The Oral Talmud: Episode 0 - Learning Together
“I am responsible for my chevruta’s learning, and my chevruta is responsible for my learning. I am invested in you.” - Benay Lappe
Join study partners (chevrutas) Rabbi Benay Lappe & Dan Libenson as they reflect on five years of The Oral Talmud, and celebrate its transition from a video series to a podcast!
What do lasting study partners recognize in each other? How do they decide how and what to learn together? Find out what makes a learning journey exciting, possible, and loving!
This week’s texts: The Chevruta of Rabbi Yochanan & Resh Lakish (Bava Metzia 84a), Widening the Doors to the Study Hall (Berakhot 28a), Make for Yourself a Teacher (Pirkei Avot 1:6)
Access the full Sefaria Source Sheet with additional show notes via this link. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation.
Further Learning
Benay Lappe's CRASH Talk "An Unrecognizable Jewish Future: A Queer Talmudic Take" (on YouTube)
"Who Wrote the Bible" by Richard Elliott Friedman ( 1997, on Archive.org)
"Galloping Gertie - The Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge" (on YouTube)
The Chevruta of Rabbi Yochanan & Resh Lakish (Bava Metzia 84a)
Widening the Doors to the Study Hall (Berakhot 28a)
"The Secrets of Friendship and Torah" written for SVARA by Mónica Gomery, about Pirkei Avot 1:6 (on SVARA's website)
A classical commentary on Avot called Avot D'Rabbi Natan 8:3, which is referenced in Noam Sienna's book, A Rainbow Thread (pg. 46): "'And acquire for yourself a haver.' How [is this to be done]? This teaches that a [person] should acquire for [themself] a companion and that [they] should eat with [them], drink with [them], read with [them], study with [them], sleep with [them], and reveal to [them] all their secrets: the secrets of Torah and the secrets of worldly matters [derekh eretz]."
From "The Illustrated Pirkei Avot" by Jessica Tamar Deutsch (2017, from Print-O-Craft Press). Image: two vertical cartoon panels, with the words "Zug [Pair] #2" between them, for the sages Yehoshua son of Perachyah (nice eyebrows, Pirkei Avot 1:6) and Nittai of Arbel (wiggly beard, Pirkei Avot 1:7) Each column illustrates their teaching: "Appoint for yourself a teacher" has a student and teacher arguing, "Acquire a friend" has friends with arms around each other; "& judge all favorably" has scales labeled "bad" with a skull and "good" with a heart. -- Nittai's teaching goes "stay away from a bad neighbor, a person with long hair running from a spiky monster wearing a collar that says "evil"; "Don't associate with a wicked person" has the spiky monster yelling at the person from before on a park bench; and "& don't despair in the face of trouble" features our same person sitting cross legged on a mat meditating with thumb and forefinger circle mudra hands, and a star on their forehead. Illustration is in black and white, cartoony and peppy.
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DAN: This is The Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN: The Oral Talmud is our weekly deep dive study partnership, in which we try to figure out how voices from the Talmud – voices from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today. The Talmud is the record of how Jews navigated a time of chaos and transition, and, well, that seems pretty relevant to our time.
Today we’re celebrating five years of our study partnership, known in ancient Aramaic as a “chevruta,” by converting our weekly video discussions into a podcast. But this first episode of the podcast is brand new, and we wanted to begin by reflecting on why we embarked on this learning journey back in the early days of the COVID pandemic. We also thought it would be fun and helpful to ground new listeners in our relationship as study partners, what we each are trying to bring to one another, and to you, and what has kept us coming back every week for five years.
Near the end, we’ll give you a quick taste of what most of our episodes will be like when we talk about Talmud. We’ll discuss a favorite text on teachers and friendship from Pirkei Avot, a core book of early Rabbinic wisdom. Each episode of The Oral Talmud has a Source Sheet linked in the show notes, on a web site called Sefaria where you can find pretty much any Jewish text in the original and in translation. You can follow along with the texts if you want, or you can just listen to our conversation – we think this show will work either way. And, maybe one of these days you’ll have a study partner of your own, and you can bring these texts and ideas to your chevruta as well!
And now, The Oral Talmud…
Dan: Welcome everybody. To what will on the podcast version be, episode one of the Oral Talmud in, in the, uh, outside world. It's actually something close to our 200th episode, or 200th time together, Vinne and, uh, and, and so for, lemme start again. Um, hi everybody, and welcome to episode one of the Oral Talmud.
I'm Dan Libeison.
Benay: And I'm Benay Lappe. Hey, Dan.
Dan: Hey, so good to see you. It's, it's funny because, uh, a lot of our, uh, old time viewers of this show Will, will know that we've actually been doing a version, a video version of this show for really, uh, I think on and off for the past five years. It started very early on during COVID, and we always meant to release it as a podcast for all kinds of reasons, knowing especially that a podcast would reach a, a far larger listenership, but it's technically not that easy.
So we always kind of got a little bit, uh, stymied by that and we continue doing it, but I'm so excited that now this is gonna be a podcast. So, um, so what, so it's a, but I think it's a little bit of an odd form of a podcast because in a certain sense a lot of the material that, uh, folks who've only listened to it on the podcast are gonna hear.
Is has been recorded already. Like we know that we're not gonna run out of episodes for years. And that's really exciting because my big fear doing the Judaism Unbound podcast was always that we'd like run out of epi. You know, we'd run out of ideas, we'd run out of episodes. We haven't yet, and it's been nine years, so I'm, I'm confident that we won't either, but we know for sure that we have four years of material out there.
So I'm so excited to share it with people in this new way.
Benay: Me too. And I, you know, what started as something really just for me and you and, you know, if anyone else found it interesting, great. But if not, that was okay too. Um, I'm, I'm really gratified that, um, that some people find it interesting.
Dan: So let me just say a word for folks who are new to the oral Talmud, which I think is gonna be the vast majority of people listening to this.
What is it? And, uh, hopefully you're here because you were intrigued by the title, or maybe you have heard of one of us, or, or probably a relative of one of us. Uh, but the, um, but the idea of the oral Talmud, I, I wanna talk about it in two ways. One is the name, what, what do we mean by the oral Talmud? Uh, and the second is the format of it.
I'll actually start with the format first, because I don't know if this is something that we innovated. I like to think that it is, it makes me feel kind of warm and fuzzy, but I think this is something that I've been calling a fishbowl havruta. So for those who don't know, ATA comes from the root of a friend or, uh.
Partner, somebody that you're connected with. And the idea is that it's a traditional way of studying a Jewish text with a study partner with a friend. And we're gonna talk about that more. But normally a kruta is something that happens behind closed doors. I mean, nobody else listens to it. Often you'll break up, you'll study in Kruta for a while and then come back to what's called the ur, the larger class.
And maybe you'll share a little bit out from what you studied in your havruta. But it's very rare that somebody could like visit somebody else's havruta. And yet, from the beginning, that's what this show has been. It's been a fishbowl, kruta, which I think of as we're studying together. Everybody who's been watching now listening is kind of right on the edge and is is listening, but it's not a.
They're not listening because we are so wise and we are teaching them, they're, we're not like that. We've, we are really studying these texts sometimes we've seen them before, often not. And we've been, and, and we're studying them for ourselves to try to understand them. And the people are there too. We haven't figured out technologically how to include their voices in this.
And it might be unwieldy and it might not be a kruta anymore. And so there would be a loss there. But they're really, really close. They're like over our shoulders and we are doing it with them. And so in a sense, like we can't hear them, but they can hear us and they can be studying and they can be studying along with us.
I think there's something potentially powerful there that I don't know. I don't know if there are any other fishbowl HTA in, in history and certainly not that have been going on for five years. And so I think it's something really exciting potentially to invite people into.
Benay: And you know, something you brought out as you were talking just now.
Is, at least for me, is it Theta experience, which is generally private, is where the ma not only the magic and the excitement and the experience of, of flow and all the light bulbs where all that happens. Um, it's actually the, the re embodying, it's the reenactment. It's what the Talmud actually is there to do.
It's there to reenact and, and I'm a little bit preempting you on what do we mean by oral Talmud? I think because this is the process of making this text alive and in that interaction between the two kruta creating something new. So, um.
I don't know. I think, I think we've inadvertently d done something quite important, which is shift the spotlight from the, the more public, um, space of typical Talmud learning. You, you imagine the discussion with the teacher in front of the room and all the students looking at the teacher and, and as I tell my students, that's not where the real thing happens.
Mm-hmm. That's where you get unstuck a little bit and, and where you try out what happened with your, but the real magic is, is in the kruta and I, I I love that we've made that available and accessible to people. Yeah. At least I hope we've done that.
Dan: Yeah. And the, the title of the oral Talmud, I mean there are a number of elements to it.
One is that I. We thought it was gonna be a podcast. You know, we always thought of it as a podcast, even though it was video. And why was it video? It had to do with that. We were doing it really early on in Covid and people were all at home, and we had this idea that people were gonna be watching video a lot.
And so it seemed like doing it as video would be the right thing to do at that time. But we called it the Oral Talmud, in part because we always imagined it as, as a podcast. That's the simple reason. But there are also much deeper reasons, uh, one of which is the idea that, well, there's also the, the fact that, that we originally had a different title, which was talking Talmud, and then we found out after like two weeks that there already was a Talmud podcast called Talking Talmud.
So we changed it to the Oral Talmud and the, the idea of the Oral Talmud was that the Talmud is called the Oral Torah, right? There's this idea that the Torah that we have, the Bible is. Just part of a larger body of, of, of material that was given by God to the Israelites. Right. And there was also the oral Torah, which was all this other stuff that wasn't written down in the Torah.
And that, you know, there's all kinds of levels at which you could think about what that means exactly. Some of which we've explored on this show, and we'll, and you'll hear those, those explorations over time. But, but one of the ideas of it is that there was this oral material that after, you know, thousands of years got written down and that became the Talmud.
So the Talmud is the oral Torah, and we sort of were imagining what, what if, in the same way there's this much larger body of material that's the oral Talmud and that hasn't been written down yet, and, and that we're part of that tradition. I mean, I, I, I think that a lot of people say, no, that is the oral Torah and it is, you know, that the oral Torah continues.
Right. But, uh, it seemed, it seemed, uh, cool to call this the oral Talmud.
Benay: I, I, I love. The Oral Talmud name, I, I, you've always helped me shift my perspective from learning this thing that is in our past to being a creator of this thing. Mm-hmm. And I, I do have a conception of using the Talmud to create something else, but using the Talmud to create a bigger, more effective, more, um, truer Talmud a a manual that is gonna do an even better job of doing the thing that has really been lost in the study of Talmud over the last, at least several hundred years, um, has been really exciting to me.
And when we learn it, it feels like we really are. Surfacing a lot of new stuff and stuff that was there and hidden and really needs to be brought up and, and forward.
Dan: So there's a lot more to talk about in terms of this, in terms of like what this show is about and what we're trying to do here and everything, much of which I think will be revealed over the weeks and months and years ahead.
And the reality is, I think part of the podcast format is that it's not for us to say, it's for the listener to say what we're doing, you know, what, what it's doing for them, if anything. And hopefully it will be something. Um, but in the meantime, you know, some people ask about, well, but who are we? But in the meantime, I think that, you know, people are asking, you know, if it's not our relatives listening to the show, they're asking who are, who are we, what is this about?
You know, who, who, who is participating in this fishbowl, Verta, uh, you know, why am I not, uh, in the fishbowl, Verta? Why are you guys in it? So, um, so let's talk about that a little. Benay. I mean, um, I, I think that, so, so maybe let's talk about how we met and. Who we were when we, when we met because um, I remember it really well.
Like I was the Hillel director at the time at the University of Chicago and we had some funding to have a program where, uh, and we had some funding for an annual program where somebody would come and kind of give an interesting lecture and memory of a previous Hillel director. And um, and uh, I was new and I was new to Chicago and I didn't really know who to invite and we didn't have that much budget, so it would have to be someone local.
And I just sort of asking around and one of my students said actually, um, you know, I had this teacher in high school who is amazing and she's actually from Chicago and she's just moved back to Chicago pretty recently and you should have her. And I didn't really know much about you, I don't think the internet was quite as developed.
I mean, it was hard to get information back, but it, she was, seemed intriguing. And, and so we invited you and you had all these, I remember you had all these like demands, like, you know, there needed to be whiteboard and we'd have a huge whiteboard. And so we had to figure out how to put like big post-its on the wall and everything.
And anyway, so then you gave this talk and it was what's known in the world as your crash talk. And you could say a little bit more about that if you want, but, um, but it, it blew me away. Like I was like, oh my gosh, this is a, like theory of these instincts that I've had all along about how Judaism isn't really working for people.
But that doesn't mean that Judaism is bad. It can be reimagined, but you had a kind of a whole theory behind it and that that was the first. Time that I, you know, came to, to, to see your work. I, I think it took a few more years until we really became friends, but, um, but that, that was the beginning of it for me.
Benay: Yeah. And I remember that very, very well. Um, I didn't know you were new to Chicago at that time and new to that job. Job, to me, you seemed like the man.
You, you seemed very the man in a good way or in like the man, you know, like the,
Benay: I kind of in a, well, for me, Hillel was very establishment. Yeah. And you were, you were the head of that.
So you were, you know, you, you were, you were the establishment and, and also an obviously really smart guy. And what I remember most about that lecture was afterward when I got the sense that it really. Did mean something to you and excite something for you, and that you looked at me as if I had something to say.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: And given that I had sort of placed you in that realm of the establishment, and um, you know, you, you seemed so obviously, and you are so obviously so much smarter than me, it gave me a lot of confidence to, to know that you, that that that something in what I was bringing was, was important. That that was a sense that you gave me.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: That, that I had something Im important to say. And that meant a lot to me.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: And I think that's been an important part of our dynamic, that you are the smartest guy. I know you are. Uh, okay. I'll try not to embarrass you, but I, I just admire you so much. I admire the human being that you are, the mensch that you are.
Um, and I have this feeling that you, you think highly of me. Not forget as a person, I don't know about that, but, but that you think I, that, that maybe I'm smart. I, I, I don't know. I don't wanna make this all about my insecurities, about my intelligence, but, you know, I'm not a scholar and I have a little bit of self-consciousness about that.
Um, but your trust in me and your belief that I have something important to say brings out. Things in me that I, I, I think don't come out when I'm really busy worrying that I'm, you know, not that
Dan: anyway. I mean, I love that you're this, uh, insecure because, because like anybody who does know you and anybody who has been part of the work that you've done over all these years thinks that you're the man, but not in the bad way.
You know, the kind of like, you know the person, right? You know that you're a giant. And I love that you don't see yourself that way, because that's the spirit of this show is the idea that, that anybody can really have a voice. And I mean, I think you're a giant, but, but if you don't think you're a giant, then that means that you think that anybody can have a voice, right?
Because if, if you can have a voice, then anybody can. Right. You know? And I, and I, that just gets to the spirit of what we're doing very deeply.
Benay: I love that. I, I feel like I'm a grasshopper, but in your eyes, I, I'm a, I'm, you know, a giant, and, and that's, that's a really nice, it's a nice dynamic, I think.
Dan: Hmm.
Um, the, um, I, I, well, you know, I, I mean there are only a few, there are a few. Things that I feel have like revolutionized my life in general and, and my Jewish life in particular. I mean, I've talked a lot of times about reading the book, who wrote the Bible as something that really gave me something to hang onto in terms of remaining connected to the Bible and remaining connected to Judaism at a time in my life where I felt very alienated by it.
And this idea that I hadn't been exposed to before, that human beings wrote the Bible and we actually have archeological and literary evidence of who they might have been and that there was all this history that gave me when I was 17 that gave me something really important to hang onto. And I remember when I was in high school.
My, the rabbi of the high school, I went to a religious, uh, high school in Israel. And, um, I remember when we were graduating, everybody had a sit down with the rabbi of the high school, and he asked like, what you were gonna be doing in the future? And I told him I was going to college in America. And he said, well, I hope that you're gonna find somebody there to be your verta who wants to study Talmud as much as you do.
And at the time, I thought it was like, I laughed. I, it was a joke to me because I didn't wanna study Talmud at all. I never wanted to see it again. And I said to him, well, I don't think that will be a problem, you know, by which I, I'm not gonna be studying any Talmud. And the joke is on me because I found thatta.
It took a while. Mm-hmm. And not only that, but the fact, it, it wasn't only that I wanted to, it wasn't that I wanted to study Talmud and found a jta. It was that I found a JTA who made me wanna study Talmud. And that's you. And I am incredibly grateful to you for that. And. You're a giant in my eyes because Richard Elliot Friedman, who wrote, who wrote the Bible is a giant because he gave me the Torah and you gave me the Talmud.
So I, I just feel incredibly grateful for this. And, and it's like, of all the things that I think of that like, bring me joy, you know, in my, in my work life, let's say, you know, how would I wanna spend my time in my work life? Like, I, I can't really imagine, uh, something more fun than just spending all day studying Talmud with you.
Benay: I feel, I so feel the same way. Um, I think we're, we're, we're so lucky that there's something about our approach to the tradition and to life and the world that's really fundamentally very similar. I
Dan: mm-hmm.
Benay: I think because of my insecurities, but because of. You, something else in you, which is not about insecurity.
We're both pretty open and excited about learning and questioning and really holding our truths lightly and really trust each other and really feel loved by each other. And I think that's a big part of what makes ATA work.
Dan: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause it goes back to like when we met. So, you know, I said we didn't become friends till a few years later and part of that was because I remember being so like blown away by your talk.
And then I, I remember going out to the parking lot with you to like walk you to your car and somehow we were talking about stuff and you just seemed like really religious to me and like. In a way that I have always kind of rebelled against and, and not, not felt drawn to. I don't remember what it was, but like, you know, you didn't drive on Shabbat or whatever it was.
And, um, I was like, wow, this, you, you're so open like this, this theory of how Judaism changes, it's so amazing. And yet you're still doing it kind of the old way in a lot of ways. That was my impression. I don't know if that was true at the time or not, or you changed, but at the time, uh, that was kind of my perception.
I was like, oh, this was awesome. I really like this person. I like this, this perspective. But we're very different and of course we're very different in other ways, you know, I mean that, that you were very much, you know, building this queer yeshiva and I was straight, you know, and so like, what, what, what was that gonna be?
And so it just felt like, wow, this is a great. A great experience, a great, a great moment. And then I remember a few years later we actually had some more funding for a different program that not just was a lecture, but now it was a weekend and we had like six weekends in a year, something like that. And, um, we invited all kinds of people and, and we were like brainstorming for who to invite.
And one of my staff members, uh, said, uh, oh, you know, bene Lapi, she's really great, and she's around. And I was like, oh, you're bene Lapi. I remember. But she was really great a few years ago and, uh, yeah, we should have her again. And, um, you know, it's, students have graduated, it's different students. And I, I think you came back, you probably did the crash talk again.
You know, that those, in those days that's what you would, I mean, still No, but that's what you did a lot in public performances and, um, and I, I was blown away again, but somehow that time we really connected and, and I don't, I. Remember exactly what it was, but I think that it was this kind of openness, this idea that, you know, we have our commitments.
And yet I think that one thing that, that I feel very strongly about me and I think about you and is that, um, I'm not afraid to hear other ideas. Like I don't understand why you should be afraid to hear other ideas. Generally, when I hear an idea that is in conflict with mine, I actually find my, my, my mind immediately is trying to problem solve and figure out the way that it's not a conflict.
Which by the way, is often a Talmudic thing that the Alma does is tries to say how these cases that seem contradictory aren't really contradictory. And, and so, um, so, so I think that there was just some something in that orientation. And I remember that we decided at that time that we should get together, uh, regularly.
And I think that it was like. There was this thing that I, I probably thought like maybe once a month or something, and, and I think you said like, oh, I'm gonna come every week to spend a few hours with you in your office and, you know, you live an hour away. And I was like, wow, this, you know, this person really must like me.
You know? So it was kind of like, uh, it was definitely one of those once where, um, you know, it's nice to, nice to be appreciated in both directions.
Benay: I, you know, as you're talking about being wrong and changing our mind, and, um, it, it occurs to me that maybe one of the reasons why it's sometimes hard.
To hold our truths lightly is that we're afraid that if we're wrong, if we got it wrong, people won't love us anymore. The person who sees that we got it wrong will lose respect for us, or will lose their trust in us and won't like us anymore. Um, because maybe the thing they liked about us was our idea, or I don't know what, um, but with us, I don't have any question that you are gonna still love me no matter what.
I get wrong. And you know, I used, I used to say in, in, in the Yeshiva that.
Our, our origin story and the, the methodology and the culture came about because I only taught the people that I loved. Mm. And I only gathered people who I could love. And I used to always say to our teacher, trainees only teach people you can love, because, because you are only gonna be your best self with those people.
But it has only become clear to me that it's really not who I can love. It's who I can feel confident is gonna love me back even when I get it wrong. Even when I mess up, even when I, even when I disappoint them. And I, I, I think that's a big part of, of what I have with you, that you're gonna still love me.
Dan: Well, it's really also helpful in thinking about our pedagogy in this show as Right. Because I think. In general for a teacher. I mean, we've both been teachers. I was a law professor for a while. I mean, we've had teaching experiences where like we don't, it's not that we don't love this, we don't know the students so well, you know, there's, it's a huge lecture class or whatever it might be.
And, um, how do you, how do you, how do you teach with love in that way? And actually this idea of the fish havruta may be a solution to that because I can love you and you can love me and we can learn together. And if the person is like sitting on our shoulder learning along with us, like in a way they're part of that loving learning that in a way that would be almost impossible to create any other way.
So I'm mm-hmm. Kind of fascinated by, by that as a pedagogy.
Benay: Yeah. I hope, I hope that comes through. I, and I I can't imagine that it doesn't, I can't imagine that, um, anyway.
It for me, it fills our time together. So I, I, I hope people experience that and go, oh, that, that's the thing I'm looking for. You know, as my, my colleague Lenny Solomon always says, we're not, we're not teaching people how to be liberatory human beings or create other liberatory spaces or worlds. We are hopefully giving them an experience of liberation, an experience of being loved and being very, um, able to hold their truths lightly.
And that in of itself, I, I think, changes you. So, yeah.
Dan: Well, we, we, um, I don't think we. We're conscious of this, and, and I don't think that we've ever been conscious of it. I'm curious about your thoughts on this, but Right. The great, the great TTA story in the Talmud is the story of Rabbi Hannan and Ish, which we spend multiple episodes on later in this series.
Um, and the famously, I mean, that, that's also, there's a, there's a queer level to that story, meaning that their love might have been, you know, beyond the, the love of learning. Right. Um, and, um, we, we get deep into that. But, you know, one of the, one of the elements of it is that sort of at the end of the story, it kind of ends badly for all kinds of reasons and.
Rachel ish eventually dies and Han is devastated and they bring him this other kruta to study with who basically is always telling him that he's right. And he's like, get this person away from me. I don't want somebody to tell me that I'm right. When I would have a kruta with Rabbi Yohan, I mean, when I would have a Ata with Rachel ish, he would tell me, uh, how I'm wrong.
And, and I don't want a yes man. I want that kind of tension and not that we that,
Benay: yeah. Andy says it. By him doing that, my Torah got sharper
Dan: Uhhuh. Yeah. And not, not that we have like a lot of tension and, and profound disagreement between us. And so, but, but it's interesting because I almost feel like there are elements where, like the fact of our kruta is that in the sense that, like, I remember when we first started learning together.
It wasn't you and me together, it was that I had invited you to lead some, uh, Talmud learning for my staff. This was, uh, I had kind of gone through it. Like I had, I had actually had like a bad breakup with, uh, the Jewish Federation of Chicago with Hillel. And we were doing this like alternative Hillel kind of organization.
And um, you know, you had helped me through that in all kinds of ways. And, and, you know, I wanted to kind of profoundly build Jewish learning into the new organization that I was creating. And you, you know, and so I, and I, and you know, your, your, your approach had really inspired me and I wanted you to.
Learn with us. And, and you insisted on learning in this very particular way where that involves like, studying in the original Aramaic, even though none of my staff knew any Aramaic or Hebrew and memorizing and all these things. And I was like, Benay, like I don't think these things are important. Like, let's, let's study a lot of Talmud stories and let's, you know, let's just kind of give them a, a depth but also a breadth of, of, of different ideas that they could study.
And you said, no, I, we have, we have to do it this way. And I kind of said, okay, I'm willing to go along with this as an experiment. And we studied this one particular text, and we probably spent, I don't know, months and months and months, uh, with a weekly study of this text and finally got through it. It was like two sides of a page.
And you told me I can't look up the translation at all, and I didn't. And then when it was over, and, and, and it was an amazing experience and everybody loved it, and everybody got so much out of it. And when it was all over, I read the original English, sorry. And when it was all over, I read the English translation.
And I was astonished because I realized that most of the amazing conversations that we had would not have been able to be had if we had studied in English, because the English translation kind of resolves a lot of the ambiguities that are in the original. And, and that was very eye-opening to me in terms of, you know, the, the, the, the tension was that you had a different approach to studying Talmud than I did, and you were right.
But also I had a different approach that this show kind of allowed to give a try, which is that you had convinced me that kind of lingering and, and really check at least checking the Aramaic to see what other readings are possible is so important. And, and yet I also had a sense that there was something to covering more material more quickly, or that there was something in the English that would be worthwhile.
And, and I, when we started thinking about doing a podcast together, I thought like, I don't see how we could possibly do it in Aramaic and you know, have an audience and you kind of said, okay, I'll give that a try when Covid happened because it was like, we gotta do something and you know, and um, and I think that this show has actually ended up being a style of Talmud study that is new, that is in English, but it's sort of inflected with your approach.
Yes.
Benay: Yeah. You know, when, when we started learning, I was very reluctant and I was very orthodox about only learning in the original. I never ever teach in translation. I refuse any invitation that asks me to teach, you know, a one hour slot and I'm gonna hand no, get somebody else. I'm not your guy for that.
I, I don't do a good job of that. And when you wanted to learn in English, I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I, I, I don't see this being anything, but I think we've discovered something. Um, I think we've discovered some kind of middle ground where maybe be partly because you saw some value in what can happen in the opacity of the original and.
I came to, to see that maybe because of who you are, that that depth can come out. Even learning in translation, I don't know, but we should, we should think about this more. We've never talked about this, but I think we're avoiding the problem of learning in translation, which is, as you were saying, is, is typically about it putting you as the learner in a very passive mm-hmm.
Place. Uh, because it's, it, it also seems very finished and clear. Um, and yes, one of the problems is it lands in its clarity on one of many possible options, but also because it. Um, it, it isn't very stimulating. It doesn't, you know, when you have a puzzle and not all the pieces are there, it draws you in to try to figure something out.
And one of the things that Talmud, I think is deliberately structured to do is to stimulate you to think and talk and interact in that very creative, figure it out kind of way. And I think we've found some kind of sweet spot where we create a very inside thick, not too cleaned up translation in English.
And we go very slowly and I'm always looking at the original, so we're doing a little bit of a dance there. I don't know.
Dan: Yeah. No, and I mean, I think, uh, listeners should understand that we have done a fair amount of working with the translation. We're not just pulling a translation off the shelf. Yeah. We are really using the translation that's available on Safaria, which is the translation.
It's actually a translation of a translation because, uh, rabbi Adin Steinle, uh, wrote a Hebrew version of the Talmud where he basically translates from Aramaic into Hebrew, and then the English version translates from his Hebrew into English. And that's the, that's the addition that's available on Safaria.
But we take that translation and we'll change it to try to preserve ambiguity if that's what we're trying to explore and to do other things. We're not always perfect at that, but we do do some, some we, but we are making an effort to create a translation that is not just smoothing things out, that actually is, is one that we can have that style of learning with, and.
Benay: Sorry to interrupt.
Dan: No. Uh, and that's, and that, and, and I think that that may also be part of the innovation of this show.
Benay: Mm-hmm. I think an another thing that makes our learning work, even though we're learning in English, is that we are on the same page in terms of our assumption. Our main assumption is the surface meaning is not primarily what this text is here to tell you whatever the surface content is, which a nice translation, uh, makes it hard to avoid landing on.
Do you know what I mean? A nice translation makes the surface content very prominent because your brain immediately understands it and is in. That surface, but we begin learning a text with the assumption that there's something underneath there. This text is trying to do something other than what the, so, so I think that's an important piece of why we're able to do what the Talmud is, I think trying to stimulate us to do in spite of the fact that it's in English.
Dan: Yeah. And that goes to the question I think of, yeah. And that goes to the question I think of what we're trying to do on this show beyond modeling Talmud study or more than modeling, inviting you into a certain kind of Talmud study. Like, so what kind of Talmud study is it? Because there are different kinds of Talmud study and we're doing, I think a, a particular set of kinds and that has evolved over the course of the show.
So just to give folks a little bit of a. Of a taste of what's to come in. In the early days of the show, and partly this was also because of Covid and because like there were opportunities and there were, there was time in a way that there's less, now we had this thought that basically every other one, or I forget what our original thought was.
We were gonna have us studying a text and our thought was that we would study a complete story in one show. You know, we would do it and, and sometimes two. And we would have guests who were prominent, people that were, that we admired, that were involved in one way or another with the Talmud. And that had interesting things to teach us.
And over the course of time, we started to have guests less often, and. We also started to linger on certain texts for much longer than one episode. And then sometimes we, because of have, of getting so much out of those lingering, we would go back to a text that we had already studied and studied again.
And so there, there are ways that, you know, we could, um, we could have, uh, when we released these shows, we could have sort of brought those together. I, I think we're gonna end up releasing the podcast the way that we did it on, on video. Um, but so sometimes there was a text that we studied twice or three times over the course of years.
Right. And sometimes there was a text that we studied, you know, for 10 weeks in a row. In a row. Right. And, um, I guess there, that raises this question for me of like. Especially, well maybe thinking Well, and that raises the question for me both looking back at what we were thinking when we started and what you're going to hear over the next few weeks and months, and what we started to do over time.
Did we start to study Talmud differently? Like did we, did we, do you have a sense of what we're trying to do? Like when do we know that we've gone deep enough or when do we know that we've exhausted a particular topic? And I think that in those early days, we were just like, well, we had to do it in an hour.
And so we would kind of keep things moving. And over time, I, I think we, we came up and over time I think we developed a, a different sensibility. I'm curious like how you think about that.
Benay: Yeah. Well I remember when we started, we dug out that old list that you and I created together of what we called the greatest hits of the Talmud, which we had put together as a kind of leadership.
Curriculum for some other project we were working on years ago. Remember that?
Dan: Yep.
Benay: And those, for me, were the greatest hit texts because they were examples of the rabbis being radical innovators, even to the point of overturning Torah. Which,
which, which to me was a, a mind blowing realization when I began learning Talmud. That the tradition isn't fixed and unchanging the way we're taught it is. And, you know, those things that are distasteful in the tradition actually can be changed.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: Um, and we don't have to either stay and suck it up or leave.
And that, for me, that was. At least phase one of the project, it was to, you know, let those who have left essentially, and those who are in danger of leaving, know that there's a third option
Dan: mm-hmm.
Benay: That, that they can stay in, make it better. And they stand on the shoulders of very brave people just like them who did that very thing.
Okay. So I think the first thing we were doing was learning those greatest hits and those were texts that I had learned many times and taught many times. And I had a really fully formed hop on, like I had a take
Dan: mm-hmm.
Benay: On all those texts. And I remember in the early days I was kind of driving, you know, you would turn to me at the beginning of our show and I would do the framing and I knew where we were gonna go.
And it was always, Fun and different. But basically I was trying to get this message, certain message, it was really clear to me across, and then we ran out of those texts. Mm-hmm. And my understanding of what happened next was we just, well, partly you would bring texts that you had stumbled on in omi.
Right. Or
Dan: de being the practice of studying one page of Talmud every day, which I've been doing for the last five years or so with my wife.
Benay: Right. Or, or we'd be interested in a certain topic like conversion or, uh, whatever it might have been, the, the cre, the ordination of rabbis or leadership. And then we would look for what texts might be dealing with that somehow, which neither of us knew.
Or if you knew it. Better you would drive. But I think our learning has become much more open and actually much more exciting to me as we started learning texts that neither of us knew. Um, and we were really both open to wherever it was gonna take us. And I've been sort of astonished at our ability to get underneath a text in English that neither of us knew.
Um, and I, I, I feel like I have trained myself to find things in text, but you have that as well. You, you have this intuitive ability to see what may be going on under the surface. And I feel like together we're like the Tacoma Narrows bridge
fell down. Is it?
Benay: It is the one that fell
down. Wait, why are we that?
Benay: Because, because it, the important part is not that it fell down, the important part is what caused it to explode. And let's see, I don't know if I'm gonna get my science right, but it's something that to do with the coefficient of friction or whatever of the material with the frequency of the wind and when those frequencies met, you know,
Dan: something explosive happened.
Benay: Yeah, yeah. That exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Dan: It's funny, I remember, I mean, I was joking, but in those days I remember that people, when we would skip a week, I would get an email that said, uh, when will Rabbi Lape class happen? And I was like, what am I job, Bert? This is not Rabbi Lape class. This is our Verta. You know?
So, um, uh, but maybe over time I, uh, contributed more, but the, um, the, um. I, I was thinking though, that maybe we could talk a little bit about queerness, because I think that we should talk about what our take is on the Talmud, because it's not just two people studying Talmud, and it's not just two people studying Talmud who fundamentally are seeing that what the rabbis were doing as radical.
Right? I mean, our basic idea is that the rabbis were reinventing Judaism and they weren't just interpreting it as is often framed in terms of what the Talmud's doing, right? The Talmud is often framed as the mishna and interpretation or a commentary on the Torah and the Gamara, which is the main part of the Talmud, is a commentary on the Mishna, and it's this unbroken chain of commentating and nothing new.
You know, don't, don't nothing to see here, you know, just, uh, keep, keep moving along. It's an unbroken chain of tradition and we're. We're reading it with a take that says no, what the Mishnah is is a radical rewriting of Judaism. And what the Gamara is is a radical rewriting of that Judaism that includes an attempt to try to tie the two together, the old Judaism and the new Judaism.
But it's still radical in its own way, and it's revealing that. And we had wonderful guests on early in the show who, who are gonna talk about, uh, you know, academic scholars who talk about the, the theory of that. But I think that the queerness element of it is that I think that for us, these are not scholarly notions.
Only. There's a existential element to this and in the, in the sense that, that our own life experiences require us to be able to read the Talmud and Judaism this way or be out. Right. And, um, and I, I, in terms of like sexual orientation, I. Um, you know, I, I feel I'm straight. I mean, what are you gonna say?
And yet you have always insisted that there are different forms of queerness and that there are ways that people who are straight in terms of sexual orientation can also be considered queer, not all such people, but that a certain life experience makes you queer in a certain way. And I, I would love if you could talk both about like, how your read on Talmud is inflected through queerness of the way that we generally understand it as sexual orientation, and then also that other potential form of queerness.
Benay: Yeah. My understanding of queerness is not, doesn't actually require, um.
Lemme say it differently. My understanding of queerness doesn't primarily have to do with sexual orientation or gender.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: For me, queerness is about a perspective that one gains from the positionality of being on the margin,
which is a very precious location from which to, to have a valuable perspective on what's really going on in the center and what's really wrong with what's going on in the center. And, and taking that insight that you gain from being the outsider, from being the one who's marginalized and walking that through the world to make that center or a new center.
A better, a better world and a better place. And people have embodied queerness for a variety of reasons. And one of the reasons why I started to use the term queer from the get go in my framing of Farah the Yeshiva, rather than L-G-B-T-Q, is that a whole lot of gay people aren't queer, and a whole lot of heterosexual people are queer.
Um, you know, if,
and there I, I recognize that we queer folk, the, the folks who had the perspective from the margins had something fundamentally in common with the rabbis.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: I see the ra, the early rabbis, the shapers of what we now have as Judaism and the system of, um, a constantly changing, evolving tradition and a mechanism, a spiritual technology for making us.
And that's Tam much study. The kind of human beings who can tolerate change, upheaval, uncertainty, uh, you know, holding our truth lightly and so on. It, their marginality was central to what they created.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: I saw them as queer.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: Not in a sexual orientation sense, a gender sense, but from that marginality, um, from the power structure that had.
Fortunately for them just crashed. But, but they were, were cooking up this tradition even when that power structure was enforced. And, and you know what I call the crumble before the crash. And, and once I saw myself in them, I made the, the assumption, and I don't think it was even conscious until very recently, that their system was meant to be handed down to me.
That, that they meant for us to do what they did. Um, I, I was just talking to, to my colleague Montgomery, who Mo and Lainey and I were, we're real partners in, in shaping Savara. And,
and, and she, she said something that came out of with Lainey about really the central issue not being. The question, is the tradition radical or not? Did the rabbis create this radical tradition? But did they mean for us to carry it on or not? Mm-hmm. Did they mean for them to be able to do really radical things or did they mean for us to do them as well?
And I just always assumed that they did. I always assumed that Talmud was this love letter to all of us, that it was the instruction manual that was meant to be handed down. And I still think that's the case. Um, mostly because it was created hundreds of years after the voices in it, the rabbis in it lived, and so, you know, as a highly curated document, it, it had to be meant to do something.
And, and that's what I think it was meant to do. It was, it was meant to be a. Used by those people on the margins, the queer folk in every generation, because those are the ones who have the most, most at stake personally, and are, you know, they've survived because they've basically said, I, I, I think what my inner voice is saying is right and I trust myself.
And that kind of experience gives one a lot of courage. And I'm interested in queer folk of whatever variety of queerness. Whether it's because of being non-white in a white world, in a white, you know,
whether it's because of race or disability status or gender or sexual orientation or you name it. Um. Because I think those folks are most able to take what's in the Talmud and do something with it most able to actually carry on, um, this radical process of re-envisioning and re-asking, how can we make this better?
How can we make this system better to make better people who make a better world?
Dan: Yeah. And it's interesting to be none of those things, right? In other words, to be straight, to be white, to not disabled, et cetera. Uh, and say, but that perspective speaks to me and I wanna be part of it. And I feel like it has given me the capacity to have a voice as well.
And I understand that some people, I. Aren't interested necessarily in my having a voice there. Um, I I, I don't think that that's, um, I don't, I I think that that's not inevitable, and I don't think that that's helpful. You know, I think that it's good for us to say, Hey, there aren't that many of us who are, um, both alienated from the tradition and who love it or who have the pot, or who have the potential to love it, and let's get together and see what we can make of it.
Um, I feel incredibly grateful to live in a time where queer Torah is available and where, and I feel even more grateful to be invited by you to be part of it, because you could have said, this isn't for you, Dan. You know, this isn't, and you never said that because you don't believe it, but, but you never said that.
And it, it. It's one of those things, it's almost like a double donkey story. So you, you have this idea of, uh, the donkey stories, which comes from someone else. But the idea was that if donkeys, literal donkeys could read the Torah, they would notice all these stories in the Torah that involved donkeys. We notice those too, but we often just think, well, somebody wrote in on a donkey, it's about the person who rode in on the donkey, but it's not about the donkey.
And the donkeys would say, oh, it's about a donkey. And there was a guy on him. Right. You know? And, um, and let me understand, let me try to understand deeply what that donkey must have been thinking or what was really going on and why a story would've been written about a donkey and, and Right. So you, you have this layer of meaning that nobody else sees, literally nobody else sees.
And there's a level at which, right. The first level of thinking about what does it look like when queer folk read the tradition is they notice all the queer folk in the stories, meaning. Often sexual orientation or gender queer, but maybe other fi forms of queerness as well. Marginality, uh, certainly people of color and disability and, and people with disabilities, but also other kinds of marginality.
You, you could imagine that they're reading those, that there's stories about them, and then there's another level where you say, wait a second, if their stories about them, maybe the writers were them, right, or, or understood them. If they were good stories, then maybe the writers had some reason to understand and to empathize with those characters.
So maybe they themselves were queer. Right? And then I. There's a whole capacity to say, well, if they were doing so, maybe it's not two levels, it's like four levels. You know, if the writers were queer, weren't they probably trying to do a queer thing like we are doing today? You know? So let's not assume that they were just carrying on the chain of tradition.
If it looks like they were doing what we would have wanted to do, then maybe they were actually doing it. And then the next level is, if they were doing it, we could do it. And then the, the last level, the one that like works for me is like, if I look at that, I sort of see a different kind of donkey story in that.
'cause I see the people that were marginalized, that would've been thought to be part of the majority.
Benay: Yes, yes, yes.
Dan: That were part of the queer parts. In other words, some of the rabbis were straight, right? But were doing things in a profoundly queer way. And it's only because the sexual orientation in other forms of more, more, uh.
More generally thought of as queer folk have, have unlocked that for themselves, that it also unlocks something for me, for which I feel like profound gratitude and wanna pay that forward, you know, to to other. Right. And, and you know, the, the, the last thing I'll say about that is like a story that we, we study.
This is a story about, uh, when Robin Glia was, was thrown out of his position and, uh, and Azar Azaria came and replaced him. And the story is that Rabbi Goleal had these rules and regulations that kept a lot of people out of the study hall. And when they took away the rules and regulations, all these people flooded into the study hall.
And the part of the story that moves me the most is that the first thing that those people do is they decide that a different person who the Torah says can never be a Jew, can be a Jew. And meaning that the first thing that people do when the doors are open is they open the doors even wider. And that, I feel is the ethos of this show.
That we, we don't believe that the doors should be open, wider and then closed. We, there's this notion that the doors should be open even wider and then wider and wider and wider. And that is a loving spirit of invitation that I think really sits at the core of what we're trying to do.
Benay: Yeah, and I think you're getting at one of the reasons that I love learning with you so much, and that is because you see donkey stories that I don't see.
And, you know, because of my life experience and all the, the scars and the trauma, you know, and, and that have been, that have been left for me that I carry, sometimes my focus is on one, one part of a story or one message in a story, and I can't see what else is going on and I can't see more nuance or the postscript.
And you see a lot of that that I don't see. And, and that's, it's so exciting for me.
Dan: so Benay, even though this was our. Introduction to the podcast version of this conversation. It just felt weird to me to imagine doing an episode of the Oral Talmud without actually studying any Talmud. But knowing that we would only have limited time for this, we chose a very short text and one that, uh, is connected to the topic that we've been discussing, which is study studying with a, with a partner.
So, um, so I wanna look at that text and, and have a little bit of, of learning of it with you, and then, um, and then we can sort of, uh, you know, write wrap things up for, for today's episode and, and invite people to go on to everything that we've, that we have for them coming forward. So this is a famous text that comes from a collection of sayings called Pirke Votes.
The sayings of the ancestors, or the people sometimes call it the Ethics of the fathers or the sayings of the fathers. It's sort of a. Um, prequel to the Talmud. It's, it's, I think of it as this. It's a, it's a prequel to the prequel. A prequel to the prequel. You know, like, I think of it as this kind of like you're supposed to, it's like the, it's like you're supposed to read this before you start reading the Talmud.
And, um, there's all these sayings and ideas and it's also about the chain of transmission of the Torah. There's a lot in there. Um, and, uh, but we're just picking out one of the sayings because it relates to this idea of kruta. So this,
Benay: but, but, but, but I don't think we should disregard the context of this text.
Okay.
Benay: And it, it feels very important. It feels like its location in the first piece of oral Torah that's created after the destruction. And almost immediately after the grand myth is put down that this oral Torah was also from God and its divine. And you know, it was passed down along with the written Torah from God to Moses and hand it down to all of us.
This is our, our, our new origin story and the new legitimating story of what is going to be for the next many hundreds of years of very in progress thin. I don't know how this is gonna turn out. Is it going to even be Judaism? Is it gonna feel Jewish kind of system? And it feels like this text in this position is not, it's not just saying a nice, nice thing.
It's laying down a methodology. It's saying. This is how we're going to, this is gonna be a really important
practice or way that we're going to create this new world. Okay. So I think that's really the context of where this line drops.
Dan: Hmm. Well that's making me think that, you know, five years from now for our new listeners, we, we should start studying pure KA vote as part of the oral Talmud. Um, the, the basic idea, right, is that the Pirke vote starts and says that the Torah was handed down from God to Moses, to, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And eventually like makes it into the hands of the rabbis. And then it kind of goes from rabbi to rabbi and they basically give each rabbi in the chain, meaning. Chronologically in the chain. Each generation of rabbis kind of has one or two representatives, and each of them is given essentially one line of this was their great saying that, that they used to say, right?
And, and so this one is a very early one to 'cause. This is from chapter one of Pir Kea vote, verse six. So the person who's being, uh, mentioned here, Yoshua Ben Paraia, is one of the very earliest in the kind of Brito rabbinic chain of transmission. And he says, uh, and so the, the, and so Pvo says, uh, Joshua, Ben Paraia, Yeshua, Ben Paraia says, make for you a teacher, teacher and acquire for you a friend in Hebrew that's,
and be judging of all people with a scale weighted in their favor in Hebrew, the.
Oh, lemme say that again. And in Hebrew, that's,
and so we tried to do one of these translations that is not fully smoothed out, so that we can do a little bit of talking about it. We tried to get pretty close to the original Hebrew and what it, uh, sounds like. And, uh, so, so the, just to make one thing clear, that in the Hebrew, um, we have, uh, the part that says, acquire for you a friend.
Ve, ve and jta are the same word, essentially. One is in Aramaic and one is in Hebrew. Uh, and it's not clear that this is referring to havruta as we think of it, a study partner, but it's not clear that it's not, and it's, it very well, uh, may be so y
Benay: Yeah, I, I think the common translation of friend.
Completely misses what this Hey, now I was about to say piece of advice is getting at, and again, not to beat the dead horse, but to take a kind of Rashi framework on this. Anytime you read Rashi's commentary, 11th century, great commentator on the Torah and the Talmud, you, you can really only understand what he's saying if you understand the question that what he's saying is an answer to.
So I really think we have to, we don't have to figure it out right now, but we have to hold in one hand as we're listening to the answer, what's the question that this is the answer to? I do not accept that these are, oh, this guy used to always say it. He used to drive us all crazy with this. He was famous for the, it's not that it's.
I don't know. We could surmise right now what we think the question is, but let's, let's answer, find the answer and then let's ask the question. What is this answering? What, what, what's the question that this is the answer to? Okay. So the first thing that jumps out at me is the very weird language make for you or make for yourself a teacher.
That's weird. Mm-hmm. That's weird. And you know, they could have said, find a teacher, but what? Well, you would never say make a right. Make a teacher what it was. Even make a teacher. Teacher get a teacher. Teacher find a teacher. But the fact that they didn't say that makes me think they're saying something different than locate one making.
So what does it mean to make someone your teacher? Is, is, is a question that this is, this section is prompting for me, and, and that bothered a lot of commentators because I know some of the classical commentaries on this. It's bothered, you know, readers of this text for a long, long time and, you know, one of the classical answers to make for yourself a teacher, I think it's Bart Nora, what, what classical commentary on the Mishna who says,
E even if this person doesn't know all that much, don't, don't take that fact that they don't know very much as saying they shouldn't be your teacher. Make them your teacher. Anyway. I don't know. I find, I find that kind of interesting. But in any case, what, what do you get? What do you get from the making
Dan: word?
Yeah. I mean, it, it, what it says to me is that the teacher is not, it's like, it's almost like, um, Schrader's cat. You know, the question of whether the cat is dead in this box that you hold. You know that, that in some ways it's, uh, well, I, I mean there's a Jewish version of that, right? Where somebody comes to a rabbi and says, you know, rabbi of a bird in my hand, is it alive or dead?
And the rabbi says, the, the, the fate of the bird is in your hand, or something like that, right? That, in other words, that it's, it's you who is gonna make someone the teacher. Uhhuh not a teacher. It's not a teacher exists out in the world. Mm. Nobody's a teacher unless you make them one.
Benay: I love that. I love that.
And you're not gonna be able to learn unless you get to that place where you are open to this person and believe they have something to teach you.
Dan: Yeah. And, and so like you could imagine a person who's like an authorized teacher. And you can imagine a person who's not authorized, who's just a, a wise person or somebody that you admire or somebody that you don't admire.
I don't know. Not that you don't admire them, but that it's not about admiration, it's about, it's about, um, that you're, that they're your verta. I mean, like a lot of times, like Right, traditionally it's, it's, you're not, your Verta isn't a teacher. Your Verta is like another kid in the class. Right. Or another person.
Right. And, um, but you're learning, you, you end up learning from them. Right.
Benay: You, you know what you just made me think of this text comes historically at a moment before there's a new can. Even before there's a new canon to teach, they're coming up with it.
Dan: Yeah.
Benay: So there what, so Rob, the, the teacher isn't the person who sort of has mastered or has acquired a whole bunch of stuff that you don't have.
Nobody has it.
Dan: Right.
Benay: And, and so I think there's something. I think there's a relationship between this first part of the teaching make for yourself a teacher and the second part, and acquire for yourself avta. They, they're intertwined in, in some way. And what are you thinking?
Dan: Yeah, exactly. Look, no, I think that, I think that, um, first of all, there's, there's a couple of different ways that one could read this almost structurally, right?
One is that they're two, just two different ideas. Make yourself a teacher and find yourself a friend. Right? Right. Do these two different things with two different
Benay: people.
Dan: Yeah. There's there's another way to read it that says, make yourself a teacher and you will find a friend. Meaning, like, that teacher will become your friend.
Right? Mm-hmm. And I think that there's another way to read it that says, um, make yourself a teacher. Find yourself a friend, almost like they're, you're, they're both in the same time. Meaning find a friend who will be your teacher.
Benay: Right. That's what I'm, that's what I'm getting now too. Which I never saw before and I love it.
And thinking about us. That feels right. Totally. The, the, the true kruta relationship is one in which you are my teacher and I'm your teacher.
Dan: Right. And I guess like, what I would wanna say to others who are listening in is that like, yes, you and I know a lot of Talmud and knew a lot of Talmud before we started this show, but I think that what you'll find in our learning together is that the real good stuff isn't coming out of things that we know.
It's coming out of openness and love. That allows us to dig out things that we're noticing. And maybe we notice a little more because we have the Hebrew and the Aramaic. Or maybe we notice a little more because we have more context, but. If two other people studied it who didn't know that much, they would actually be able to draw a lot out of it and actually would be better than if they went to some Talmud lecture, which would say the same exact things that they're gonna discover on their own, because that and, and more, right?
Because they're gonna forget that, but they're not gonna forget the things that they dug out on their own with their study partner. And so there's, there's something more powerful, like as a teacher. Like you'll learn more studying with a partner than you will hearing, you know, sitting at the feet of the great, the great person.
And there's something, so there's something about that your Verta or your jve, you know, your friend actually is your greatest teacher, but not because they're qualified, it's because you made them that by having that relationship with them.
Benay: Right. And the, the, the teacherness that's happening isn't the transmission of stuff.
Um, you know, at Farra we say that a teacher is someone who makes their learning visible in front of the room, who is learning authentically with the students, but is is standing in the front of the room. And you and I have talked about, I remember you telling me the story of one of your law students.
Dan: Hmm.
Benay: Who, who commented that, that your gift, I, I'll let you tell this story, but
Dan: Well, it's like, it's faded into the, the midst of, uh, you know, misremembering. Right. But I, they said, I, I took it to be like, you know, I'm not sure that you're the greatest teacher. Uh, meaning like that my pedagogy was so well developed, but he said, you're the greatest student that I've ever seen.
Like that, that, that, that you, your sort of curiosity flows, you know, is obvious. And, and that, you know, my take was that, and they were learning from that, right? Yeah. That they were learning.
Benay: And, and that's, and that's what I meant by we're each other's teacher, that we facilitate learning in the, in with each other because we're making our learning.
Well, I don't know, I don't know. I've lost the thread. But you know, as far we, we admonish our students, I don't know if that's exactly the right word, but we say you are res when we teach them how to learn in Kruta, we say, you are responsible for your kavita's learning and your kruta is responsible for your learning.
I think that's a better way of getting at what's, what's the, the teacherness that's going on. It's, I'm invested in in you anyway.
Dan: Yeah. So let's just in the interest of time, go to the second part of it. Okay. And just 'cause we wanna wrap it up, but like, well, it's interesting in the same way, like, are these three random statements or are they interconnected?
Right. And the, this third statement is, yeah. It's, it's in the present tense, the ve right. So we're, that's why we translate it in a weird way, but it says, and be judging all people with a scale weighted in their favor. So I, my question is, number one, how do you understand that term, that that idea, and, and then the second question is like, why is it connected to this issue of, you know, making a, uh, making a teacher and, and having a friend?
Benay: Yeah. Well it's, it's, it's also in the command form,
Dan: right? Uhhuh, right.
Benay: Be do you gotta be doing this? And I, I think you're right that all three of these are simultaneous and intertwined elements of a relationship that is going to be generative and growthful and creative and help us bring about. The Torah that we're seeking.
I, I think that's what, what's going on here. And this last element, um, remember what we were saying about loving each other? Yeah. It's like, I, I know you're gonna keep loving me. Yeah. You, you, you are gonna still believe in me even when I mess up. And I think that's what this last part is getting at. Yeah.
You, you, you're gonna still judge me positively.
Dan: Yeah. You're
Benay: gonna retain your regard for me.
Dan: Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, I guess it doesn't make it a very interesting, uh, you know, there's a tension here, but I I Right. The, the idea of, well, first of all, the, the idea of like, um. Judging all people with a scale weighted in their favor, right?
I mean, just on an image level, right? That, that, yes. The idea that I have, right? So if you think of the scales of justice, right? And that there are two sides to the scale, and one is, and, and in that scale, in that sort of classic Jewish thinking on the scale, there's, there's like the good deeds and the bad deeds, right?
And, and that there, and, and when you're, you know, when you die or you're deciding, you know, God's deciding whether you should go to heaven or somewhere else, or what, right? That there's an idea of, of kind of like measuring how many good you did versus how many bad. And if it was weighted towards good, then you're good, you know?
And, um, which is a whole interesting thing in and of itself, which I think we've talked about on certain, uh, future episodes. But, um, but the idea here of I think judging with a scale weighted in their favor is if God or you, right, put a thumb on, on the scale, on the side of the scale that's weighted towards justice so that even maybe you didn't.
Uh, uh, in, in the thumb on the scale, uh, weighted, uh, you know, with the, the merit, with the good deeds, right? That you put a little extra thumb on there. So even if they're bad deeds outweigh their good deeds, they're still gonna get, you know, classified as more good than, than bad. And that, that thumb on the scale is kind of an act of love.
Benay: Yeah. Yeah. And, and that, that's an essential element to any relationship that's gonna work. And, and, and not just a personal partner kind of relationship, but it's also an important element in a, in an intellectual, and I hesitate to call this an intellectual relationship because it's, it's so much deeper than that, but any relationship that's going to be productive and creative, and I, and I still, and, and this is what we're.
I come back to that question, what's the question to which this is the answer? And I, for me, it, I'm still working it out and this is helping me, but it feels like the question is somehow is something like, how are we gonna do this thing? Our world is crashing and what we thought was true is no longer true.
And the way we thought we were going to live good lives and have a relationship with God, that's, it's just not gonna be either because it can't be that way. We don't believe it can be. How are we gonna build a new world? W what's gonna be the essential thing to do to, to build a new world? And I think this is at least, um, whose answer.
Yeah, I think this is his answer.
Dan: Mm.
Benay: This is the way we're gonna build that new world by being in relationship to even just one other human being in this way. And what if we then take that way of being and walk through the world that way with everybody? I mean, I think, I think the crucible, the fishbowl kind of thing for them is we're gonna do that to create a new tradition to create Torah, but that way of being the creates Torah is gonna train us to be that way all the time.
I think that's the hope. Hmm.
Dan: Yeah. And just I think maybe to kind of wrap things up, it's that I. When we, you know, when Covid happened five years ago? Really? Five years ago almost. Yeah. When Covid, when Covid started, there were two things I think that were happening at the same time. Speaking of things, multiple things happening all at once, right?
One was that it felt like the world was crashing down around us, and the other is that we were profoundly alone. Mm-hmm. And in those early weeks, we were all, I don't just mean you and me, I mean everybody in the world was basically like flailing around trying to figure out like, what, what am I gonna do?
Both to kind of figure out this world and also to not be alone. And you and I decided to study Talmud together and, you know, we could have just taken an hour to hang out every week. We are friends outside of, outside of. Doing Jewish things together. But there's something, and our producer, Joey was mentioning this before we started recording, that there's something about adult friendship that maybe as you become older or in certain contexts, like the way you do friendship, this how Joey said it, the way you do friendship is, is through work, through working together.
And this is not like working together like that we're paid to. Nobody's paying us to do this work together. I mean, you know, in certain ways we make our salaries, but we, we like choose to do this together. Um, but it's work in the sense that we're trying to accomplish something together. We're not just hanging out as friends.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. And I think that we often think about love and work as separate. And in a sense, I think what we're exploring here is whether love can do good work, and I'm excited to have people along for this ride to see what you think.
Benay: Love, loves love,
Dan Libenson: Thanks so much for joining our chevruta today! We hope you’ve enjoyed learning with us… and with the Talmud. You can find links to the source sheets for all episodes in the show notes and on our website at oraltalmud.com. Your support helps keep Oral Talmud going. You can find a link on the website to contribute.
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