Hi Shalom,
In response to the essential question "Why study Gemara?" I wanted to share something I read over the summer that really struck me as a direct response to this question. It's slightly lengthy, but worth the read.
A Rationale for Studying Talmud
In the Introduction to Menstrual Purity, her book on rabbinic approaches to gender, Charlotte Fonrobert strays from her subject momentarily to record what she calls her Interlude on the Genesis of a Talmud Student. I believe that her words serve as a rationale of sorts for why we continue to study Talmud and may be useful in framing Talmud study for modern students, particularly teens. I quote her text her and urge that it be shared with teachers and students.
I encountered the Talmud first as a literary monument of the Jewish community, the community that the people among whom I grew up attempted to erase from the face of this earth. The culture that claimed the Reformation, claimed the best of humanism, literature, and philosophy as its own, attempted to erase Jewish culture from the memory of humankind. Having been raised with the best of German literature as the horizon for the formation of my trust in the goodness and beauty of this world, I had to reconcile those fundamentals with the memory of two World Wars that this same culture unleashed in this century. One way to reconcile the impulse of creation and the impulse of destruction was to think that the former failed: Poetry and music had to fall and remain silent.
However, a people does not own its literature. It does not even own its language, and that is the only reason why it is perhaps not possible to argue that the German language was buried in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The murderers spoke the language of Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gertrud Kolmar, and Else Lasker-Schuler. To let the murderers speak the last word is to silence these voicesvoices which have survived and are speaking today.
I studied my first page of gemara (Talmudic discussion) at the same time that I encountered Walter Benjamins work. It was Benjamin, then, who did not allow me to condemn the German language and its many voices and to rest comfortably with a judgment which would have allowed me to come to terms with the murderous past of the world in which I had grown up.
Therefore, the Talmud came to promise me something else: the understanding of what it was that those who spoke my language tried to murder. I hoped to unlock the secret of that otherness that seemed to have burned so brightly within a world of desired sameness, so that people of sameness could not bear to see its light and obsessively set out to extinguish it. Within my sight, Jewsin the early eighties in Germany the word Jude was still inscribed with guilt and shame, with incomprehension, with insurmountable distancecame to embody what is now commonly called the 'Other.' The Talmud, to me then as now in many respects the greatest cultural, textual, and literary monument of Jewish culture, seemed to hide all the wisdom that would explain to me what had made die Judenas bearers of Jewish cultureinto the prime targets of the unleashed, murderous lust of those people who bore the culture that I was born into and inherited. If the Talmud was the founding literature of the Jewish community in exile, I expected it to explain to me this ultimate otherness. The first time I saw a daf gemara (a leaf in the Talmud), I saw it as the surviving voice of those whose bodies had been burned to ashes and whose living communities had been erased from the maps of Europe. Violently disembodied words. Words printed on a page that could no longer be deciphered by those who had lived the words, but by me, who tried to cope with the unspeakable. Words that were not addressed to me, but to those who were gone forever. When I studied my first page of gemara at the age of nineteen at German institutions of higher education, I had never met a Jewish person. All the Jewish women, children, and men I had seenin photographs in book and in museumswere dead. I wanted the gemara to become the redemptive voice for those who had been murdered.
Now, thirteen years of learning later, the gemara has become a fairly constant partner in dialogue for me. To study Jewish culture, specifically Talmud, in America and in Israel has given the voice of the gemara a very different sound. Within the context of American Jewish culture it has ceased to be the voice from the grave. I have had the opportunity to learn Talmud with people who live the words, whose life is circumscribed by halakha, and, over time I, too, have grown into such a life, having been absorbed by the text and the community. The voice of the dead has regained its body, in many different shapes and genders, in different communities or readers and students: the university, the synagogue, the Beit Midrash. My love for the text is not just a love in the mind, but a love passionate with all the fluctuations, frustrations of distance, anger at rejection, and exaltation of intimacy that such love entails. The voices in the text are not merely voices from the past anymore, but also the voices of all those among whom I have studied and study the text. The printed text is not merely that which lies in front of me and waits for me to give it a contemporary voice by imposing my interpretation onto it. It is, rather, an open forum for dialogue and discussion which invites me, and every one of its students, to participate in it. The experience at the Beit Midrash has taught me the impossibility of the initial one-way street from me to the text. Rather, to learn gemara in the traditional hevruta style (with study partners) means to be drawn into and reenact an ongoing conversation within the text that is not closed by virtue of being enclosed in a printed volume. In this way, I have changed seats, or rather, the seating arrangement has changed. Where the text ceases to be the fixed entity that I encounter from outside its fixation, there I am no longer sitting in the chair of her who came from beyond the boundaries of the ethnos which claims the Talmud as its cultural constitution. The Talmud has made me part of its world, of its own community, and seated me among those who participate in its heated debates.
--Maccabee
Rabbi Maccabee Avishur
Dean of Judaics
Frankel Jewish Academy
