Tevi Troy and Noam Wasserman
First Things, Sept. 14, 2023
“Rabbi Shapiro had a bold vision for maintaining an ancient tradition and furthering Jewish unity at a time of international upheaval.”
This Friday, September 15, marks Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. This year, however, Rosh Hashanah also marks the 100th anniversary of the Daf Yomi, a program for daily Talmud study that has become a staple throughout the Jewish world and brought some measure of unity to an increasingly fragmented people.
Daf Yomi was founded by Rabbi Mayer Shapiro, a learned scholar who was also involved in Polish politics in the 1920s. Rabbi Shapiro observed that he was living in a time of great social division and wanted a way to bring “Achdus” (Hebrew for “unity”) to the Jewish people. He created a program of universal daily assignments of Talmudic study. At the pace of one page per day, those who followed the program would read the 2,711 pages of the Talmud in a seven-and-a-half-year cycle. He hoped this system would become “universal”—with Jews throughout the world studying the same portion each day. He designed Daf Yomi as a new way to use Jewish learning to help bridge social divides and counter the fragmentation. As Rabbi Shapiro wrote of his innovation, “When two Jews from different towns, or even different countries, meet, the knowledge they share on the Talmud being studied will help them form a deep bond of friendship.”
Rabbi Shapiro was also motivated by the decline of Talmudic learning in the aftermath of World War I, and by the growth of distracting entertainment alternatives. He sought a solution to the challenges that the modern world brought to an ancient religion.
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