Come and Hear
What I Saw in My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey through the Talmud
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- $40.99
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- $40.99
Publisher Description
A literary critic’s journey through the Talmud.
Spurred by a curiosity about Daf Yomi—a study program launched in the 1920s in which Jews around the world read one page of the Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half years—Adam Kirsch approached Tablet magazine to write a weekly column about his own Daf Yomi experience. An avowedly secular Jew, Kirsch did not have a religious source for his interest in the Talmud; rather, as a student of Jewish literature and history, he came to realize that he couldn’t fully explore these subjects without some knowledge of the Talmud. This book is perfect for readers who are in a similar position. Most people have little sense of what the Talmud actually is—how the text moves, its preoccupations and insights, and its moments of strangeness and profundity. As a critic and journalist Kirsch has experience in exploring difficult texts, discussing what he finds there, and why it matters. His exploration into the Talmud is best described as a kind of travel writing—a report on what he saw during his seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Talmud. For readers who want to travel that same path, there is no better guide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and literary critic Kirsch (The Blessing and the Curse) turns his attention to the Talmud in this thoughtful take on the appeal of Talmud study's intellectual rigor. After realizing his understanding of Jewish literature and history required more of a grounding in the Talmud, he embarked in a program of study usually only undertaken by Orthodox Jews, to "read one page of Talmud every day for 2,711 days, about seven and a half years," a practice called Daf Yomi. By sharing his reactions to the texts, which cover practical religious questions about what is and isn't permissible on the Sabbath (for instance, what to do with "just born" items or problems that appear on the Sabbath day itself), as well as more fanciful parsing of rabbinic law—such as whether an elephant can serve as one of the walls of a sukkah—Kirsch gives a tantalizing taste of what reading and seriously grappling with the Talmud is like. The end result meets his goal of sharing the Talmud's "moments of strangeness and profundity." This is a great complement to Jonathan Rosen's The Talmud and the Internet.
