Talmud is Fun!

This year the DeLeT program at Brandeis is experimenting with the frontloading of a week's worth of content before the "official" start of the summer session, in order to make the subsequent weeks a bit less intensive. This is much appreciated by the students. This first week has been heavy on Judaic subjects, since secular subjects start up next week in conjunction with the regular MAT program, so it's been a week of spiritual reflection as well as academic instruction.

One course that meets every day this week has been Beit Midrash for Teachers, which is equal parts Talmud and Metacognition Theory. We're learning how to "think about thinking" in the context of a traditional havruta study partnership that requires listening skills, articulation, the ability to challenge and support a partner, and the ability to brainstorm or narrowly focus on subject matter as required. I'm learning a lot about the learning process--how to develop my own as well as how to encourage others.

The subject matter is Talmud, 2nd to 5th Century commentary on earlier commentary on the Torah. Now I'm not exactly a Judaic Studies novice. I went to Hebrew school three days a week for six years, had a bar mitzvah, went to a "Hebrew high school" program for four more years, attended a Jewish summer camp, took Hebrew language classes in college, and in all that time only just learned about the Talmud--when it was written, how it was formatted, and all that. Never once in all those classes did we ever crack open the Talmud to examine its contents. Never until this week.

What we got in the Beit Midrash (literally "House of Study") was a small selection carefully picked to be on-topic for teaching, and we examined it in English, but I have to say it was not at all what I expected. There are parables, humor, and crazy stuff about teenagers turning into old men overnight, or a pair of rabbis who both die because they can't agree on how to properly bless a sword. And that weird section of the Passover Haggadah about the rabbis who stay up all night arguing about whether God unleashed 40 additional plagues at the Red Sea, or was it 50, or was it a million? That turns out to be lifted directly from the Talmud as well.

Talmud is wacked. Talmud is twisted. Talmud is subversive. Talmud requires hard thinking to uncover nuggets of wisdom in deeper and deeper layers. Why didn't anybody ever tell me this before? No wonder some people devote their lives to reading and rereading these books--they're fun!