Jewish Scholars Mark 7-Year Study Cycle

Adhering voluntarily to a daily lesson schedule spanning seven years, tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews around the world this week completed their study of the Talmud, the classic compendium of Judaism’s laws and values.

Many of the same men--businessmen, professionals, rabbis, artists, bakers--will go back today to the start of the Talmud in a regimen they say is intellectually and spiritually rewarding. “It’s like racquetball; it’s good exercise,” said Dr. Mitch Honig, a North Hollywood dentist. Honig has participated in the program 10 years, the first eight in New York City.

But neither he nor dermatologist Martin Kay, who has participated two years, planned to end the demanding routine this week.

“I like the regular, set time for learning,” Kay said after a recent class that begins weekdays at 6:45 a.m. at North Hollywood’s Emek Hebrew Academy.

This week marks the end of the ninth go-round since 1923 when Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin, Poland, proposed to an international Jewish meeting that Jews everywhere study the identical portion of the Talmud each day. Although the program is called Daf Yomi (literally, “a page a day”), students study the two facing pages. The cycle takes almost 7 1/2 years to complete.

The standard printed edition used today is the 20-volume “Vilna Shas,” which follows a format first established last century in Vilnius, Lithuania. Written in Aramaic, it requires translation and interpretation by Talmudic scholars.

For those who miss classes because of illness, travel, family or work obligations, modern technology eases the demanding pace. Cassette tapes are available for missed lessons and in 26 cities there is “Dial-a-Daf” by telephone.

Hundreds of Los Angeles participants and their friends celebrated the end of the cycle at the Hollywood Palladium on Wednesday night. Thousands more did the same at New York’s Madison Square Garden Thursday night.

“It’s an astounding moral victory for the Jewish people, who have transplanted a style of study and enthusiasm for study that some have thought was buried in the ashes of Hitler’s Europe,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, professor of Judaic studies at Yeshiva University in Los Angeles.

Adlerstein said that about 20 classes are now held in Los Angeles and San Diego.

The Talmud, compiled and edited about 1,400 years ago, is second only to the Bible in sacred authority for Orthodox Jews. It incorporates Jewish law from earlier oral and written traditions but also ranges widely in subject matter.

It is divided into six “orders,” or categories, of rabbinic opinion on Jewish law: agriculture, the Sabbath and holidays, family relations, property and court procedures, Jerusalem Temple regulations and ritual impurity.

The books contain the so-called golden rule of Hillel (“What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man”), sayings such as “Say a little and do much” and the proper ways of charity and compassion.

But it also contains much of the intricate legal points of Jewish law that non-traditional Jews maintain are religiously irrelevant today--thus, the nearly exclusively Orthodox participation in the Daf Yomi program.

The Talmudic lesson last Monday was on distinguishing menstrual blood stains on a woman’s garment from blood spots possibly cause by other sources.

Jewish law states that husband and wife must abstain from intimate contact during her five-day menstrual period and the following seven days. After she is immersed in a ritual bath, the couple can resume sex. But the slightest show of blood during the last seven days can be cited as a reason to start the seven-day interval over again.

As a result, rabbis in antiquity had to deal with claims that visible blood stains might have been caused by lice, bed bugs, wounds or blood splattered in a butcher shop.

Rabbi Avrohom Stulberger of Valley Torah High School, who leads the only Daf Yomi class in the San Fernando Valley, said he tries to lighten the lessons with a bit of humor in his translations and explanations.

“Is this a zoology course?” he asked rhetorically during the Monday lesson.

“Certain religious precepts do not have an obvious meaning for today,” said Honig, one of the students, after the lesson. Yet, he and other students said, the ways in which rabbis tried to resolve disputes and interpret Jewish law fairly still provide lessons in logic and ethics.