Try to stay with me here… this is ultimately a book review of Ilana Kurshan’s beautiful memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink. In her book, Kurshan follows the order of the Talmud as she describes how it relates to her personal life, revealing stories about her relationships, work life, and feelings about life in Jerusalem.
On January 5, 2020, I joined tens of thousands of others around the world embarking on a 7.5 year cycle of reading a double-sided page of Talmud each day. The Talmud is the textual record of generations of rabbinic debate about law, philosophy, and biblical interpretation, compiled between the 3rd and 8th centuries and structured as commentary on the Mishnah with stories interwoven. There are two versions: the more commonly studied Babylonian Talmud was compiled in present-day Iraq and the Jerusalem Talmud in Israel.
The 2711 pages of the Babylonian Talmud is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law and theology. It is a record of rabbinic legal conversations with many unresolved questions, traditionally passed down orally until it was recorded in writing. This is a good background teaching about it. It consists of multigenerational conversations among the rabbis of the first few centuries, like what to do if your camel knocks over a candle and sets a store on fire to proper behavior in all aspects of life.
In 1923, a rabbi in Poland, Meir Shapiro, proposed a universal system of the study of all 37 major tractates as a way to unify the Jewish people and literally be on the same page everyone else is learning. “Daf Yomi” literally means “daily page.“
The trick, I’m finding, to keeping up with the study is to find a way that works for you of incorporating it into your daily routine. I get an email every morning describing the texts and the most important aspects of the page in a rather humorous way, which I read while having my coffee. I also listen to a 5-minute podcast about the page, usually in the car. If I miss a day, I catch up the next day by reading both.
There are 6 “orders,” and we just finished the second (holidays) and began the third one (family law) about four months ago (120 days ago, to be precise).
Here’s a casual Q&A about the Daf Yomi process, written by Ilana Kurshan. As she writes there, “every page connects to conversations on other pages, and so once you have started learning, it’s almost impossible to stop.” Some days are rather dull, and others connect in surprising ways to something I’m learning about now or a current event in the news.
All this is background so I can tell you about Kurshan’s beautiful and touching 2017 memoir!
With personal stories about finding her place in marriage and her professional and spiritual life, Kurshan follows the orders of the Talmud tractates and connects what she learned to what her life was like then. She starts at age 27, newly divorced and living in Israel. She basically describes several years of learning and growth, mourning and discovery, romance and children.
I admire the way she draws parallels from the text into her life, drawing from her experiences of sadness, fear, and joy.
More important, I am in two classes right now, learning about both the life of Maimonides and his philosophy of engaging with the Torah, as well as a Mussar text describing how each person engages distinctly with it, creating their own internalization of what is learned. This memoir is a living example of this idea. “It is a text for those who are living the questions rather than those who have found the answers.”
“Looking back now, I see that these journal entries unfolded as a record not just of my learning but also of my life, drawing from deep wells of sadness and fear and, with time, from overflowing fountains of joy. I began learning as a divorced woman living alone in Jerusalem, with no idea of what the future might hold. It took me a while—quite a few tractates—before I found my stride. (And yes, like T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who measured out his life in coffee spoons, I have come to measure out mine in tractates, referring to periods in my life by what I was up to in the Talmud.)”
“Although Omri and I learned much Torah together, we were not learning the same Torah. It is impossible for any two people to learn the exact same Torah, because the moment someone internalizes what he or she has learned, that learning begins to assume his or her shape. In this sense, the vessel and the contents are inherently interrelated.“
There are several ways to study Torah, but for the most impact, you need to be vulnerable and allow the words to resonate within yourself, and also allow yourself to illuminate the text.
As Kurstan begins life with her new husband, she is reading about the Temple and the sacred spaces within, yet she likens it to how they learn to share space in their new marraige “—how to make room for another person, and how to let another person into your space.” Or the division of labor in the Temple can be a springboard for Kurstan to tell us about negotiating the same within her life.
When she learned she was pregnant, she was studying a passage in Niddah that teaches that “all is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven.” There is nothing like pregnancy to remind us how little is in our control. And when studying Berachot (Blessings), Kurstan reflects that writing about prayer is much easier for her than actually praying. It’s difficult to make space for regular prayer with a newborn.
“Whereas Torah study is about taking the unfamiliar—the next page of Talmud, a new midrash, a new interpretation—and internalizing it until it becomes familiar, prayer is about taking the familiar—the same words we say day after day—and saying them with such concentration and fervor that it is as if we are renewing each day the miracle of their creation… Prayer is about standing still and looking inward.”
Kurstan was also an English major and now works in publishing and translating, so interspersed throughout her book are literary references that had me swooning in pleasure. She memorizes poetry on her daily walks; she sets aside time daily to read; her writing flows with metaphor.
She ends her memoir with this: “Scholars of Talmud consider how the text is informed and often even changed by its contexts; the same is true, perhaps, of the personal contexts in which I have encountered these passages. The text seems to change with each encounter because it resonates in new ways, and I, in turn, am transformed by each encounter.”
“Every point of entry is also a point of exit, and every end is also a beginning. This is why graduation ceremonies are called “commencement,” and this is why as soon as one finishes reading the Torah or studying the Talmud, it is traditional to begin immediately again.“
What I love about Daf Yomi and even in reading about someone else studying Talmud is that there is always more to know. These rabbis’ discussions that take place over many hundreds of years is a sacred dialogue. I can imagine coming back to each page again and again and finding something new inside. The text is not different, but I am different each time.
