Haaretz
Adar1 21, 5765
For 10 years now Rabbi Pinhas (Paul) Lederman
has been participating in the daf hayomi ("daily page") lesson in
Jerusalem - a lesson in which a page of the Babylonian Talmud is studied
every day in sequence, one two-sided page a day, 2,711 pages altogether.
The lesson lasts for about an hour in the late morning, with some 20
people taking part, all of them pensioners.
Lederman takes care to
make up on his own any pages that he misses, so as not to fall behind his
friends. This is no simple commitment, as many pages of Talmud contain
issues that are not easy, and most of the text is in Aramaic. Lederman
relates that the teacher of his class, a man of 91, "told me that he
spends five or six hours a day preparing the lesson."
Lederman says
that he makes a point of sticking to the commitment because "someone who
was raised like I was with a yeshiva education is very aware of the
commandment to study Torah. According to the Torah-based outlook that I
inherited, one is in fact supposed to study during all the hours of the
day, but as this is very difficult, then there should at least be some
sort of regularity every day. Beyond that, the fact that I am partner to
hundreds of thousands around the world who are studying the same page on
any given day creates an almost mystical feeling of companionship all over
the world."
A common topic of conversation
More than
1,000 groups around the globe similar to Lederman's will study the last
page of the Talmud today, for the 11th time since this project was started
in 1923. The number of pages in the Talmud means that each cycle takes
about seven and a half years. Ceremonies will be held internationally to
mark this event tonight and tomorrow, with three of the biggest locations
being at the Yad Eliyahu sports arena in Tel Aviv, at Madison Square
Garden in New York, and for the first time since the Holocaust, in the
city of Lublin in Poland, the city where the daily page project began. In
contrast to the first two ceremonies, which will be held this evening, the
event in Poland will be held tomorrow, in order to allow an "air bus" to
bring hundreds of people from Israel in time to participate in both
events. An English-language event will also take place in Jerusalem
tomorrow night.
The initiative for the daily project came from
Rabbi Meir Shapira at the first Great Assembly of Agudat Yisrael in Vienna
in 1923. The initiative was greeted with much enthusiasm, and the daily
study began immediately on Rosh Hashanah.
Shapira is a fascinating
figure in his own right: a Chortkov Hasid who became a member of the
Polish parliament, he re-established in his city the Hakhmei Lublin
Yeshiva - which had existed in the 16th and 17th centuries but was
neglected and destroyed afterward - as a yeshiva intended to bring the
studious Lithuanian model into the more Hasidic world of Polish
Jewry.
Professor Menachem Friedman, a researcher of ultra-Orthodox
society from Bar-Ilan University, explains the background of the daily
page initiative.
"It is part of the whole outlook that led to the
establishment of Agudat Yisrael and to the establishment of the Bais
Yaakov network (of schools for girls) after generations during which
education for girls had been neglected," Friedman says. "This was a period
when the centers of ultra-Orthodox Judaism were in danger of falling
apart. There had been a transition from the small towns to the large
cities, and from Eastern Europe to America, and the fear had developed
that in these dramatic transitions the basis of identity would become
shaky. As a result, an initiative was introduced to create a common
scholarly basis for all of ultra-Orthodox Jewry, which would create an
immediate connection between all the Torah-learners in the world. Every
day everyone studies the same page, and when they meet they already have a
common topic of conversation."
Friedman relates that a friend of
his, an American Jewish neurologist, provided him with additional
information about the benefits inherent in the project: "It turns out that
in the ultra-Orthodox public there are a lot fewer `geriatric illnesses,'
like dementia and Alzheimer's disease, than in the general population.
This same expert suggests that the reason for this is that the elderly men
have a daily social gathering like hadaf hayomi, at which intellectual
activity also takes place."
The daily page project is indeed very
suited to the new global era and also to the need to balance between the
value of Torah study and the need to earn a living. It is not by chance
that it has gained momentum particular in the world of modern Orthodoxy in
the United States, where on the one hand (at least since the 1960s)
yeshiva education has been very strong, while on the other, there is no
one to fund hundreds of thousands of yeshiva students over the years, and
they work for their living.
Lederman, who is himself an immigrant
from the United States, tells of a group of ultra-Orthodox men who work on
Wall Street and hold their daily page lesson every morning in the train
from Long Island to Manhattan.
Rabbi Mordechai Kornfeld, the head
of the Iyyun Hadaf Kollel (yeshiva for married man) in Jerusalem, relates
that in the United States during the past several years there have been
about 800 daily page study groups. In Israel, too, their number has
increased markedly in recent years, including among religious Zionist men,
and he says that a study conducted recently by his people found that "in
Israel today there are about 650 such groups, and in Europe about another
250." Other surveys have found that the number of daily page lessons in
Israel is even higher and approaches 1,000.
Rabbi Elyashiv will
be absent
Modern technology also affords many study aids for
learners of the daily page. For example, it is possible on the Internet to
find detailed lessons for daily study, and even by telephone it is
possible to find daily lesson commentaries. One of the organizations that
provide a service of this sort in Israel, Kol Hadaf, summed up its figures
for the last year alone in the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Yated Ne'eman:
nearly 1.3 million calls during the course of the year, an average of
about 5,000 calls a day.
The languages chosen by listeners to the
lessons is also interesting: About 60 percent prefer the lesson in Hebrew,
32 percent in Yiddish, 6 percent in English and about 0.5 percent in
Russian. The most popular hours for calls to the line are between 11 and
12 o'clock at night.
The world of modern communications also
influences the character of the festive ceremonies that will be held this
week. Thus, for example, the ceremony tomorrow at Binyanei Hauma is aimed
entirely at the anglophone audience, as all of the speeches will be in
English. Not only have all of the thousands of tickets already been sold
(at NIS 50 each), but also thousands of additional participants are
expected to watch it on closed circuit television screens.
Not only
will there be a ceremony at Madison Square Garden in New York this
evening, but parallel ceremonies will also take place at the Meadowlands
in New Jersey, and at the Javits Convention Center three blocks west of
Madison Square Garden, with each of the main speeches being shown on
television screens at the other sites.
Every success also has its
downside. One of the anxieties of which the heads of the ultra-Orthodox
public are afraid is the sense that it is possible to be a talmid hakham
(wise student) by studying only for one hour a day, and therefore there is
no need for yeshiva study. Therefore, in recent days, parallel to the
preparations for the festive events this week, the columnists in the
ultra-Orthodox press have been stressing the need to preserve the
hierarchy between those who study a daily page and those who devote all of
their time to study.
Outstanding among them is Nati (Natan Ze'ev)
Grossman of Yated Ne'eman, who for a long time has been considered the
"seal bearer" of the "authentic" ultra-Orthodox outlook of Rabbi Eliezer
Shach's school. He explained last Friday that "it is necessary to be
vigilant lest the fuzzy thinking of other circles (religious Zionist
circles - Y.S.) infiltrate us, because sometimes a person who sets aside
times for the Torah can be stricken with arrogance and is liable to think
to himself: `In fact, what is the difference between me and the yeshiva
student or the kollel student? He studies and I study.'"
In the
face of this danger, Grossman writes that anyone who does not see the
yeshivas as the most important thing will end up "going from bad to
worse."
Ultimately, despite the celebrations, it is also impossible
to avoid the political aspects of the event. One of the reasons for the
large number of events to celebrate the completion of the cycle is not
only the desire to have as many people as possible participate; it is also
the fallout from disputes among the followers of various
rabbis.
Thus, for example, the rabbi who is called "the Rabbinical
Ruler of the Generation," Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, will not
participate in the main event this evening at Yad Eliyahu but is in fact
expected to participate in an event that will be held next week at
Binyanei Hauma. The official reason given is that the elderly rabbi does
not leave Jerusalem. However, one of the ultra-Orthodox newspapers relates
that the real reason is that "Rabbi Elyashiv does not want to participate
in any ceremony with three of the Torah sages who are supposed to
participate in the ceremony at Yad Eliyahu: Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman,
whom he considers a reformer (Steinman supported the Tal committee, which
encourages ultra-Orthodox men to go to work, and the ultra-Orthodox Nahal
unit in the Israel Defense Forces); the admor of Ger, with whom he
disagrees about a number of issues, and the Ger Hasidut is considered the
main sponsor of the daily page project in the ultra-Orthodox world; and
Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, who disobeyed Rabbi Shach's instruction at the time
not to enter the government of the left - Shas joined Yitzhak Rabin's
government, and was also a partner in the government at the time of the
signing of the Oslo agreements.
Incidentally, Rabbi Yosef, at whom
all of the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox world is angry because of that
"disobeying of an instruction," is not expected to deliver a speech or to
be accorded any mark of respect at the Yad Eliyahu ceremony. The opening
of the event - the study of the last page in the Talmud - is reserved for
Rabbi Shmuel Vazner, one of the last students of Rabbi Meir Shapira, the
founder of the project. Yosef, then, will be just one of a long list of
rabbis sitting in the row of Torah sages.