Liel Leibovitz: Why the Talmud Is So Hard to Love—and Worth Loving

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

Dovid Bashevkin: So I am so excited to introduce someone who I consider my chavruta, my study partner, who we have been studying and teaching Talmud with Tablet Magazine called Take One for the last six years. And I wanted to talk with you because I feel like what we did together, what we’re doing together on Take One is like the undergraduate course, and now Talmud Daily is graduate school, and then eventually we’re hoping some people go on to, you know, like their PhDs in whatever it is, Daf Yomi or Torah study.

Liel Leibovitz: You’re smart, I’m fat. What we’re doing in Take One is the amuse-bouche, the little kind of passed hors d’oeuvres.

Here, it’s the it’s the actual food. It’s the sit-down dinner. What you came to eat. Right, right.

Dovid Bashevkin: So I want to start at the beginning because what I really want to explore with you today is how does one go from not studying Talmud to studying Talmud? And your journey has taken you like deep, deep, deep in the chambers of learning. And when did you first have that twinkle in your eye looking towards the Talmud and saying, “This is something I want to know more about, study, or at the very least, I want to share it with more of the world?”

Liel Leibovitz: So I think you study Talmud the way you go bankrupt: slowly, slowly, and then all of a sudden. Which I think is a is a perfect metaphor really for all of Jewish life, because when I was taking my first steps into Jewish life, having had a front-row seat to academia’s collapse into chaos and mayhem, having become a father, feeling that the things I thought were were true and eternal, like all these institutions I put so much stock in, you know, the university, the newspaper, you know, the strength of our democracy, all those were crumbling before my eyes, and I I I asked this question, which is almost embarrassingly banal, which is like, “What is true?” And like so many of us, the only answer I could come up with was obviously Yiddishkeit, which was the easy part. The hard part was, okay, what now? You want to do this thing, how do you approach it? I didn’t know what the right way was, and I promise you this is all going towards Talmud, but I knew what the wrong way was.

The wrong way was emotional. The wrong way was ecstatic. The wrong way was enthusiastic, which are all words that we usually use to describe—

Dovid Bashevkin: Those are nice words.

Liel Leibovitz: Great words to describe great things, but but look, I was old enough, I was already in my early 30s.

I was old enough to understand the great danger that faced me. The great danger that faced me is that I would get really into something and then—

Dovid Bashevkin: Really out of it.

Liel Leibovitz: Like a fad diet, like a promise on, you know, January 3rd, “I’m going to go to the gym every day. It’s going to be amazing.” I realized intuitively that if I only sought kind of moments of tremendous elation and kind of great, big excitement, those moments are rare in human life.

And even if you have them frequently, they don’t really last that long. I mean, think about leaving We’re all Phish fans here. Think about leaving a Phish concert.

Dovid Bashevkin: Poster in the back.

Liel Leibovitz: The first two days, you’re like, “Oh my god, it was so incredible,” and you listen to it again and again. But then life takes over. Then your kids start making demands, and then there are errands to run, and there are work obligations to meet, and the excitement fades away. I knew that if this Judaism thing was going to change my life, I had to come to it on its own terms.

And and here’s what I mean by that. Look, you think, for example, about the way we daven. The way we daven is the most frustrating thing in the world, and I learned this firsthand, right? I went to a synagogue for the first time in many, many years, having previously been, shall we say, a few cheeseburgers removed from the faith of my fathers. And I looked around, and I was like, “What is even going on?”

Dovid Bashevkin: A few cheeseburgers removed from the faith of my fathers.

Liel Leibovitz: Right. I’m standing there at shul, a complete newcomer at an Orthodox synagogue, and I’m like, “I don’t understand any of this,” because all I could see is a bunch of guys going like, mumbling to themselves, and then all of a sudden, at intervals that I didn’t quite get, everyone stops and kind of comes together, and it was chaos. And I left the first couple of days thinking, “Why can’t we have nice church? Why can’t we have, ‘And now everyone turn to page 34 and we’ll all sing a hymn together,’ and then someone in a beautiful white robe would stand before us and deliver this amazing speech that will so move us to be better people?” And the more I thought about it, the more I realized, all due respect to other faith traditions, that fades away. You leave church on Sunday afternoon, and by Tuesday morning, you’re already not feeling it.

What you need, what I needed, was a real change. And finally, I’m going to answer your question. That is what Talmud does. There are other texts, wonderful, amazing texts in Judaism, that you could and should and must read that will leave you feeling so incredibly all those things we said before Inspired, sublime.

Happy, inspired, moved, sublime, elated. That feeling is hard to sustain. But opening a page every day and jumping into a question that forces you, literally drags you down, and says, think about things my way. And by my way, the Talmud means really think about things.

Example from the daf we are reading tomorrow, from Chullin. Rabbis are talking about, well, you know, if you cut meat with a knife, you can’t then cut radish, ’cause radish has a very sharp flavor, and then, God forbid, if there’s still some fat, meat fat on the knife, it will transfer to the radish. And you read this like, what does that have to do with anything? Until you take three steps back and you start thinking, oh, here’s what they’re telling me. They’re actually asking the greatest questions in the world.

They’re asking, why do we eat? How are we alive in this world? What should we do? And the answers that they give is, don’t coast through it, don’t just, you know, check boxes and have, you know, vague rules that you do or don’t understand. Get into the smallest nitty-gritty, and then use these constant explorations, these constant question-asking to really change your behavior. ‘Cause when you go back to that example of the knife of the radish, you’re like, right, they’re asking, why do we eat? What’s food? Is it just digesting things? No, it’s tasting it. And the same question, of course, goes to life.

What’s life? Is this going through the motion? No, it’s stopping and tasting every little flavor, and making sure that every little flavor on the tip of our tongue is good, and holy, and builds our palate some more. It could only be achieved, this incredible palate-building exercise, emotional, spiritual palate-building exercise, if you truly jump into the mines of Gemara. The mines of Gemara sounds like something out of The Lord of the Rings, right? The dwarves are going to the mines of Gemara. And really dig deep and hard for years for these nuggets of meaning that are the most precious metals in the world.

Dovid Bashevkin: I love what you’re saying right now. You know, it reminds me, when you think about life, a lot of times people think about like these major existential moments, these were major narratives. And when you were speaking, it reminded me of a somewhat famous presentation. It was David Foster Wallace when he spoke at Kenyon College, and he spoke about, what is the value of a liberal arts degree? This is back in the day when liberal arts degrees were really trying to accomplish something.

The example he gave is is almost exactly what you said. He said, what I am trying to do with my students is change the way they think when they’re online at the supermarket, which is like the actual fabric of life. I’m not trying to change the way they think when they’re at the top of some mountain in some monastery. I want to change the way you think in your the grit of day-to-day life, when you’re online in a supermarket, and you notice how many items the person in front of you has, and you you’re like, you know, like seething and like trying to literally want to like murder the person because they’re taking too much time in this line, and literally change the way that you that you think in the in-between moments of actual lived experience.

And that’s why I think the Talmud, what I find is so amazing, is almost how not epic it can be at times, how detail-oriented, the way that it shifts your focus into the daily rhythms of everyday life.

Liel Leibovitz: Crazy, frustrating, sublime, and irreplaceable. Look, as a kid, I was obsessed with this French I still am very much obsessed with this French writer named Marcel Proust, the famous Jew, or, you know, Sure, who Not halachically Jewish, but somewhat, somewhat Jewish. We’ll we’ll He’s part of the team, given that the great kind of events of his life was were the Dreyfus affair.

And he wrote one book, In Search of Lost Time. It’s about three 3,000-something pages long. It is the closest work to the Talmud that anyone has achieved in modernity. It is just that.

It is an exploration of everything: this cookie, this flower, the sea, the architecture in this tower, the emotions I’m feeling, my lamppost, everything. He has these observations like, don’t ever discount the furniture in your room. And by observation, I mean he goes on for about five or six pages, because the furniture in your room, he says, are imbued with the essence of who you are. They’re the limits of your world.

Basically telling you the same thing David Foster Wallace is telling you, the same thing the Talmud is telling us: Don’t go looking for God on top of the mountain top. Look for God in your night dresser. Look for the smallest details. Ask yourself, why am I living this way? Why am I making these smallest choices? Sure, I understand why I am choosing to be Jewish, and it’s very beautiful, and good, and and moving, and we hear these great, you know, speeches on Rosh Hashanah from the rabbis, and we we feel elated.

But ask yourself, when I wake up in the morning and I’m brushing my teeth, how am I doing this? Am I doing this correctly? Is this action a real manifestation of my unlimited Godly potential? Am I being God’s partner in creation right now in the best way that I can? Am I living my best life, not in the Hallmark, silly, kind of, you know, in- internety sense of of the word, but in the most true, profound way. And that’s what the Talmud helps you to achieve, by asking you to question everything. And not just question as in, you know, throw some doubt or shade into it, but question as in really inquire into the intricacies of how the thing works.

Dovid Bashevkin: I want to go on the flip side and come back to an analogy, because it’s not the first time I’ve heard this analogy.

You briefly touched upon an analogy of like the January 3rd gym commitment. And what’s very interesting is I remember I had a friend, we haven’t been in touch in a long time, her name is Sophia Zohar, shout out to Sophia, she had a long post, which I actually included in my essay on Berachot, where she literally compared the study of Daf Yomi to that gym membership, where every time there’s a new Daf Yomi cycle, like you see all these people coming in, they’re they’re starting the first tractate, they’re excited, and then slowly it thins out. For the crowd that never even shows up, for the crowd that, you know, is vaguely familiar that there is a document called the Talmud, they’re in touch with their own Jewish identity, but they never associated that with the Talmud, what do you think are the barriers of why people are not engaging more deeply in serious Talmudic study?

Liel Leibovitz: That’s a great question. Honestly, there’s one barrier, and the barrier is gym think, right? We walk into a gym, let’s stay with this metaphor, because, look at me, I clearly haven’t been to the gym, you know, since, I don’t know, the Reagan administration.

Dovid Bashevkin: I think for both of us it’s been a minute.

Liel Leibovitz: You know, it shows for one of us more than the other. If you visit any gym, again, I didn’t do this in person, but I sort of see videos, they’re very beautiful. They’re inviting.

Everything about them screams hospitality. There’s a reception desk like in a fancy hotel. There’s usually a gift shop with like beautiful clothes and like a juice bar right up front, and they advertise how beautiful and new and advanced the machines are, and there’s a spa and all these amenities. And that’s exactly the problem, because too many of us want that.

We want the convenience, and we want the amenities. We are the generation who clicks a button and everything arrives at our doorstep. The Talmud beautifully and incredibly is the opposite. The Talmud is the world’s worst gym.

You walk in the door, it’s like, you know what? Forget those who never make the commitment. Let’s talk about the poor saps who do, and think, “I’m going to do this,” and they open the book, and the first thing they read is, “Me’ematai korin keri’at Shema?” What? Hold on! It’s like already moving! Introduction? It’s like stepping into an escalator, and all of a sudden, like, there’s no rails, and everything is going…

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s stepping onto a moving treadmill.

Liel Leibovitz: And you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, why am I talking about keri’at Shema? Explain to me what’s going on.

Why did you start here? What’s the order? Why didn’t you just write an introduction? This is the most maddening thing in the world!” And the maddening is precisely the point. The point is precisely to tell you that the greatest public health hazard is addiction to convenience, addiction to simplicity, addiction to ease of use. “I want to quote-unquote understand.” The Talmud does not want you to understand. It wants you to ask.

It wants you to feel frustrated. It wants you to bang your head against the wall and say, “I don’t understand any of this.” And Dovid, I’ll be very honest, we’re now about a year towards the end of the cycle, I think I understand much less right now about Talmud than I did When you started. before I first started learning Gemara. The depth and the breadth of the vistas have become more understandable to me, and I know how vast this landscape, and how I will probably never ever begin to even see but an iota of it.

That’s exactly what you’re doing here. And part of the modern problem is that we all, we’re all into marketing! We’re all in marketing, no matter what our profession is, we’re marketing. “We’ll make this accessible!” This is what you and I did. Yeah.

“We’ll make the Talmud accessible!” The beautiful thing about the Talmud is that the Talmud actually tells us the opposite, like, “You make me accessible? I don’t want to be accessible. You don’t want to open the door, don’t open the door, that’s on you. I only want the kind of people who don’t need the marketing. I only want the kind of people who don’t need the fancy juice bar or the gift shop or the reception desk, kind of people who came here to actually work out.” Like in the movie Rocky, right? It’s like, you don’t need a gym.

You need You need a freezer full of slabs of meat. That’s what you need if you want to be a world champion. That’s who the Talmud is for. Not for everyone, but boy, if you take this journey, going to be a champ.

Dovid Bashevkin: I am so grateful for the journey that we’ve gone on, and one of the things that I’ve developed, because I want to hear Every Friday what we’re doing is we’re trying to introduce people to different Talmud educators. And in a way, I wanted you to be right at the beginning, upfront, because you’re the For…

Liel Leibovitz: Because ma’alin bakodesh ve’ein moridin. You start slow, and then you go to the actual people who know something.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s perfect. No, no, no, no, no. It’s because there is a huge audience who, like, you brought the Talmud—I mean with Take One through Tablet—people who never thought that this is something I would want to engage with and dance with, and you found a way of making it sweet, making it digestible, letting them know this might not be, you know, the inner, inner, inner chambers, but you at least pointed out a doorway. And one of the things that I wanted to do is introduce the listeners who are going through Talmud daily to the people who I think have done the most masterful job of at least, like, giving the tours of the Talmud.

Liel Leibovitz: At least letting people understand. Here’s the thing that you don’t get. I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s a show about the Talmud, of course I’m going to interrupt, and I’m not sorry at all. Here’s what you really don’t understand, and by you, I don’t mean, chas vechalilah, you, Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin, I mean, I mean one, I certainly didn’t understand this.

You start off and you think to yourself Talmud is for Talmud scholars. It’s for people with long beards and black hats. It’s for quote-unquote Orthodox Jews. You don’t understand how much of the spiritual, intellectual genius of the Jewish people, how much of the wisdom, how much of the humor, how much of the, to coin a term, chutzpah, comes precisely from these pages.

You don’t understand, in other words, that it’s yours. I had the occasion, not too long ago, to witness something incredible. I was with a friend who had done very well, and another friend came to visit him, and they were sitting together and having a great time, having not seen each other for a very long time. And all of a sudden, my friend said to his friend, “You do remember your stock options, the ones that I gave you back when we were young, you know, when you were helping me out with that little loan or whatever it was?” And the friend looked at him and said, “What are you talking about?” And then it turned out that this guy, whom my friend had not seen in years, had, in some bank account he didn’t even know about, tens of millions of dollars.

For real? For real. That were waiting just for him. This was a complete life-changing moment. This is how I feel about Talmud.

Somewhere in a bank account, there are tens of millions of dollars’ worth of wisdom that are already yours, and you’re not even going to make a small withdrawal? You’re not even going to see what this thing is about, this thing that has shaped every great Jewish mind we admire throughout history? That’s the thing that frustrates me the most. In other words, I don’t want to make it accessible, because as I said a moment ago, I don’t believe in accessibility. I believe in hard work. I love that it’s not accessible.

I love that it’s kind of like gritty. Really gritty. I love, and this is something that you and I talked about a lot, that the first page of every tractate is two, because page one is you. Your decision to go on and say, that’s the first page of the Talmud.

But at the same time, you have to know about this. All I want to do in life is just to make people know that this belongs to them.

Dovid Bashevkin: That you have money in your bank. It’s already there.

Liel Leibovitz: It’s already deposited. You have all the money in the bank. You’re already a millionaire. Go and enjoy the spoils.

Dovid Bashevkin: Take out a withdrawal. On every one of our interviews with a Talmud educator, I wanted to ask a question from our Talmud questionnaire. These are more rapid-fire questions, if you need to phone a friend or grab a—

Liel Leibovitz: I’m turning off my my conscious mind.

Dovid Bashevkin: I am sitting here I just want to hear.

Liel Leibovitz: In a state of Zen. I’m here.

Dovid Bashevkin: Here we go. Ready? This is our official Talmud questionnaire.

Let’s start with question number one. Who do you consider your primary teacher of Talmud?

Liel Leibovitz: Dovid Bashevkin. Next question.

Dovid Bashevkin: Come on now.

Liel Leibovitz: That’s the God’s honest truth. Absolutely. Really?

Dovid Bashevkin: That means a great deal.

Liel Leibovitz: Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin is the only answer I will consider.

Next.

Dovid Bashevkin: How would you explain what the Talmud is to somebody who has never engaged with it before?

Liel Leibovitz: I would borrow the words of my good friend Jonathan Rosen who said, “It’s not a book. It’s a drifting net for catching God.” A drift I like that.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s a gorgeous imagery.

I love that. If you were introducing someone to Talmud for the first time, where would you begin? For the first time, where would you start that?

Liel Leibovitz: I would start completely uninterestingly and uninspiredly. I would start at the beginning because—

Dovid Bashevkin: Meaning on the first page of—

Liel Leibovitz: On the first page, because of the confusion that ensues, but then that moment in which the rabbis break apart the three shifts of the night. The first one is when you hear dogs crying somewhere in the distance.

And then when you hear a woman talk to her husband. And then when you hear a boy crying. It is so beautiful, poetic, and evocative, and it leads you right into this beautiful conversation in which the rabbis are saying, “Well, but if we could do it all night and then why why put any limitations on it?” “Well, because we need to put a fence, because if we didn’t, you’ll just come home from work and you’ll say, ‘Whatever, I have all night to pray Ma’ariv. I can go watch some Netflix, I can eat dinner, I can drink a beer, I can relax a little bit.’ Next thing you know, you’re waking up on the couch and it’s 7:00 in the morning and you’ve overslept.” There is so much poetry and deep insight into human nature, all rolled into what seemingly is a quote, unquote boring halachic discussion.

I would not start with the beautiful, moving Agadah stories. I would not start with, you know, some of the tractates that move me most, like Yoma, etc., Mo’ed Katan. I would start at the very beginning. The rabbis knew exactly what they were doing.

Dovid Bashevkin: I could not agree more, and my theory that I plan on on sharing is that actually, although you’re 100% right, one of the great features of the Talmud is that there is no introduction. Others have written introductions, but the Talmud didn’t write an introduction for itself. I think the introduction to the Talmud is the first mishnah in Berachot. Oh, 100%.

That is telling you what this project is about without telling you that it’s telling you what the project is about.

Liel Leibovitz: Couldn’t agree more.

Dovid Bashevkin: Next question: What is your favor — you kind of gave it away, but let’s hear. What’s your favorite tractate? Yoma.

Explain what’s Yoma about. I love that Yoma is your favorite tractate.

Liel Leibovitz: I’ve read enough Talmud to know that a student can never explain anything in the presence of his rabbi. So I will let you do it, and then I’ll tell you why.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yoma is a really beautiful tractate. It is also of my favorites. The main focus of the tractate is on Yom Kippur, but specifically, not how we practice on Yom Kippur, but how the high priest, known as the Kohen Gadol, would practice on Yom Kippur. It takes you through his day, one day, which is why the name of the tractate is called Yoma, “the day,” and it takes you through the service of the high priest on Yom Kippur, which is of the most beautiful, meaningful, it’s like choreography, it’s so gorgeous.

And the last chapter talks about how people like you and I observe Yom Kippur.

Liel Leibovitz: I don’t care about the last chapter at all, I have to say. I’m I’m profoundly uninterested in it, as much as uninterested as you could be in, you know, Talmud, which of course is still very interested. I love it because it’s a masterwork, not just of storytelling, this linear narrative of you take off this vestment, and you put on this vestment, and you take this accessory, and you put down that accessory, but also because I think it’s it’s Judaism personified.

Do you want to get closer to God? That’s great. It’s not vibes. It’s not feelings. It’s not vibes.

It’s action. It’s the things that you do. And you read the whole thing, it’s like, why am I reading this? Why do I need to know today what happened in the temple that hasn’t stood for almost 2,000 years? But then, of course, it ends with this terrible, and I mean this literally and and and profoundly, this awe-inspiring moment of all the people falling on their face when they hear the Kohen Gadol, the high priest, say the express name of God! And you’re like, oh, my God, that’s how it works! That’s the intimacy. That’s the payoff.

It’s the moment of preparing ourselves, and preparing ourselves, and preparing ourselves by taking on all these very intricate commandments that seemingly lead nowhere until you see where it all leads. It leads to change, a real change of heart. There is nothing like it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yoma is incredible.

Next question: your favorite story in the entire Talmud, and why?

Liel Leibovitz: What is the What is the rating of this podcast here?

Dovid Bashevkin: Let’s keep it Let’s keep it like a ’90s PG-13.

Liel Leibovitz: It involves a a rabbi named Elazar ben Dordaya. I don’t know that I can necessarily repeat it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Oh, okay.

No, the Yeah, you could totally repeat that. That’s in Avodah Zarah on page 17, I think?

Liel Leibovitz: Correct. It is an incredible story. I will tell it very briefly.

Dovid Bashevkin: You should know, my mother would always tell me, and this is true. My mother was very strict. I grew up in the age of Blockbuster. And my mother, God bless her, I’d always get a kick out of the fact she would always ask the person working behind the counter at Blockbuster, “Is this movie appropriate for my child?” And these people had like neck tattoos, I don’t know why—

Liel Leibovitz: That—made you feel very cool.

Yeah. Like, “Yo, what’s up?” But—

Dovid Bashevkin: But one thing that my mother would always say, because she wasn’t crazy strict. She was strict. She didn’t want me to see wildly inappropriate things, but she was always like practical, and she would always say, “It’s not any worse than what you’re going to read in the Talmud.” She would tell me that all the time.

“It’s not any worse than what you’re going to find in Gemara class.” Because Gemara class is about intimacy, sexuality, violence, it’s all there. I mean — So tell me the story.

Liel Leibovitz: — Talmud is a human book, nothing human is foreign to it. The story is about a rabbi named Elazar ben Dordaya, which loosely translates to Elazar, the man of the dregs of society.

He was a rabbi who, shall we say, was very fond of working girls. He loved prostitutes, and he invested most of his time in frequenting their their houses of ill repute. One day he’s told that there is a a new professional in the game who is better than anyone else, and he must visit her. She lives very far away, and her price is extreme.

He collects the money, he goes over to visit her, he puts down the payment, and begins to engage in the work that they had come there to consummate. And just as that happens, there is a loud occurrence of flatulence on the lady’s behalf. And she looks at him and says, “Just as this wind broke, so…” too, could you never take back your sins. And he runs outside, naked and terrified, and he starts begging for forgiveness.

He talks to the rocks, and say, “Rocks, please, ask God, tell Him I’m a good person, tell Him to forgive me.” And the rocks say, “Well, we’re just rocks. We, you know, we have rock business. Leave us alone.” And he asks the rivers, “Hey, please, you know, ask God, tell Him I’m a good person, tell Him to forgive me.” The rivers say, “Well, we’re the rivers.” Finally, he asks the heavens themselves, “Hey, you know, stars in sky, tell God I’m a good person.” And similarly, the stars in the sky say, “Don’t bother us. We have our own thing.” And so he sits by the side of the road, and he puts his head in between his hands, and he begs for forgiveness in a true, pure fashion.

And at that moment, we’re told, he dies and goes to the world to come. And the story ends with a bat kol, with a small voice, telling the rest of his friends that not only did he pass straight on to what we would call heaven, but even, they call him Rabbi there. The rest of the rabbis are like, “What? That guy? That guy? That big sinner, that, you know, that that philanderer, how how how could it be?” And Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi famously says, you know, “Yesh, yesh koneh olamo besha’ah achat.” There are those among us who have to work very hard for, you know, forgiveness and redemption, but there are some who could buy, quote-unquote, guarantee their place in the world to come with one moment of clarity, one moment of true repentance, one moment of teshuvah. Now, there is so much commentary on this story that I love, but I recently heard a really interesting bit of commentary that is very appropriate as we’re recording this, I believe today is the sixth day of Elul, we’re recording this in the month of Elul, the month of Jewish introspection.

And I heard a really good commentary from this great rabbi in Israel called Rabbi Shneor Ashkenazi. He’s the chief rabbi of Rishon LeTzion, he’s a Chabad rabbi. And he said, “Look, we read this story all the time, and what do we focus on? We focus on this incredible forgiveness. Oh, he sinned, he repented, and he went to heaven.” Says Rabbi Ashkenazi, “That’s the wrong point! The point is that Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya asked God to die.

He didn’t ask God to live. He could have said, ‘You know what? I am going to stop visiting prostitutes. I’m going to change my ways. I’m going to be a better person.

Please let me live and let me grow.’ And God would have granted that to him happily, much more happily than taking his life! But so many of us, it is so much easier to say, ‘You know what? I’d rather die than live like this.'” The great prototype, of course, being, you know, the prophet Bil’am, right? At the very end, what does he ask Hashem? “Let me die like a Jew.” Not “Let me live like a Jew.” Not “Let me give up my ways of idolatry and chasing money so that I could become like these righteous people who I’m seeing with my own God-given talent are incredible.” No, no, “Let me die like them so I could be mourned and honored like them in death.” That’s not the point! The point is to live like a Jew, not die like a Jew. And Elazar ben Dordaya, though it’s a very earthy story with a lot of, you know, flatulent prostitutes, man, it doesn’t get more kind of extreme than that, but I think it’s here to teach us precisely that. It’s much easier for us, as we want to repent, to think in these grand, almost like martyr-like terms, “We want to give it all, sacrifice everything.” That’s not the point. The point is the small little change.

The point is going to the gym on January 3rd. The point is opening that page of Talmud day after day after day and learning Gemara. That’s the point of the Dordaya story.

Dovid Bashevkin: I love that.

My next question, not stories, do you have a favorite legal debate or discussion in the Talmud?

Liel Leibovitz: That is an incredible question, very much influenced by you. I have recently on my journey began some semichah studies, meaning I study halachah seriously. The tractate we’re reading right now, Chullin, is chock-full of of precisely the stuff that I’m currently learning, which is hilchot ta’arovot, what happens when all kinds of things get mixed with each other in ways that make them questionable.

Dovid Bashevkin: A little bit of milk falls into—

Liel Leibovitz: A little bit of milk falls into, or a little bit of meat falls into a pot of milk or vice versa, or non-kosher food—it’s hot, it’s not hot, mixes with—

Dovid Bashevkin: Kosher food, how much?

Liel Leibovitz: I may just be giving this answer because that is where my head is at right now and that’s what I’m studying.

But the logic of it to me is incredible. First of all, because when I began this journey, I was frankly really confused that we needed a whole class on that. As far as I was concerned, the answer was just, “No! Something fell into a pot? Great, throw out the whole pot! Make a new pot, man! It doesn’t matter. There are laws and the laws are strict.” Then you open Masechet Chullin, and you start reading about things like the concept of shishim, right? The idea sixty, yes, that if there is, right, sixty times sixty times more the permitted thing than the prohibited thing, it’s not a problem.

You start understanding principle like the one we just discussed a moment ago of ta’am ke’ikkar The idea is that what we really want to follow is the flavor, because it is the flavor of something, not just its presence. In other words, there may not be any meat left in the pot, you took it out right away as soon as it fell, but it already gave the whole pot its, you know, bacony, God forbid, flavor. This idea is so beautiful and intricate to me. And then, on a totally different note, the other laws that I am very, very, very interested in are the laws of nazir.

Dovid Bashevkin: You never told me that. Nazir, I love.

Liel Leibovitz: Right. The obsession comes from the following place.

Because, again, it’s so counterintuitive. You read them, and when you start reading, you think, “I don’t understand why this is here. Clearly, this is a very good guy who wants to be, quote-unquote, more religious. So clearly, this whole thing is going to be about how this guy is awesome and how we should support him.” And then it’s exactly the opposite.

It’s like, “No, no, no, no, we don’t want angels here on Earth. We want humans. We don’t want you taking on more stringencies. We want you to find ways of making the Torah more and more and more approachable.”

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s such a great example, because it gets to the emphasis of the highest value of Jewish life, which is actually not strictness and prohibition, but something that allows you to really engage fully in life.

We don’t like that the nazir takes themselves out of—

Liel Leibovitz: I don’t know that it that it qualifies as halachah, though the end of the discussion is halachah, but that moment when Yalta famously talks to her husband, right, and says, “Look, for everything Kadosh Baruch Hu prohibits us, He gives us something comparable, right?” And he says like, “You can’t eat this, but you could eat that, that tastes kind of the same. You can’t do this, but you could do that, which is more or less the same thing.” And she asks like, “What do I get for milk and meat?” And her husband, of course, famously has the whole discussion about the consumption of the udder and how we are to treat the udder to make sure that it’s empty of of all milk before we cook it. It is a classic example, as far as I’m concerned, a, of the way in which you could always learn laws from Agadah and always learn stories from laws, that’s something you taught me. Yes.

And second of all, that none of these laws are needlessly stringent, difficult, lo bashamayim hi. In other words, these laws are here to help us question and answer the greatest conundrums of of human life.

Dovid Bashevkin: What advice would you give to somebody studying Talmud for the very first time?

Liel Leibovitz: Drink. I’m not joking.

I think we’ve been spoiled. Modernity has spoiled us. It has disenchanted this world. We come to to learning and we expect to understand.

We expect to make sense. We expect to to leave with questions that are answered. One of the greatest pleasures, and I’ve said this to you a hundred times, I’ll say to you a hundred times more, I love nothing more than, you know, I have this big leather chair where I sit and and and learn, and, you know, someone like my wife or or my daughter or my son will come and say, “Hey, what are you learning?” and I would describe, you know, the sugya that I’m learning, and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s very interesting. What’s the answer?” I say, “The answer? Do you even go here?” as the kids say.

“The answer is not at all the issue. The joy is jumping into the essence of the thing, is is really relishing and reveling in the question.” It is very hard for newcomers to understand that and leave and contain and hold these frustrations. I think it helps a little bit if you’ve had a l’chaim or six.

Dovid Bashevkin: Do you remember when you first fell in love with the study of Talmud? When you’re like, “Wow, like I think I think I actually like this.

I’m enjoying this.” Banal alert.

Liel Leibovitz: Banal answer alert. The first time you and I did learn together.

Dovid Bashevkin: It was in this very room, I think.

Liel Leibovitz: It was in this very room, and it was precisely my complete and utter befuddlement and deep understanding that I had just read a page, me, a person who had, you know, previously completed PhD studies in in a university some people would say is a good university, Columbia, sadly no more, no longer so great, but I’m thinking I’m thinking to myself, “Look, I have a PhD, I’ve read German philosophy and and and Greek texts in Latin, the original, etc., etc. I’m sitting here, and this is about as foreign to me as I can imagine, and you’re explaining this to me, and I’m holding on for dear life, and I’m thinking to myself, this is what growth looks like. This is what change looks like. This is what the highway to a better place is all about.” I absolutely love this.

Dovid Bashevkin: Okay.

How has Talmud study changed your religious life, if at all?

Liel Leibovitz: Profoundly, in ways that I that I could spend a very long time explaining, because it made me at one and the same time both, quote-unquote, much more and, quote-unquote, much less religious. This is a long way of saying that I find this whole term, religious, to be ridiculous and objectionable. It’s very Catholic, right? No offense to our Catholic friends, but it says like, “Well, here’s the correct path, and you follow it in the correct way, that’s the religio. To me, it’s all about getting close to Hashem.

Talmud has taught me that there are so many paths. There’s one law, there’s one halachah, but so many ways into it, so many ways to understand it, so many questions that remain unanswered, so many answers that should be requestioned. And when you start to understand things this way, first of all, you go much deeper down the rabbit hole and you feel yourself much more connected, much more rooted. You want to learn more.

I started this journey, I was like, okay, well, you know, maybe I could spend an hour a day, and that would be it. As you could tell by looking at my beard, that hasn’t been the case. I’ve gone I’ve gone, you know, far deeper because it consumes me in the best possible way. At the same time, it actually clarified some of my understanding of some issues, religious issues, and made me want to take steps that, from a more traditional perspective, would seem problematic, like, for example, the way I dress, right? And it’s very important to me to dress in a way that is not immediately identifiable with the decisions a person like myself makes of, you know, attending an Orthodox yeshivah, learning for the rabbinate, learning Gemara, keeping, you know, Shabbat and mitzvot, etc., because the more I know, the more I know that I don’t want there to be this distinction in the world when people see me and think, oh, I can’t really approach this person because he’s because he’s there, and I’m here.

He’s from a different class. He’s religious! Like, nah, man. The most religious event I’ve attended in the last year was a Phish concert at the Sphere, when we all stood together and were were quivering as one person, with this amazing, you know, light show component of it and the music playing. And I thought to myself, this is what it’s about, not like making sure that you have the white dress, the white shirt, and the black yarmulke, and the hat just so with the right dent in the right place, but actually being together with other people who could not be more different, but you’re there for the same reason, and you’re all quivering together.

Dovid Bashevkin: When and where is your favorite place to study Talmud?

Liel Leibovitz: I have a very specific routine. Because I have to record this podcast, and it is a daily podcast, That’s Take One. Take One. Because learning Daf Yomi, it’s every bit like borrowing money from the mob.

If you miss one payment, you know, someone will come and break your legs tomorrow, because somehow you’re nine days behind.

Dovid Bashevkin: So if you miss one day You’re gone, man. Take a weekend off, you’re finished. The interest, the vig is not worth it.

Liel Leibovitz: Right. So the mornings Right, the mornings for me are just like making sure that, you know, I did the chazarah, I wrote the script, I recorded the episode, everything is okay, we can move on to more earthly things. Then comes the hour of, say, 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., and everyone’s asleep, and everything is quiet, even in New York City. And there’s a drink, and there’s a big book, and the air condition is blasting, full-on.

And I can really sit and read. And by really sit and read, I mean I could really let my mind wander. I believe the opposite of what I think most people believe about studying. I don’t like concentration when I’m learning Gemara.

I like the opposite of it. I like huge distraction, not distractions like, oh, I have an email, oh, I have—no, I know exactly. The opposite. Distractions like, oh, why are they saying this? Why why are they thinking—

Dovid Bashevkin: Let me go down this rabbit—

Liel Leibovitz: Hole, and that rabbit hole.

Right. Hold on. Why why are they saying that? You asked me about my favorite, you know, laws. The other day, again, because Chullin on the mind, the other day, an amazing, amazing question on the daf.

Like, what happens? This is the most beautifully Talmudic thing. What happens if you eat, you know, chatzi kezayit, half a kezayit, half of the legally permitted quantity, and then you regurgitate, you basically throw it up, and then you re-consume it? Did you eat?

Dovid Bashevkin: Regurgitation appears more than one would think at first glance in the Talmud.

Liel Leibovitz: You know? And then they go into these questions like, well, is eating about the throat or is it about the stomach? Do you actually need to Exactly.

Dovid Bashevkin: Does to eat, to consume, does it mean to swallow, does it mean to digest it?

Liel Leibovitz: And I find myself sitting there with a big tumbler of scotch thinking, that is one of the most profound questions I’ve ever heard.

I’m going to put the book down on my lap for a second, and really kind of sail away. I think if you do it like this, you really let, you know, like the famous story, I believe the Kotzker Rav, like he had a student come in and say, you know, “Oh, Rabbi, I’ve been through the Gemara three times already.” And the Kotzker Rav says, “Yeah, but how many times has the Gemara been through you?” I like to let the Gemara go through me, and that can only be achieved late at night with a with a good mashkeh.

Dovid Bashevkin: My dearest friend, chavruta Liel, thank you so much for joining us on Talmud Daily, and let’s keep making Torah sweet.

Liel Leibovitz: God bless you.

Baruch Hashem, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to A, be a part of this in any way, shape, or form, but even more importantly, to know that this exists. Because cuz Take One, again, was if it was anything is If it’s anything, it’s the anteroom. It’s the reception room. Talmud Daily is where the real learning is going to happen, and I can’t wait to learn with you all over again, my dear friend and teacher.

Dovid Bashevkin: Thank you so much, my dearest friend Liel.