The Doodles of the Gemara

Hi friends, and welcome to Talmud Daily. Just 10 minutes a day and we will give you a tour of the entirety of the Talmud.

Today I want to continue talking about the distinction between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. What we call the Torah Shebiksav, ksav meaning writing, and the Oral Torah, the Torah Sheba’al Peh, which is spoken.

Now there are a lot of differences between something in writing versus something that is spoken. And you could think about a few of those differences. You know something that is in writing, you know on a piece of paper, it’s there for anybody to come—you could read it, you could look at it, you could take it with you, you could put it on your shelf. Something that is spoken exists in a specific moment in time. You can record it as we’re doing now, but you have to really listen to it. It doesn’t exist on your shelf in the same way. The sound waves only are coming out in a very particular moment in time.

Now I think that this distinction between a Written and an Oral Torah gets to something far much deeper than just two different ways of giving over ideas or two different ways of preserving wisdom. We look at the distinction between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah as representative of something so much larger, and that is really our relationship with God and life itself.

If you think about it, the fixed Torah is the Torah Shebiksav, the Written Torah. It is fixed on the page. It is fixed in a Torah scroll. It is something that you cannot touch, you cannot play with, you cannot make any additions to. And then we have a dynamic, elastic Torah, which is the Oral Torah—which is how we build meaning, how we find meaning. And this dichotomy between a Written Torah and an Oral Torah really is representative of how we approach life itself.

Life itself has these two poles. Everybody in their life has a fixed Torah: the parts of their life they cannot change. Perhaps it’s what’s been encoded in your genes. Perhaps it’s where you were [born]. The parents and the life that you were born into—your childhood. We have things in our life that are fixed on the page. We cannot change it. We cannot substitute it out. We cannot edit it.

And aside from that, we have the way that we build and find meaning in our life. That is our Torah Sheba’al Peh, our so to speak Oral Torah of how we find meaning in our life.

And both of these are operative. If you ask anybody, you talk to anybody, both of these are operative in anyone’s life. Everyone has their own personal Torah Shebiksav. They have their written Torah. The parts of their life that are fixed. The parts of their life so to speak that are almost through revelation. “This is this is what God gave me. This is the hand of cards that I have for the rest of my life.”

But we don’t just have that. We also have a dynamic Torah, we have a Torah which is elastic, dynamic, where we build and find meaning, and this is the world of Torah Sheba’al Peh. This is the world of the Oral Torah. And what we are trying to do in this give and take between the fixed Torah of the Written Torah and the dynamic Torah of the Torah Sheba’al Peh, of the Oral Torah, is we’re really trying to wed the two. We’re trying to find meaning in that fixed Torah, we’re trying to build meaning and trying to extrapolate as much direction, as much spirituality, as much guidance for our ever-dynamic, unfolding lives.

We do this on a page of Talmud, but in a deeper more transcendent way, we do this with our life itself. We are always trying to figure out which parts of our lives are fixed—that we need to learn how to accept, how not to touch the page. And where can we make additions? Where can we find and build meaning?

You know when it comes to this distinction, and I think it is so profound, and almost underappreciated how profound this distinction between a Written and an Oral Torah is at the heart of Jewish wisdom and the way Jewish wisdom is transmitted.

And as an aside, you kind of find personalities that kind of are more like one versus the other. You find some people who they like it very fixed and almost the rigidity of Torah. Their souls are maybe more akin to that Written Torah. And then you find people who like the chaos. They like the dynamism. They have Torah Sheba’al Peh souls. They have souls that enjoy the wildness, the iterative process of the Talmud itself. But both of these we find in each of our individual lives.

Now I want to share something with you that I think is incredibly profound. And it is a poem that was actually written to me by a friend, but I think it is one of genuinely the most profound poems that is a rumination on this distinction itself between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.

I have a friend who I know from many years ago in day camp who is a brilliant and creative writer and poet, and they were raising money for some music album, I don’t remember the details. It was a cute album playing the kazoo, and if you donated money they would give you a prize. So you could give different tiers of donors, whatever it was. So I didn’t givea ton of money. I think I gave 36 bucks. And I asked for a poem called “Ode to Doodles in My Gemara.” Gemara is a word for the Talmud. And they came back with one of the most profound reflections on this distinction between a Written and an Oral Torah, and I want to share it with you because I think it is going to be so central to our ongoing journey through the entirety of the Talmud.

This is the poem. It’s written on this beautiful paper. It’s called “A Poem on the Theme of Ode to Doodles in Your Gemara.”

Now, thank God, one of my proudest possessions is my Talmud, and if you open up and look inside of my Talmud, it’s not doodles. That you’d have to go to my elementary school Talmud. But you will see side notes that I write all over my Talmud. This is my Talmud that I studied when I was in yeshiva, Tractate Berakhot, the first one. And if you open up the page, you’ll see all of these little notes on the side margins.

So this is what the poem says. Again, it’s called “Ode to Doodles in My Gemara,” and I, just as a disclaimer, real doodles, if you go to my fifth grade, sixth grade Talmud—plenty of doodles. Now it’s more notes, but this is really such a profound poem.

There are courtly book lovers and carnal book lovers, or so Anne Fadiman quibbles.

That’s from an article she wrote, “Confessions of a Common Reader” in 2000.

One shows respect by not creasing the covers, the other through dog ears and scribbles.

In Yeshivish culture, we find both reflected.

You never lay hands on the klaf.

Klaf is the term that we use for what we write down the Torah on. A Torah scroll is written on klaf. So the poem says, “in Yeshivish culture we find both reflected.” Both showing respect by being very careful and through dog ears and scribbles.

You never lay hands on the klaf, for Torah scrolls taking great care means respected.

The same isn’t true of the daf.

Gemaras get glosses and doodles quite merry.

They’ll take every thought that might barge in.

Many an insight or full commentary get started as notes in the margin.

Perhaps this duality is not untoward, though the treatments may seem independent.

It’s a paradox also displayed by the Lord, who is immanent while also transcendent.

That ending is so profound to me. Where after this rumination on why the Written Torah, a Torah scroll which is written on a klaf. We don’t even touch the klaf. We’re careful to be so careful. Forget about doodles, forget about writing on the side of it. We try not to even touch it. And yet you open up a page of the Talmud, and when we go through the page, you’ll notice all the writings on the side; it all began as, not doodles in a disrespectful way, but they all began as scribbles. And these two ways of approaching and preserving Jewish wisdom correspond to the way that we think about God himself.

On the one hand we have a Written Torah, the klaf, the scrolls of Torah. We don’t even touch it. That is the God that is transcendent. Those are the parts of our lives that are fixed—we cannot change. They predate any of our decisions and don’t emerge because of our decisions. That’s the world of the Written Torah.

And yet we also have an Oral Torah, the Torah Sheba’al Peh. That is what emerges from the partnership of the Jewish people and God in the unfolding and building of Torah throughout all generations. And it’s specifically in the Oral Torah, in the margins of the Talmud, inside of the bottom of the page, we have doodles, we have scribbles, we have notes, we have ideas. Because this duality, as the poem says, is not “untoward. Though the treatments may seem independent, it’s a paradox also displayed by the Lord, who’s immanent while also transcendent.”

Where the Torah Shebichtav, the Written Torah, is what represents the transcendence of God. The parts of our life that transcend even our own decisions. The world that we were born into. And then we have the world of Torah Sheba’al Peh, the Oral Torah. Where we construct meaning. Where we bring God from that transcendent place into the details—into the very center of our lived lives.

So thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily. Keep scribbling in your Talmud and let’s keep making Torah sweet.