The Oral Talmud
An exploration of the Talmud through the “traditionally radical” lens pioneered by Benay Lappe. Whether you are a beginner to Talmud study or a long-time learner, by listening in on Benay Lappe’s study partnership with Dan Libenson as they explore foundational stories and material from the Talmud, you will discover the how-to manual that the ancient Rabbis left behind for future generations to help us re-imagine a new version of Judaism after the previous version “crashes.”
Episode 71: Hard Cases Make Bad Law
“Hard cases make bad law. You don't take the existence of theoretical hard cases that may rarely occur but do occur and make law based on those hard cases. You say, ‘Yeah, sometimes there are hard cases that the law can't accommodate, and that doesn't invalidate the law.’” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What if the Torah says exactly what it means, and we decide not to follow it anyway? In this e...
Episode 70: Cultivated Common Sense
“Don't think for a minute that the Torah actually meant money at the beginning. It actually did mean an eye and we changed it because that's what we do. That's what our project is. Our project is upgrading Judaism to fit the needs of Jews today and the world today.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What if the most important interpretive tool in the Talmud is basically: “Oh, come on”? In this e...
Episode 69: Juggling Arguments
“The Talmud has one message, one and only one message, and it gives it in 14,000 different cases, and that one message is, reader, you are tasked with making the tradition as good as you possibly can, and you are not bound to the Torah in doing that.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
The Talmud wants you to think you’ve figured it out. Then it pulls the rug out from under y...
Episode 68: Thou Doth Protest Too Much
“The entire Talmud is a response to the bind that we got ourselves into before the rabbis ever existed by claiming that our God writes books. That was the mistake of history. That caused us a lot of problems. To think that God actually writes words down and this document is the word of God was the beginning of the end.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What if the rabbis were...
Episode 67: Sleight of Hand
“ Imagine you're reading some magician textbook, how to do magic… the magician is saying since he transferred the coin from his right hand to his left hand the coin disappeared. But he doesn't actually believe that it disappeared. He's showing you how to make the audience believe it disappeared. If the person reading the handbook thinks the way that you make something disappear is you move it to another hand, the joke is on that person.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 150...
Episode 66: Rules of Interpretation
“This is a really great text to be learning because it shows that something as clear as day in the Torah doesn't mean what the words purport to mean. That doesn't stop the rabbis from legislating it out of existence and ultimately claiming that they didn't, that it always meant that all along.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What do you do when your sacred text is clear and you think...
Episode 65: Attractive Instability
“The process that made the eye for an eye a dead letter is exactly the same process that could be used to make the Leviticus against homosexuality a dead letter, and that's what we're called to do because that's the tradition.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
"An eye for an eye" seems perfectly clear, until the rabbis decide it doesn't mean what it says. In this episode, Benay and Dan dive...
Episode 64: Showing Their Hand with Menachem Fisch
“ I'm always asked, 'You're obviously an anti-traditionalist, so why are you going back to the Talmud all the time?' An anti-traditionalist doesn't need an authoritative history. The answer is that the only way to begin to convince traditionalists of an anti-traditionalist option is to show them that there's a long tradition of anti-traditionalists.” - Menachem Fisch
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
Does the Talmud preserve tradition or secretly rewrite it? In this episode...
Episode 63: Calculating Damages
“ When people say, ‘What makes something Jewish?’ A lot of times you're looking for some substantive answer to that, emphasizing the value of tikkun olam or whatever it might be. But no, what makes it Jewish is that it has been part of this process of changing and remixing, that's the essence of Judaism.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
Breaking someone's arm is easy to see. Breaking their future is harder to e...
Episode 62: The Rabbis and Gender with Gwynn Kessler
“[The Rabbis] show us, and texts from antiquity across the board show us, that any silly political insistence that there are only two sexes and there always have been, is just straight up nonsense. They attest to more than two genders. And yet, we repeat it so often that they inherit a binary system from the Bible and then scholars writing about gender have projected our assumptions about their binaries on the text.” - Gwynn Kessler
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can h...
Episode 61: Thinking Like a Jewish Lawyer
“ Even if you accept that we are nothing compared to Moses, nevertheless, we're sitting on the shoulders of Moses and everyone who sat on his shoulders. So we're actually having a higher perspective, even though we're smaller ourselves. That's an argument that accepts the concept of each generation being less impressive than the previous one but nevertheless, they can overturn things because they just see farther.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
The mos...
Episode 60: The Bottom of the Toolbox
“ I'm really starting to land somewhere for me with this text. I think this is an instruction manual for how to apply that very radical and broad directive of prioritizing human dignity over the precise following of the Torah when they conflict.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What if one of Judaism's most revolutionary teachings wasn't rejected, but deliberately buried? Deep inside the Talmud sits a breathtaking claim: human dignity overrid...
Episode 59: Is Dignity Greater than Torah?
“It is preferable to break, violate a prohibition in the Torah, anything the Torah says don't do, you can actually go ahead and do it if by not doing it you would cause someone significant indignity or disrespect.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What if the most radical idea in the Talmud has been hiding in plain sight? A tiny legal principle expands into a sweeping claim: human dignity may overr...
Episode 58: Living After the End of the World
“That's what Rabbi Yitzchak is saying, once the temple is destroyed, we are all in a state of unhealthy living, and our desires can only be satisfied in forbidden ways.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
The rabbis began with a thought experiment about a lovesick man, which we discussed last week, and they end their analysis with something far stranger: the suggestion that the entire world has been broken ever since...
Episode 57: The Lovesick Man
“ The issue here isn't sex. The issue here is objectification. So that can take place in a sexual context, but it can also take place in other contexts. So this potentially gives us the opening to say in a case where you have a disease that you're going to die where the cure would require the treating of another person as an object, that is not permitted. That's a much larger category. ” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us...
Episode 56: Children of Prophets
“ There's no question in my mind that retelling, reshaping the contours of the Jewish story is what you do. That's the most Jewish thing of all Jewish things.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
This episode begins with a surprisingly modern question: are we discovering the truth, or are we making it? We begin with myth, storytelling, and the uneasy feeling that every generation reshapes Judaism even while claiming to preserve it. The...
Episode 55: The Wisdom of Crowds
“The rabbis ultimately see us being the Rabbi Akiva character, that everyone is an innovator, an upgrader, a potentially radical rewriter. That's the story that they're telling over and over and over and over in the Talmud. That's the message that they're trying to tell one another, to empower one another.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What happens when the people start changing Judaism before the rabbis are ready? This episo...
Episode 54: Who Owns Torah?
“ People who learn the tradition own that tradition and therefore can do with it what an owner can do with what an owner owns. If you own your house, you can knock down walls, you can build an extra story, completely change it. You can knock down the whole thing.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
Who owns tradition? God? The rabbis? Your teachers? Or you? This episode begins with a strange...
Episode 53: What's the Point?
“You’re really wasting your time, you’re doing the wrong thing if you think that your job is to receive the tradition, protect it, preserve it, and hand it off exactly as you got it.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What if the point of tradition isn’t preserving it, but changing it? This episode begins with an obscure Talmudic line just three words long: “agra, de shmata, svara” or “The reward...
Episode 52: Raw Material
“ God only gave you raw materials. God always wanted you to mess with this. The story of the wise servant who turns the flour into bread, you could equally imagine him turning it into pita or challah or donuts or pancakes. I don't think any of those would've been the wrong answer. Anything that is healthy and nutritious and useful that you make out of it is okay. [This story] should shape how we view Torah. It gives a lot of permission to innovators at a time like now, when I think we've got to roll up our sleeves and...
Episode 51: Reading Between the Lines
“One of the criteria for a good life is did you understand a thing from within a thing? One way we could translate that is, did you read between the lines? Did you dig deeper? Did you reject the plain meaning? If you only read the surface level meaning, you get no merit for that. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Sometimes it's worthy to do, but don't call that Torah.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help...
Episode 50: Ultimate Questions
“You're not going to be judged on how much Torah you know. You're not going to be judged on other elements like how smart you were. You're going to be judged on did you make this a priority? What you're going to be judged on is, did you actually work to live the life that you wanted to live? Or did you just kind of hope for the best?” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Juda...
Episode 49: Passover in the Talmud
“ People often take rites and rituals and they miss the point. It would be like if your doctor wrote you a prescription if you were sick, and then instead of taking the medicine, you take the prescription and you put it on your altar, you bow down, you recite the prescription, ‘Oh, wonderful doctor, wonderful doctor,’ and you keep reciting the prescription. You're not gonna get better. You have to actually take it.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help u...
Episode 48: The Myth of Interpretation with Richard Primus
“ We have a Constitution that's almost impossible to amend but it must change to preserve the constant. And the mechanism for change is that we reinterpret it to keep it true, that it reflects our deepest values and highest aspirations. If we did not reinterpret it, there would arise a dissonance between what we think the Constitution says and who we think we are and who we are as Americans is a people who do not tolerate that dissonance.” - Richard Primus
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the...
Episode 47: The Maidservant’s Moral Power
“This story raises the questions of who's in our community, who can be in our community, and who’s svara should we be listening to? The answer is much broader on all of those questions than we typically think. She changed the entire tradition. She changed how we think about prayer and life and suffering and our role vis-a-vis God and what should happen in the world because we listened to her, we listened to her svara.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud...
Episode 46: Sweet Little Lies
“ We're meant to be profoundly, deeply, intimately, radically empathic with one another. My understanding should be influenced by what I know is in your mind. I need to get into your head and I need to get into your heart, and I need to understand how this is gonna land for you. And I need to intertwine my consciousness with yours before I know what the right thing to say is.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethi...
Episode 45: The Svara Torah
“ I think the value that's being privileged here is relieving suffering. It's not fiscal responsibility, it's not caution, it's not never making a mistake in giving to an undeserving person. Those are values, but making sure someone who's suffering isn't suffering, even if it's gonna cost us more money, that's a more fundamental value. And that's the Svara that wins.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
In this episode, a community collect...
Episode 44: When Tradition Fights Back with Menachem Fisch
“ I now read the Talmudic literature as a paradigm of rationality, where you realize that to be rational you have to be self-critical. But you can't be fully self-critical merely by talking to yourself.” - Menachem Fisch
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
A philosopher of science walks into a Talmud conversation and everything shifts. In this episode of Oral Talmud, Dan & Benay sit down with Menachem Fisch, who didn’t grow up inside the Talmu...
Episode 43: Black Mold
“ The rabbis would acknowledge that's not the reading that is closest probably to the original intent. It's nevertheless a justifiable reading because the ends is justifiable. And we're using our reading as a way of not completely breaking the chain. We still wanna have some connection to the past, even though we know this is the most strained connection possible to the past. And that actually feels like a more laudable reason to do misreadings than one in which you're trying to fool people.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study...
Episode 42: But I Sat on His Grave!
“ The power of the methodology that is modeled over and over and over in the Talmud is that it makes very clear that we are not limited by the original intent or the obvious meaning of a text. So even if a text actually does mean what it looks like, it means, and we find it difficult, we are not bound to continue perpetuating that norm in the tradition.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judais...
Episode 41: Goldilocks and the Wayward Son
“The whole myth of ‘God wrote this,’ which I don't believe the rabbis bought into, is necessary in order to make these rationales convincing. It isn't so much intended to guarantee people's compliance and observance. What if that myth, ‘God wrote this’ is necessary to justify the hyper literal interpretations away from the text?” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What if the purpose of a question isn’t the answer, it’s how the qu...
Episode 40: Consciousness of Guilt
“That’s one of the reasons there's a crash because it's dealing with a new reality where everybody has the potential to know everything. And so there's no more hiding. And so what we have to do is to reinvent a Judaism that is palatable to everybody who's expected to participate.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What happens when the crowd finally says stop? In this episode, Dan and Benay stay wi...
Episode 39: A Glutton for Punishment
“ The big idea of what we're doing is to say, well, if we can see what the rabbis were doing to the Torah, then we can potentially do that to the rabbis in the next era. Then I think the question gets raised, what are the categories that Judaism over the last 2000 years, may have constructed or approved of, that we now would not approve of?” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What...
Episode 38: Bad Seeds in the Capitol
“ Learning Talmud specifically was a spiritual practice designed to shape us into the kinds of morally sophisticated thinkers that can create a certain kind of world. So, at moments like this, it's not necessarily an odd thing to do.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What do you do when the world feels like it’s on fire? This episode was recorded the day after the January 6th storming of the Capitol i...
Episode 37: Wayward Sons of a Certain Age
“The Talmud is giving you a toolbox of methodologies and mechanisms to use to write repugnant understandings of God’s will out of existence.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What do you do with a sacred text that tells you to stone your own child? In this episode, Dan & Benay confront one of the Torah’s most disturbing passages: the law of the “wayward and rebellious son.” The Talmudic text we discuss...
Episode 36: A One-Way Ratchet
“What you can't do is try to ratchet it backwards to the original law from the Torah. No, it does not have a special status because it was in the Torah. Once it's overruled, it's overruled. Period. End of story.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
In this episode of Oral Talmud, Benay and Dan continue to discuss a text about divorce, and they uncover a radical rabbinic principle hiding in plain...
Episode 35: Repairing the World Means Admitting It’s Broken
“That is a point at which they're gonna say this is such a broken world that we can't let this stand. We're gonna have to repair the whole world to prevent people from falling into this category and that's going to mean overturning a Torah law.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
This episode is a new Talmud passage. It’s about divorce again – but not really. Dan & Benay begin by thinking...
Episode 34: Our Way or the Highway
“What's really important is not just that they're doing it, but they're showing you that they're overturning Torah with what their own svara tells them is a better take on how to be a human being and that's why I think this entire document of the Talmud is an instruction manual for us. I think they meant to teach us how to do it so that we could do it.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink...
Episode 33: It’s Svara All the Way Down
“It's always been that if we get to a point where svara tells us that this text is wrong, svara trumps the text.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
When we were recording this episode in November of 2020, it was feeling very much like we were living in a time of crash in America and in the world, just like the world at the time of the Talmud. That sense still feels...
Episode 32: Our Hands are Not Tied
“ What this text is trying to say, as is the entire Talmud, is ‘my hands are tied’ is not how we do Jewish. It's never been how we do Jewish, ever since the rabbis at least, and can never be thought of as a legitimately Jewish response to any suffering ever.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
When this episode was recorded back in November of 2020 it was a moment of deep uncert...
