The Oral Talmud

“ 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...

“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...

“ 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...

“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...

“ 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...

“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...

“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...

“ 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...

“ 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...

“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...

“  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...

“ 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...

“ 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...

“ 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...

“ 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...

“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...

“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...

“ 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...

“ 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...

“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...

“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...

“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...

 “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...

“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...

“ 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...

“The big error is to imagine that a general principle of interpretation applies only to the case in which we learned it.” - 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 week Dan & Benay work through to the end of the case of a person who is sick and needs to eat (and not fast) on Yom Kippur. We recognize this whole section of Talmud to be a sampler - a presentation of the m...

“Talmud is showing people how you do the sleight of hand. It's like magician school! And this is the manual! A magician never reveals his tricks! But the democratization of the old tricks allows for the new tricks.” - 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 week Dan & Benay continue to work through the case of a person who is sick and needs to eat on the austere fasting day of Yom Kippu...

“As almost always, there's a wink in this text. And the question is: has that wink been successful? Or have we lost track of the wink and opened ourselves up to the misinterpretation of this radical approach, for an originalist approach?” - 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 week Dan & Benay continue to build on the discussion of Pikuach Nefesh – how the Rabbis established and expressed their fundamental value that one should...

“In these moments of new foundings, I wonder the extent to which you have to make some kind of a plausible argument that your changes are actually an expansion of ancient principles. Otherwise, I wonder if they’ll be cast out by the immune system.” - 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. 

For the past few weeks, Dan & Benay have been exploring the rabbinic declaration that we should violate *almost* any Torah command...

“What's inherent in racism is the idea that you are judging groups of people in terms of value one against another. And I think that's precisely what's underneath – that's the svara essentially – about why you can't murder someone else to save your own life. Because you cannot say: I know my life is more valuable than that person's.” - 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 week, Dan & Benay continue to unpack the excep...

“And since they've shown us their work, we're able to say, ‘I'm not following the substantive rule in this case! I'm following the process rule – which says: How do I think about this new case?” - 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 dedicated to the memory and legacies of Ruth Bader Ginsberg & Breonna Taylor.

Dan & Benay pick up where we left off last week, in Nitza’s Attic, and...

“When the Rabbis start saying: Well, when does this line in the Torah apply? And when doesn't apply? – You forget that their first radical move was to imply: This doesn't always apply. That's enormous. It's that shift that makes anything possible.” - 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. 

So far, Dan & Benay have been exploring when the sages overturned Torah on a case-by-case basis, spending the last two weeks on pikuach nefesh and vio...

“Jewish law works like any legal system that survives for a long period of time – and it does so by the same mechanisms. And those mechanisms are the human insight that is brought to bear to modify, qualify, limit, and expand the law as one receives 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. 

Last week, Dan & Benay began to learn how the Talmud questions and defends the principle of Pikuach Nefesh, the tea...

“How do you take what you have and analogize, and tie some new radical thing that you don't have but you want to insert into the tradition? This entire passage is part of the instruction manual! This is some new twist of creativity, a twist of imagination.”  - 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. 

Benay & Dan turn to another essential Talmud text, the origins of Pikuach Nefesh, the teaching that we can and sh...

“Ultimately the only way that you actually take these lessons into your soul is through trying to implement it in your actual life. And often that's gonna be failure!“ - 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. 

Dan & Benay return to the daf after a series of interviews, picking up where we left off in Episode 19, exploring where the editors of the Talmud went next after the famous “Eilu v’Eilu” moment between the Schools...

“Part of what I love about Talmud is that even if you're just listening, there's so many gaps, so many rough edges, so many places that don't quite fit together. There're all these holes and you, the reader, burrow into those holes. You find your nook, your cranny, your space, your neek’rat ha’tzur. And it's the nature of the discourse that has you do that. I don't think it's possible to learn this text passively!”  - Ilana Kurshan

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud fr...

“I want activist reads to also be responsible reads, which is why I’m so committed to people being anchored and being able to actually read these classical texts.” - Jane Kanarek

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 week Dan & Benay learn with special guest Professor Jane Kanarek of Hebrew College Rabbinical School, author of “Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law” (2014), “The Pedagogy of Slowing Down: Teaching Talmud in a Summer Kollel” (2010...

“Opinions that are contradictory to one another, the opposite of one another are both the words of God.” - 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 dedicated to beloved Talmud translator Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz who passed in 2020, in the days before recording this episode. After honouring his life, Dan and Benay return to learning the deeply radical daf Eruvin 13. (For background, listen to Episodes 12, 13, and 15.) The legend of Rabbi Meir asks...

“We have to imagine that everything that we love today, or don't love, might end up in the Tisha b’Av of the future.” - 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 was originally released for Tisha b’Av in 2020, the Jewish calendar’s most essential day of mourning and remembrance. In our new podcast re-release schedule, this episode is coming out much closer to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. As Hashem w...

“I love the world of the Talmud. I love the fact that they need to justify, they wanna justify, they wanna talk and talk and talk; the way that people who are less socially confident sometimes find themselves doing, when we're in a situation where we're in a new community, and we just, you know, ramble! That's something I love about the Talmud.” - Shai Secunda

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 week Dan...