In the Talmudic method of text study, the starting point is
the principle that any text that is deemed worthy of serious
study must be assumed to have been written with such care
and precision that every term,expression, generalization or
Daf Yomi: Tossed into a stormy sea when his ship was
wrecked, the great Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva was given
up for lost. This is how he later described his miraculous
rescue to Rabbi Gamaliel: "A daf (plank) from the ship
exception is significant not
so much for what it states
as for what it implies. The
contents of ideas as well as
the diction and phraseology
in which they are clothed
are to enter into the
reasoning. This method is
characteristic of the
Tannaitic interpretation of
the Bible from the earliest
times; the belief in the
divine origin of the Bible
was sufficient justification
for attaching importance to
its external forms of
expression. The same
method was followed later
by the Amoraim in their
interpretation of the
Mishnah and by their
successors in the
interpretation of the
Talmud, and it continued to
be applied to the later
WHY DAF YOMI?
Because by now the
Talmud is in my bones. Its
elegant and arcane ethical algebra, its soaked-in
quintessential Jewishness, its fun, its difficulty, its
accumulative virtue ("I learned a 'blatt' today, I've
learned forty 'blatt' this year") all balance against
the cost in time and the so-called "remoteness from
reality." Is 'Lear' closer to reality? I think they are
about as close ('l'havdil,' as my rabbi would
interject) in different ways, and that the
Talmud is
holy besides.
Anyway, I love it. That's reason enough. My
father once said to me, "If I had enough breath left
in me for only one last word, I'd say to you, 'Study
the
Talmud.' " I'm just beginning to understand
him. I would say the same thing to my own sons.
Above and beyond all its other intellectual and
cultural values, the
Talmud is, for people like us,
'identity,' pure and ever-springing.
Herman
Wouk, unpublished diary,
16 January 1972.
suddenly appeared as a
salvation, and I just let the
waves pass over me."
When Rabbi Meir Shapiro,
the rabbi of Lublin between
the two World Wars,
initiated the program for
Jews all over the world to
study the same daf yomi
(daily page of
Talmud), he
explained the significance
of this undertaking by
paraphrasing Rabbi Akiva:
"A daf is the instrument of
our survival in the stormy
seas of today. If we cling
to it faithfully all the waves
of tribulation will but pass
over us." The entire
Talmud is covered in seven
years by those who keep to
the prescribed daily pace.
Study groups and
individuals throughout the
world are now in the
forms of rabbinic Literature. Serious students themselves,
accustomed to a rigid form of logical reasoning and to the usage of
precise forms of expression, the Talmudic trained scholars attributed
the same quality of precision and exactness to any authoritative
work, be it of divine origin or the product of the human mind. Their
second half of the seventh cycle of daf yomi.
One individual is the author,
Herman
Wouk, who
here, in a never-before-published page from his
diary, described his experience with the daily daf
attitude toward the written word of any kind is like that of the jurist toward the external phrasing of statutes and laws,
and perhaps also, in some respect, like that of the latest kind of historical and literary criticism which applies the method
of psycho-analysis to the study of texts. This attitude toward texts had its necessary concomitant in what may again be
called the Talmudic hypothetico-deductive method of text interpretation. Confronted with a statement on any subject,
the Talmudic student will proceed to raise a series of questions before he satisfies himself of having understood its full
meaning. If the statement is not clear enough, he will ask, 'What does the author intend to say here?' If it is too obvious,
he will again ask, 'It is too plain, why then expressly say it?' If it is a statement of fact or of a concrete instance, he will
then ask, 'What underlying principle does it involve?' If it is broad generalization, he will want to know exactly how
much it is to include; and if it is an exception to a general rule, he will want to know how much it is to exclude. He will
furthermore want to know all the circumstances under which a certain statement is true, and what qualifications are
permissible. Statements apparently contradictory to each other will be reconciled by the discovery of some subtle
distinction, and statements apparently irrelevant to each other will be subtly analyzed into their ultimate elements and
shown to contain some common underlying principle. The harmonization of apparent contradictions and the