all this seemed to change when I met Paul, who wanted to curl up with me and my books and play Paolo to my Francesca. And that when our marriage collapsed, the entire edifice of literary romanticism that I had constructed for myself seemed to collapse beneath me, and I was convinced that my love life—that imaginative world informed by Byron, Barrett-Browning, and the Brontës—was over forever.