Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Finding Joy in a Fragile World

Transcripts are produced by Sofer.ai and lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections. 

Dovid Bashevkin: I am so excited to introduce a former 18Forty guest who I really spoke to in our very beginning, an interview that I’ve returned to, quoted from many, many times, really one of the great educators and leaders within the Jewish world. It is my privilege and pleasure to introduce Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Shalom, hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Dovid Bashevkin: Thank you so much for joining, and I was saying earlier how people might not remember, but way back when, and I don’t think you even completely remember, but in that original interview where we were talking about the loss of your precious son in that awful, awful terrorist attack with the boys, and you told me way back then that you said, “I don’t want to be talking, you know, just about loss. I want to teach Torah. I want to teach Talmud.” So, to be able to come together and talk together, for me, is extraordinarily moving as somebody who really, I don’t think you appreciate how many times I’ve returned to the words that you shared with me many, many years ago. So, having you today really means a tremendous amount, so thank you so much for being here.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Thank you, and thank you for having this project. Anything that makes Torah and Talmud more accessible and introduces it to new audiences is just amazing, and it really has unbelievable effect. Sometimes you don’t even know what the thing that starts the process is, and just a few, almost seven years ago in a celebration when we finished Daf Yomi, for the first time we had a really big women’s celebration. And it’s not because there were thousands of women learning Daf Yomi at that place, there might have been around the world, but thousands of women came to celebrate it with the ones that did.

You can’t imagine how many people since then I heard that said, “Wow, I was inspired to start, and it’s so exciting.” So, any celebratory or happy meeting with Talmud gathers more and more people to it, and it’s just amazing, and so happy you’re doing this.

Dovid Bashevkin: So, that is the perfect introduction, because we’re talking about tractate Sukkah. And Sukkah is unique among all of the holidays that it is described in the Torah multiple times as the zman, the time of simchaseinu, the time of joy. The word simcha, which means happiness and joy, is specifically associated with the holiday of Sukkos.

And this tractate, which gives you kind of the roadmap of, you know, how to build a sukkah, what are the four species of a lulav, esrog, hadassim, aravos that we bring, and if you go through the tractate and you go through even the holiday and you’re familiar with it, it doesn’t necessarily click or make that much sense, why of all of the holidays is this considered the time of joy? Meaning, I might understand why Passover, you know, that’s an experience. You have everybody around a table, you’re celebrating the creation of the Jewish people. I understand even Shavuos, we got the Torah, what’s more joyful than that, the celebration of revelation. But it’s specifically Sukkos and our tractate Sukkah that is the roadmap to finding joy.

And I want to hear from you, where did you find, whether it’s in this tractate or in the holiday itself, to make sense of the fact that this is considered the holiday of simcha, of happiness?

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: So, it’s really, really multi-layered, okay? So, I’ll start on both ends and then I’ll do the middle. One is, three times in the Torah, the Torah explicitly says you have to be joyful on Sukkos, you know, and all the holidays have this mitzvah of being joyful on Yom Tov, even the ones that don’t say it explicitly, and yet by Sukkos we hear time and time and time again, it’s the time of joy and you have to make sure to be joyous before Me in the sukkah. So, that’s, you know, as far as the verses go. And all the way on the other side, when I speak of the reality, you spoke about, “I understand Pesach,” and you said, “I understand Pesach historically,” but you also said the experience, the Leil HaSeder, you know.

I can tell you, there’s nothing as joyous as moving your family out into the sukkah, and this I’m talking in practical terms. My kids love every holiday, and every holiday has its own charm, but there’s nothing like Sukkos. At least here in Eretz Yisrael, you eat in the sukkah, you sleep in the sukkah, you’re busy building it, decorating it, and it’s just like a different time. Like we say that Shabbos is like above time, a time, like a castle in time, here sukkah brings out a piece of your life to celebrate together.

So, that’s like on the reality of Sukkos. But even in like as far as the content and the spiritual content, it’s very, very multi-layered. So, we start out with Sukkos actually being the real end and beginning of the agricultural year, and people celebrate Sukkos when classically their crops are, they’re all in already, the warehouses are full, there’s a sense of plenty, there’s a sense of accomplishment, there’s some security to some extent, and naturally, this is the time of celebration, and we’re starting again. You can prove it even from the Torah itself that there’s a sense of ending of a agricultural circle.

And that’s, you know, if we can speak of Pesach, it’s a very tense time regarding the crops. There’s the din, the time of judgment. Harvest-wise, just before Pesach, you’re not sure, anything. You see the fields are full, but anything could go wrong.

And here in Sukkos, you can breathe, okay? Not for a long time, because life has its dynamics, but there’s a natural sense of a time of joy. So that’s the first layer.

Dovid Bashevkin: Rabbanit, allow me to jump in on just that first layer of just the profundity in the way that the holidays mirror the agricultural cycle. Meaning, there is this sense that they’re not just random dates.

They correspond not only to events that happened in the Torah, but the way the Torah very much describes them is connecting them to an agricultural cycle, to a societal cycle. And there is this understanding that, you know, you plant in Passover time, you kind of do like the sowing and the maintenance during Shavuos time, and then it’s finally you’re reaping during Sukkos time, there is this sense of accomplishment and finality of like we arrived. We don’t have to worry whether or not our efforts are going to yield anything. Now is the time where we’re able to take all of those efforts and take that final product and have that like experiential phenomenon that even if we’re not farmers anymore, we’re able to experience the seasons spiritually, which is a very profound idea—

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Absolutely, and—

Dovid Bashevkin: —that Sukkos represents.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Yes, and it’s not only in Sukkos. As you said, it’s the whole cycle of holidays also has an agricultural aspect to it. You can go through the year and live with it, like you did Tractate Berachos. I’m sure you mentioned something about the way prayer and your daily cycle syncs with the sun, with the stars.

You don’t live on some disconnected cloud. You’re living in this world with the world’s reality, with the world’s pace, and there’s something very profound and healthy with being in sync with nature, and with the daytime, and with the nighttime. A lot of that is difficult for us now. That’s one aspect.

So just like it happens in the daytime and the cycle in the day, it happens in the year and the cycle of the year. On top of that, the main place where original Sukkos and Sukkos celebration took place is in the Temple, in Beis Hamikdash. And if you go through the tractate, both in the Mishnah and in the Talmud, you see the clear connections, but also the deeper connections in many, many, many layers of the size of the sukkah, often to deduce the same, you know, a sukkah lower than ten tefachim, and then they go into this whole discussion that—

Dovid Bashevkin: The whole battle—

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: —divinity never goes lower than ten tefachim, or the descriptions of what are the blemishes on the four species, and this whole notion of blemishes that only exist in the world of sacrifices, and the description of sukkah as a place where Shechinah dwells. And they talk about, over and over and over, in many, many, many ways, it equates sukkah with Beis Hamikdash.

Now, originally, really many, many, many of the rituals did happen in Beis Hamikdash, and even there was a historic shift when the Temple was ruined, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai expanded some of the things that were done only in Beis Hamikdash. It started out as exclusive for the Temple, and it spread into our homes. And the mere idea that sukkah, or maybe even a tension between sukkah as our home and sukkah as a mini-Temple we get to build in our garden, okay, a mini-Mikdash, a holy place, a place where the divinity comes to dwell with us and we would later want to bring it into our home, first of all, it’s tremendously joyful, okay? This idea that I can carry something from Yerushalayim, from the place of the Holy of Holies, whatever, and bring it all the way down to my own garden and move into it and live with it for a week, I find it almost the definition of joy, okay, where you can actually turn your home into this place and this place into your home, and all together to be like mimicking a life of Mikdash. And really, in the Talmud and Tractate Sukkah is such a great example of it, you have layers of layers of almost combinations of discussions that sound technical, and then you dive like just a few centimeters in, and the deepest ideas come out describing the holiday, describing the reasons for the joy.

That’s a topic that’s very wide, finding all the ways where sukkah is actually embodying Mikdash and reliving Mikdash to a certain extent. And there’s a whole chapter in the tractate that describes the celebrations in Sukkos and in they’ll translate Simchas Beis Hasho’evah—

Dovid Bashevkin: The central, joyous celebration on Sukkos, which the Talmud spends a lot of time on the fifth chapter discussing.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Right. And it’s every evening in the Mikdash, there was this tremendous celebration.

It’s all about something that’s as basic and as pure and as natural as water, okay? It could be a very anxious celebration, right? Where all in Sukkos, we’re largely praying and doing all kinds of acts in order to secure our water supply for the next winter, right? Even the four species are a part of that. But it’s not done with anxiety, it’s done with celebrations, it’s done with libations and nisuch hamayim, and everything in Sukkos is very, very celebratory in in a very festive way, with with actually very interesting equivalents in the Torah if you take Dovid Hamelech, King David, dancing in front of the ark when it returned, making such a fool of himself that his wife, Queen Michal, speaks to him like, “What what do you think you’re doing? It’s not a behavior fit for a king.” And that is copied into Simchas Beis Hasho’evah, and you hear stories of the Tannaim juggling fire and supposedly making fools of themselves, but saying, “This is the joy of a celebration, of a festival, of Torah, of of what we’re doing here together,” okay? So, the prayer for rain that is essential, it’s the essence of life in an agricultural world, it translates into into pure joy and not into a very anxious, fragile point of view there in the celebration. So that’s another layer that has to do with everything that went on in Beis Hamikdash, and there’s a lot more to say about it. And then there’s the simplicity of leaving all the things, the stuff, the things we accumulate in in our life that crowd Even those amongst us that aren’t real hoarders, as modern people we hoard, you know, we create so much material.

And living a simple life for seven days, and in a sense there’re many ways of looking at it, even in the different explanations given. Some would say, like Rashbam would say, you’re living simple for a week so you know how to appreciate all the plenty and all the blessing you have in your life. Others would say, and in a sense everybody says, that it’s in order to feel the hardship of the journey in the desert after leaving Egypt. But in a deeper, deeper sense, and this many modern people would feel is true, there’s something so relieving about living simple, living natural, putting your trust in Hashem for your mere existence out there, this notion of sukkah as a cradle of divinity, ananei hakavod that carried or surrounded us.

Dovid Bashevkin: The Arizal describes the sukkah as a hug, as a divine hug, because you have two walls and the third wall that juts out a little bit is literally it’s being cradled, it’s being hugged by the Divine.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Amazing, amazing. That’s a perfect Not that he needs my excitement, but it’s a very perfect description. And one could say that if someone you really trust hugs you, you relax, you let yourself go, and there’s something about that, feeling the vulnerability and the fragility, but relaxing into it.

I think that’s a lot of the joy in Sukkos has to do with that. And if I can add one more thing, in Chol Hamoed Sukkos we read Koheles. And there, you know, he’s trying out all these ideas. He says, “I thought it’s all about wisdom.

I thought it’s all about joy. I thought,” etc., etc. I think it works very well with this notion of living in a sukkah. If you listen to Koheles very closely, and you hear him say that everything’s transient, okay, so the call in Sukkos is to fill that fragile, temporary living with joy. In Koheles there’s a verse that goes, “Re’ei chayim im ishah asher ahavta kol yemei hevlacha.” You should see life with the woman you loved in all these temporary, transient times you have together.

And one asks themselves, “What, if it’s so temporary and transient, what can I be so joyful about?” And that seems to be the message itself. This is the time, this But there’s like eternity in this bubble, right?

Dovid Bashevkin: 100%. I love that last idea that you ended with of this notion that the transience is actually supposed to bring us joy. Usually, the way that we feel a sense of permanence or a sense of being is to have things that are stuff, they are objects, I have my home, and that’s what makes us feel alive and have a place in this world.

And it’s almost stepping into vulnerability and stepping into transience and saying, “You know what? I can find safety here as well. I can find safety even acknowledging how impermanent life itself is. Doesn’t have to be depressing, it can be uplifting.” I think it’s such a profound idea about where real, lasting joy emerges from, not from building a skyscraper and slapping your name on it, but from the simplicity of all I really need is existence itself and there’s a joy to be found within this as well. And I want to mention, because it relates to everything that you said, there’s a very curious halachah as it relates to sukkah that we don’t find almost anywhere else, and that is that the Talmud says on page 25 that a mitzta’er, meaning somebody who’s uncomfortable, somebody who doesn’t want to sit in the sukkah, doesn’t have to sit in the sukkah.

They’re uncomfortable, it’s too cold outside, I’m feeling a little under the weather. It’s like a very low threshold. It’s not the threshold of like if you’re sick or like God forbid your life is in danger. That’s with all commandments, that’s with all Jewish life.

But this, it’s a much lower threshold. You’re uncomfortable, and because you’re uncomfortable, you don’t have to go into the sukkah. And I think what this is about is the sukkah, it’s an experience for those who are able to find that serenity there. Like not everybody is even able to find that full experience of serenity within the sukkah.

A question that I was hesitant to ask, but I think it’s on a lot of people’s minds, especially these last few years, I can’t think of anybody more qualified to answer this than yourself. You experienced a very profound and tragic loss of your son Naftali, and that was before October 7th, just to be absolutely clear, but on October 7th, we had this national event that took place on Shemini Atzeres, which is really like the final after holiday that follows the seven days of Sukkos. We have one more day where God says, “Stay with me one more day,” and it’s on that day that we have this collective tragedy that touched everybody, some obviously much more personally, but it affected the entirety of the Jewish people. And I’m wondering how you make sense or are still able to find joy on Sukkos after experiencing the tragedy of October 7th and its real link to the holiday itself, the holiday of joy.

It can sometimes feel like a blemish on this holiday of joy. We feel weakened and we’re more vulnerable. So how do we take that experience that we had collectively on October 7th and still have the ability to find that joy, that sweetness, when this is the last thing I would think after experiencing loss to find joy, when now you’re more vulnerable, it’s more temporary. I would think after October 7th, the only place you’d want to find joy is in a fortress, is in Fort Knox, you know, like we should build cement structures and even stronger structures.

So how do we learn to find joy in a post-October 7th world, even within Sukkos itself?

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Every time I say the part of the blessing for after a meal, and when it’s on Shabbos, we say a special part, Retzei, and there every week we ask, “Don’t let anything bad happen on our day of joy.” And for a while it was definitely with heartbreak, but even with almost a sense of irony, this is what we’re asking Shabbos after Shabbos, and that day was a Shabbos, and it was a Simchas Torah, it was a holiday, and overseas it was a Shemini Atzeres, and it was like the exact opposite of what we’re begging for. We’re saying, “It’s a joyous day for us, don’t let anything bad happen today.” Rabbi Sacks likes to compare often the happiness and joy, and he says happiness is when everything’s perfect, and you know, everything’s aligned like you wanted, like you wish, it’s a big cheshbon, it’s a big calculation of all of your life, and joy lives in the moment. And joy lives even in very uncertain times and in very anxious times, and could be definitely not in a state of happiness because you’re aware, you’re not just living in some kind of la-la land, but choose to be in joy, choose to celebrate the festival, choose to hold on to the better parts of your life, and at the moment, share your joy with other people. That’s one of the things he says.

He says happiness might be an individual experience, but joy in the Tanach is always shared with other people. Simcha, it’s a different verb. The fact that this happened to us on such a great holiday, you know, Simchas Torah, is an extra challenge on top of everything else that people have to deal with. Like in Israel, in the secular Israel, there was almost a thought of, “So this holiday is gone, okay?” Like Yom Kippur for many years was only identified with the war, so now Simchas Torah is going to go that way.

And I think there’s a very strong sense all over Israel that part of the way we choose to experience this is not to let this ruin our holidays, okay? To deepen, to make it more profound, to make it more of a choice, okay? Some horrible things happened this day, and we choose to celebrate the Torah, and we choose to hold on to it and not let this paint our whole experience. Beyond that, it’s actually a perfect match for Sukkos. It’s less of a Shemini Atzeres, but yes, part of the experience of Sukkos is the fragility, is the vulnerability, is saying nothing’s in in your safe, in your bank forever, now you can sit quietly, and yet you can live within that. You were talking about the mitzta’er, the person who’s uncomfortable and could be let out of the sukkah.

The idea there is, again, the tension that exists in in our tractate very strongly, between turn this temporary hut into your home, bring bring your technology in, okay? Arrange for an air conditioner. Do whatever you need to feel comfortable. And on the other hand, remember that it’s temporary and don’t don’t build it too strong and make sure it remains a a temporary dwelling. And why is the guy that’s uncomfortable exempt? Because, you know, if there would be too many mosquitoes you wouldn’t sit there if it were your home anyhow.

So it’s part of meeting this fragility and vulnerability and dealing with it, but making it your home. So I think we said like the experience of Sukkos is very, very multi-layered and Jews in different stages in history and in different times in their personal experience meet it through different lens. And sometimes it’s about how temporary and how unsafe life is. And sometimes it’s about the hug, the divine hug, and letting go and saying, you know, whatever it is, I’m in good hands.

And it’s definitely about There’s a Aramaic name for the sukkah that means the Tzila dimehemnusa.

Dovid Bashevkin: The shade—

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Exactly.

Dovid Bashevkin: —of faith.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Shade of faith. And you say, “I don’t know what else is going I mean I know, I experience what else, the pain, the suffering, the feeling of things going wrong, and yet I have a shade of faith, something over my head.

Sometimes I feel it very close and very safe. Sometimes I feel it’s shaking, but it’s there for me.” And for us, it was Simchas Torah, and in the end there is nothing left often except saying, “Okay.” And Jews have been through history in the worse worse worse circumstances, and they held on to this, and I get to dance with this, and I get to start learning this again. And whatever powers I’m lacking now, I’m going to derive them from here. I know they’re here.

They’re hiding, you know, black fire over white fire, and it’s going to come to me. And let’s start from the outside, from just hugging it, you know? If in Sukkos, it’s, as it were, the divinity hugging us, on Simchas Torah, it’s we hugging the Torah.

Dovid Bashevkin: And a lot of the Ah, that’s beautiful poetry. I’ve never thought of that before.

What a beautiful I just want to pause. What a beautiful idea. If Sukkos is about us receiving a hug from God, on Simchas Torah, we almost return the hug by holding the Sefer Torah and dancing with it, giving our revelation a a hug itself. What a beautiful idea.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: The truth is it’s even earlier than understanding the meaning of the words, you know? It begins with the hug and the trust that you get you know that you feel I might be totally in disarray now, but the answers are going to come from here. And also from the communal hug, dancing around in circles and saying, “Whatever is happening, we’re in this together.” A lot of that is shaping people’s experience.

Dovid Bashevkin: I want to share something with you, and it’s an idea that you’ve been sharing this whole time, but it’s an idea that I had about Sukkos and the experience of Sukkos that I actually got from our first conversation, which is why I was so excited to discuss Tractate Sukkah with you. I don’t know if you remember, but way back when when we had the interview on 18Forty, I asked you about what are the things that after experiencing loss you don’t want to hear.

Do you remember what you answered me way back when?

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: No.

Dovid Bashevkin: I’ll tell you what you answered me, and I think about it every year on Sukkos. You said when you experience this loss, people would come to you and they would tell you, “Tischazku, be strong, be firm.” And that’s the blessing that they gave you. And you said it it bothered you.

You said, “I don’t want to be strong. That’s not the way that you heal. That’s not the way that you take that next step.” You said, “I wish people would come in and give me the berachah, be soft, be soft. Have the ability to reconstruct, to not be so rigid, to not be so set, to not be so firm.

To open up the entirety of your life to the moment in front of you.” And I think about that on Sukkos, that softness, both within the sukkah, the temporariness of the sukkah, it’s not built firm, it’s not built strong. It’s built with a softness. It’s not supposed to be a fort. And I also think of it when we shake the lulav, it’s supposed to sway a little bit.

It’s supposed to have that movement. Instead of that rigidity and that stubbornness, what I learned from you way back when is that the answer to everything is not just to build stronger and to be stronger. We have that instinct, “Tischazku, be strong.” And you showed me the beauty and the power of softness, of temporariness, of of building in a way that leaves room to experience the entirety of the moment in front of you.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Thank you.

It’s true that at least from my point of view, probably the most important virtue in such occasions is flexibility. There isn’t a different lifetime to experience grief and loss, and then in the next lifetime to experience joy and blessing. It’s with the same hands that you juggle both, and you find room in your life for both. Thank you so much for turning this into a devar Torah for Sukkos.

It’s interesting, the connection you’re making with sukkah is very profound. I was thinking about it when I saw, I envisioned Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel juggling the fire in Beis HaMikdash and I was thinking about all the things we need to juggle with a soft, flexible approach to to everything that occurs in our life. This notion that when something chas vechalilah horrible happens, it pains your whole existence, that’s a loss of so many other things that are so many blessings, so many layers and layers of experience. Thank you for bringing this all into the sukkah.

It’s very special.

Dovid Bashevkin: A thousand percent. So, I can’t thank you enough. We always conclude our conversations with our Talmud questionnaire to learn a little bit about your relationship with Talmud.

And my opening question is who is your primary teacher of Talmud and what did they teach you?

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: The most important teacher for me is my father. He should live for many more good years. He’s a scientist and a talmid chacham. He is a graduate of Yitzchak Elchanan, was a chavrusa with Rabbi Norman Lamm.

When my older sisters had bas mitzvos, so it was very, very uncommon, but my father started for each of them they started receiving on a regular basis every volume of Steinsaltz’s new Talmud that was coming out. By the time I came around, I got like a whole bunch that were out already. It was clear that if he would give us a Talmud Vilna, it would be beyond us, because nobody taught us in school. But having the Steinsaltz Talmud and each of us having her own Talmud was a very clear message.

Just watching him prepare his Gemara shiurim for decades, seeing how he’s all in, and his rationalistic approach, and he was a talmid of Rav Yoshe Ber, and yet what he mostly got from him was the world of Talmud and halachah, and not necessarily In Israel, he’s always regarded as the figure of thought, of philosophy, and for him it was Talmud. It was all about Talmud. From the first day of Bar-Ilan University, so he’s a person of Torah and science. And I think that has a lot to do with both the fascination with Talmud and also the approach, the expectations, understanding everything has to make sense here.

And if it doesn’t make sense this way, it’s probably something I didn’t understand correctly, and I should dig more and more deeper and in different approaches. I think that’s the greatest influence.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely beautiful. If you were introducing Talmud to somebody for the very first time, how would you explain what the Talmud is, and where would you begin with them in the Talmud itself?

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: In the instructions of how to learn, there are discussions about learning learning Bible first, and then learning Mishnah, and then learning Talmud, and already from a very, very early era, there’s this notion that Talmud includes everything.

And it’s actually a phenomenon of people knowing verses through the ones that appear inside the talmudic—

Dovid Bashevkin: I’m like that. I’m embarrassed. I remember verses, I remember them where they are in the Talmud, not where they are in the Torah.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Right.

All of us should be better with that Tanach part.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yes.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: But the notion is that everything’s included there, and everything included is is it starts with the halachic discussions, and the instructions for life, etc. But the psychology of it, the sociology of it, the history of it, the values, it’s all there in the Talmud. I sometimes find it from a different angle.

I meet women who learn Torah, but somehow they think that Talmud is not for them. So, they say, “Well, I learn, I don’t know, Rav Kook, I learn Rebbe Nachman, I learn Chasidus.” And it’s fine. I think that there are many, many doors to Torah, and everybody should get on the train whenever is right for them, in the right station. But this notion that you could really understand Rav Kook or really understand Rebbe Nachman without knowing the talmudic concepts Everything they’re saying is talmudic concepts.

Their language is talmudic concepts, and then their examples still are talmudic. I mean, I’m not arguing with anybody on what they choose to do.

Dovid Bashevkin: No, I appreciate what you’re saying tremendously. Saying Talmud is the shared language of Torah learning for all works, meaning the language of Talmud is the language of whether it’s Rav Kook or Rebbe Nachman.

It’s a brilliant point that you’re making, and I appreciate it. My next question: What is your favorite tractate of Talmud?

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: It has a lot to do with the experience of learning it, where you were. Probably the most exciting time, I learned Gittin, two years that I loved with a bunch of friends that were terrific.

Dovid Bashevkin: A hundred percent.

Do you have a favorite person or personality in the Talmud?

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: There are personalities that intrigue me, like Elisha ben Avuyah, a tanna. You know, you can’t stop thinking about that story, and how did that work, and what went wrong, and he’s a a major scholar that became a heretic. go over. You know, there’s some things are going wrong there.

Dovid Bashevkin: Who lost his faith, yeah.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Lost his faith. I think he’s the ultimate other that generations of people learning Torah are dying to know what to understand. But I think I would choose Rabbi Yochanan.

Not only because of that story and about the many amazing descriptions of him, but also because of up to his generation in both Talmud Yerushalmi and Talmud Bavli, which he he’s it, you know, he he’s so dominant in almost every topic, had a lot to do with collecting and editing probably Eretz Yisrael Talmud, and is held in tremendous esteem in Babylonia. So, anything that he said has a tremendous effect. And altogether, we know so much about him. He lived a long time, and we know personal stuff, know what Torah details.

So, over years learning, you become very attached to his- I became very attached to his personality.

Dovid Bashevkin: I love that, and he’s not just a builder, he’s a rebuilder. And I think that there is a theme that we see throughout Judaism, we see it in Sukkos as well, where what we celebrate is not the initial building, what we always really celebrate is the rebuilding.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: It’s like the difference between strength and resilience.

Dovid Bashevkin: Exactly. And Sukkos is all about not the building, but the rebuilding. That’s the idea of the Vilna Gaon. It corresponds to historically the return of the clouds of glory to the Jewish people.

That’s why we celebrate it on the 15th. It’s the rebuilding, and that’s very beautiful, and that personality captures it as well. My final question is: Do you have a favorite time and place to study Talmud?

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: The best is to have a wonderful chavrusa, a wonderful group of people you learn with, there’s nothing like that. But in every stage of life you do, I find myself learning a lot in preparation for classes.

It feels like not the greatest way to learn because you’re not, you know, learning with no agenda. On the other hand, I find myself going into rabbit holes, you know, checking something because, you know, it popped up, and open another source and another source, and it throws you, you know, from one tractate to the other, and from one sugya you go checking. That I find amazing.

Dovid Bashevkin: Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel, thank you so much for joining us on Talmud Daily today.

We are so, so grateful.

Rabbanit Rachelle Fraenkel: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been so much fun.