Daf Yomi Week 108: What Happened Next Will Shock You
(What happened next is someone close to Shmuel died, and he blamed Pinehas as if he’d been cursed, so when Pinehas showed up to console him he threw a bunch of fingernail clippings in his face. Girl, the drama.)
Shabbat Shalom and welcome! I was meant to be coming to you from a short vacation trip this week, but the weather was so bad my travel was delayed. Fortunately I’m getting out today; I’m not going somewhere much warmer, but I am visiting friends who have promised to make me a large drink and a hot sandwich, which is all I really want out of life right now.
I feel like it has been a brutally exhausting week, although really it’s not so far out of the ordinary; mostly the ongoing discourse around Maus is just extra tiring. As former library staff and a lover of graphic novels I’m against the banning of books in general and comics particularly, which have a long history of being unfairly maligned. And it’s absolutely vital that the memory of genocide be preserved and openly discussed, so as to understand what happened and prevent it from happening again. But there is this weariness that sets in over Judaism, a rich and historic faith with a wealth of culture and a diversity within that wealth, always being boiled back down to the worst, most brutal thing to have happened to the Jewish people.
I joke a lot about how boring and tedious daf yomi can be at times, but I am coming to the conclusion that it’s not simply an act of dedication or a feat of endurance to do it. It really does enrich one’s understanding of Judaism on a macro level, that there is so much depth to this faith, such complexity and thought that has been poured into it for hundreds of generations. I had the thought that it would be a fine thing to simply send a free copy of Maus to every household in the school district that banned it; probably most of them would be thrown away or burned but some might be read, and that would be a net good in the world. But I wish instead that there was some kind of -- Talmud’s Greatest Hits, both the funny stuff and the meaningful stuff and maybe even some of the ludicrously boring stuff, that could be offered. Not to evangelize, but just to say: here we are in all our beautiful complexity. More than victims, and far too busy being human to be the boogeyman people fear.
Hard to write this week’s week in review, but that’s why I started doing these -- because when I started on Daf Yomi I didn’t find much documenting peoples’ evolving relationships to the task, and I thought I might as well keep one of my own. And this is an evolution, that the reading has truly imparted an understanding I didn’t have before.
Anyway, 278 weeks to go! Next week will be better, or in any case different, which is almost the same thing.
