Jacob Sivak
Jerusalem Post, June 28, 2023
“The layout can be described as a spiral, or a calligraphic solar system, with “idea units circulating like moons around a major planet.””
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the worldwide Daf Yomi (“a page a day”) study of the Talmud, as well as the 500th anniversary of the first printing of the Talmud.
Implemented in 1923 by Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin, Poland, to encourage Jewish learning, Daf Yomi involves the synchronized daily study of both sides of a single Talmud page. A single cycle takes approximately seven and a half years. The 13th cycle, involving 350,000 participants worldwide, ended on January 1, 2020, with a concluding celebration, Siyum HaShas.
For those of us who are not accomplished Talmud scholars (myself included): What is the Talmud?
The Talmud is composed of first Mishna and then Gemara. Mishnah is a compendium of exegetical material embodying the oral tradition of Jewish law. Gemara is a rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah, first written early in the Common Era. Extensive commentaries were added throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, and as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz notes in The Essential Talmud (1976), Talmud scholarship is ongoing today.
There are two Talmuds: Talmud Yerushalmi (the “Jerusalem Talmud”) written primarily in Galilee after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem; and the Talmud Bavli (the Bavli Talmud), written in Babylon (modern-day Iraq) in various Jewish academies, the most prominent of which were at Sura and Pumbedita (with the latter today known as Fallujah).
The Babylonian Talmud, containing 2,711 double-sided folios organized as 63 tractates, or treatises, is larger than the Jerusalem Talmud and its discussions are more extensive and far-reaching. When speaking of the Talmud in the singular, it is this multi-volume text that is being referred to and it is this work that is studied in the Daf Yomi project.
