Ari Bergmann: How the Talmud Went from Conversation to Canon

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

Dovid Bashevkin: It is my absolute privilege and pleasure to introduce someone who I consider my teacher, my rebbe in so much of Jewish thought, somebody who I grew up at his table listening to his Torah. It is my pleasure to introduce to the Talmud Daily community, my teacher Rabbi Dr. Ari Bergmann.

Ari Bergmann: Hi. First of all, thank you so much for the great, glowing recommendation.

You are more than anything else a friend, and it’s a great pleasure to be here with you.

Dovid Bashevkin: I can’t thank you enough. Reb Ari, I grew up and the excitement, the joy of Talmud study was always at the center of your life. And then later on in life, what is so fascinating is you actually went back to school to do a PhD in the formation of the Talmud.

So I could think of nobody more perfect to have in our introductory weeks than you to talk about the Talmud. And I wanted to begin with a very basic question, which is why is the development of the Talmud so mysterious? Why is it that we know so little about how the Talmud actually came together?

Ari Bergmann: Yeah, and that’s a great question. That’s why I learned in yeshivah for many, many years, and like everybody else, we learned the Talmud, and we loved the Talmud, but we don’t actually know how it came about and what it really is. And that’s I wanted to get an idea for it.

And I think the more I did the research, I realized the beauty of the Talmud is that there is no one author. It’s a communal work that developed over 600 years. That’s why Talmud is so unique, right? The Talmud is not something that was a book that was published. It’s organic.

It’s natural. It’s a communal work. Imagine the Jewish people, right? We are called Ahl al-Kitab. The Quran calls us the People of the Book.

We actually, for a period of around 600 years, we didn’t write any individual books, basically.

Dovid Bashevkin: And what period of time are you talking about, which is so fascinating? There was a 600-year period where we really more or less have no Jewish books being published. What what period is this?

Ari Bergmann: It’s from the year, from the third century, around the year 220, when the we’re talking about the Babylonian Talmud, right? That’s what we focus…

Dovid Bashevkin: Yes, of course.

Ari Bergmann: So, this is when Rav, which is the great student of Rabbi Judah the Prince, goes to Babylonia, meets with Shemuel. He established a community, and they have the era of something called the Amora’im. For the best knowledge, from that era, right, around the year 220, give or take, all the way to the end of the eighth century, we had nothing else until the She’iltot at the end of the eighth century. So, this was the group, and that was a debate that evolved over time, and, as we know, started orally, but created the entire conversation of the Jewish people.

This is the same way in the Tower of Babel, right? Which is in Babylonia, and the kabbalists say that the Babylonian Talmud is an extension of that, which means that in the Tower of Babylonia, you had a lot of people, the Bible describes, were trying to build a tower, and they understood each other, they had the same language, and they worked together. And the second they did not speak the same language, they didn’t listen to each other, and they couldn’t get anything done. The Babylonian Talmud is exactly the opposite, right? There are people from different backgrounds, different opinions, and it creates a virtual beit midrash, a discussion that evolved over time. And it evolved over time, and it just ended organically.

There was never a conclusion. There is never a what we call a ceiling, and it continues evolving. So, therefore, people didn’t talk about how it came about, because it was the entire community, and it was a long process, and it just came to be. We can only analyze the process.

Dovid Bashevkin: I love that you mentioned the Tower of Babel, and what’s so amazing is that in that story, as you mentioned, they build a tower to to literally fight with God. And I know one of the students of Rav Kook, Rav Ya’akov Moshe Charlap, writes in his work called Mei Marom that that capacity to argue with God, to literally shape divinity in this world, was first introduced in the first mention of Babylonia in the Torah, which is Bavel, in the Tower of Bavel, and we continue that in the towers of the Talmud, literally arguing with divinity and about divinity through the entire duration of the Talmud.

Ari Bergmann: Rabbi Tzadok Ha-Kohen says that also, and that’s why the tower is described that it’s standing on the ground, and its head is reaching heaven. That’s exactly the Talmud.

It’s grounded. Are people debating and trying to reach heaven, to actually argue with the divine, to be part of the divine court, to the be part of the Torah process, the Torah giving process.

Dovid Bashevkin: In your dissertation, you get into so much detail about the dating and the timing And of course we will link to your books, which are absolutely phenomenal. But can you explain a little bit more, in this organic process of the development of the Talmud, at what point do we think that this went from kind of like different schools of thought arguing with each other, talking about each other, until we we actually are realized and conscious of the fact that we are developing a work that will actually be laid down with words on a page and that will continue like the Talmud that we are familiar with today? How did the idea go from organic debate, discussion, to like almost like that escape velocity to becoming like a canonized, fixed work?

Ari Bergmann: On this, as you could imagine, because it’s part of the discussion, there’s a lot of debate.

I’ll tell you my opinion that done through a lot of research. In the beginning, in Babylonia, there were disciple circles. There were each amora, the amora were the rabbis of early Talmud, they’re called amora’im. Amora’im are the reciters, the speakers, the the teachers, and they had disciple circles.

And they created a body of their own traditions. And these students would meet periodically to discuss the different schools, to try to create some coordination, but it was a very, very, very much epistemic idea that each tradition on its own. This came to a abrupt change, which is that’s called the kernel of the Talmud, again in an oral setting, by two people who came to take this as the task of their lives. Their names are Abaye, one person, and Rava, the other one.

They were not in a single location, they were very different. Abaye was very poor, Rava was very rich, but traditionally, we see them as the founders of the Babylonian Talmud. And their revolution, their epistemic revolution was that instead of having different academies, and each academy would go ahead and maintain its own traditions, the traditions will be collected in a collective discourse. Everything will be studied in a collective discourse that will be from now on memorized by what’s called the academy reciter.

The academy reciter, the name was called tanna. And he was a human tape recorder. By the way, Dr. Lieberman, Saul Lieberman says the requirements of that position was, number one, to have a phenomenal memory, but also to be actually dumb, to be able to If you’re too smart, you’re going to go ahead and try to You’re going to put in your own interpretation. Exactly right.

So he said, listen, that’s why the Talmud constantly says tanei tanna, tanei tanna, ve-lo yada ma ka’amar. The tanna repeats and has no idea what he’s saying.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s so brilliant. And you find it so often in the Talmud, they’ll say he repeated this, but he didn’t know what he said, which I always assumed was like he forgot, but like that was deliberate.

We wanted people who would just preserve the language without interpretation, so each school now has access to all the other schools.

Ari Bergmann: Exactly right. So every school did not memorize Once upon a time, the students were the ones who carried the tradition. From now on, they deposited into this central academy.

There were still academies all over, but there was a central curriculum. And even though they were not in one place, at the end of the third century this happened around, I would say in the fourth century, the middle of the fourth century, Abaye and Rava, and it has so many reasons why, because this was the first time that the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Empire Sasanian Empire were the Persians where Babylonia was, and the Byzantine, which was Constantine, which was the Roman Empire that was that where the the Palestinian the the academies of Israel were. So they had actually an interchange. They had people shuttling between the Palestinian academies, which were the the Jerusalem academies, it’s called the Jerusalem Talmud, which was not in Jerusalem, but was in Tiberias and et cetera, and the academies in Babylonia.

So they had people shuttling back and forth, called the nachutei. So they could coordinate and create a body of all the traditions. And interestingly enough, this was happening in the Sasanian society, actually. They were doing the same thing on the Zoroastrian traditions, collecting and comparing, and it all goes together.

So that was the time of bringing it together. And we see something fascinating in the Talmud. Up to that generation, you have many traditions which are from a rabbi, and many traditions are called double attributions, which a student mentions a tradition in the name of his master, which will come like this: X says in the name of It say it says that Y said. Rav Yehudah says that Rav said, which means they are transmissioning it, because they were the carriers of the tradition.

From Abaye and Rava, this goes to zero.

Dovid Bashevkin: Zero, meaning we stop having direct attribution statements of this rabbi says the name of this rabbi. What do we see after Abaye and Rava? How does that shift take place?

Ari Bergmann: Direct attributions, which means that they were recorded by the official academy reciter. There was a curriculum, and This was something fascinating.

There’s so many proofs throughout, but realize something, that in Jewish law there is also a difference, because up to that time, when a disciple argued with his master, the halachah followed the master, because the master—

Dovid Bashevkin: Knows more—

Ari Bergmann: Is older, better than the student. From that moment on, it flips. That if there is an argument between a later generation with an earlier generation, the later generation prevails.

Dovid Bashevkin: And this switches during the time of Abaye and Rava.

And explain why this is different. Why in Abaye and Rava are we now we’re deciding halachah no longer by deciding like the master, but we actually give precedence to the later generations?

Ari Bergmann: And the answer is very, very simple. You know why? Because once upon a time, the student learned from the rabbi, from his master, but we assume that probably the master was bigger, because he had more. Now, you’re not learning from the master, you’re learning from the general curriculum, which keeps growing.

So in other words, you are learning from a body of knowledge with one gigabyte. The next generation is learning from a rabbi, which is the global talmudic teachings of two gigabytes. It’s basically like an LLM. The Talmud becomes like an LLM.

You are learning from the LLM, so you have an LLM that keeps growing. So you will go from a trillion characters to two trillion. So if you learn from two trillion, you’re smarter. So the later generations had the ability to have a talmudic corpus which was bigger as their master, and like an AI, like an LLM, which is bigger, so they become bigger.

So you kept growing because you’re learning from a bigger body of knowledge. So this was it happened, and it continued evolving, and this went all the way, the tradition, to a when that body of teachings, which was very interesting, is kept in Hebrew, you see, the Talmud has Hebrew and Aramaic. And it interchanges. And the reason is because really, originally, the teachings of the rabbis, which were memorized by the academy, which were this official body of knowledge, which I called the proto-Talmud, like the early Talmud, was in Hebrew, like the mishnayot.

And there were teachings, right? And this was carried over and kept growing, up to a certain point in time that came, which is basically around the fifth, in the middle of the fifth century, there was a great rabbi, which was greater than everybody else. His name was Rav Ashi. Rav Ashi was a canonical figure, and the Talmud always compares him to Rabbi Judah the Prince, very wealthy, the one who created the Mishnah, who created the Mishnah, right? And the reason because he was very wealthy, very pious, very knowledgeable, and he lived a long life. So the Talmud attributes that him and his counterpart, which was called Ravina, they are the end of hora’ah, the end of the teachings.

Which I understand, and there are many proofs, that this proto-Talmud, which was growing with amoraic teachings, and the amoraic teachings were very they are called Halivni, Professor David Weiss Halivni, which was my professor, called it apodictic. Apodictic means very terse, clear statements, because they’re memorized, right? Like, if you remember, once upon a time, when you wanted to save something, you made sure it was saved in very short form because it took too much memory space. So those tanna’im who were memorizing, they had like limited memory, so you had to really be very terse, very clear, very precise. And it’s in Hebrew, like biblical Hebrew, even though they didn’t speak Hebrew, but like the Mishnah is in Hebrew, so they kept it in Hebrew.

So Rav Ashi, in the middle of the fifth century, decides to revise it and to clear it up and to try to clarify, and he tried to create version two, which was the Proto-Talmud 2.0. Like that’s it, like like Apple, right? Apple has a new update, Rav Ashi does this update. And he was so big and so great that at that time also the academies were functioning, but at the beginning of the sixth century, we realized that the academies could not function as well, and therefore these teachings, the ideas of the Amora’im stops, that’s the end of the amoraic teachings, the end of the amoraic age. And it ended just because the academies didn’t function as well, there was people spreading out.

So the Talmud oral continued being learned, but little gradually, it stopped being added. So the teachings were there, and it becomes like a periodization. Periodization is that you see that the circumstances don’t allow you to grow this way. So this comes out now to a generation, to the second voice.

In the academy, on oral traditions, you have a situation that there is the reciter that gives the talmudic teachings, which were the teachings of the Amora’im, and there’s a lot of debate, that you debate what is it, when does it apply, when does it apply, or you reframe it. That reframing was done orally by the academy by somebody else. And that title of that person is called a savora. And by the way, we have, if anybody wants to go to Indonesia, in Indonesia, they have a group of people, they have somebody called the kayori.

Kayori is also a central teaching, very similar to the Talmud, that they have some kind of stable text, very short, that the reciter says, and then everybody starts arguing about it. Very fluid, very conversational. And that is what the Talmud continued evolving. Always there were those discussions, and those discussions were carried over and continued growing all the way as it continued all the way to the end of the eighth century, beginning of the ninth century.

And now those discussions, if you look at the Talmud today that we have written, the Talmud is very interesting because the Talmud combined these teachings, which are very clear, very terse, it’s in Hebrew, and they are always mentioned by name, who’s the rabbi saying, and then there is the majority of the Talmud is just a discussion, fluid, in Aramaic, and anonymous. Anonymous. You don’t know who asks. You don’t know who it is.

You don’t know who’s talking, like like a voice from heaven. But this is this are the teachings and the explanations and the explications and the interpretations of the academies. And the reason is anonymous because it kept growing. It’s like a snowball, right? There were teachings and discussions, and the discussions continued.

So there was a text that was stable, memorized, not completely verbatim. We know from Lord and Teller that it didn’t ever 100% verbatim, but more or less verbatim. I I went to yeshivah, right? I was at the Ponevezh. I remember Rav Shach, the rosh yeshivah, will say a line, like a small statement, and everybody starts arguing, and that’s it.

Like if you go to a yeshivah, that’s what it is. He functions, the rabbi says a small, terse line, and everybody starts arguing, when does it apply, is it right, is it wrong, it continues. In the Talmud it was the exact same thing. There were two functions in the academy.

There were the rabbis which are called the the memorizers, their name was tanna’im, and then there was the rosh yeshivah that led a debate, and his name was savora. Savora is understandings, explanations, and that continued going. And this would have continued growing. The reason why it stopped, you know why? Because the Talmud at the end of the eighth century, they started writing it.

There was a big, big, big effort not to write the Talmud, because this way it kept growing. But then on the ninth century they start writing. Why did they start writing? One of the reasons they say that first of all, that we could we have tons of manuscripts, even in Cairo Genizah, but there’s basically nothing before the ninth century, the end of the eighth century, beginning of the ninth century. And the reason is very simple, because it was not written.

The first copies were there, you know why? Because the Jewish community start growing, I told you, and number one, Babylonia became part of the Abbasid, became part of the Islamic Empire. The Islamic Empire was very much into writing. That’s the time they wrote the Quran. Paper was more available, and more important, many people started migrating to Spain.

So in Spain they needed the Talmud, they couldn’t get an oral Talmud, so they got their first written copies sent to Spain. And once you had control copies, it couldn’t grow anymore, because people would say, you know, in an oral society Jan Assmann says something very very amazing in an oral society, you never know what something is really new, because people don’t have the memory. The only time you could compare, if you compare old to the new, you know there is some additions here. But as long as people were oral, and there were no tape recorders, there were no minutes, records, it kept growing.—

Dovid Bashevkin: How do you know what’s from now and what’s from earlier?

Ari Bergmann: It’s all the same, yeah.

But once once it’s written, once it’s written, you could compare and say like, “This is new.” That’s why one of the ge’onim, the ge’onim were the great rabbis of the time, Rav Yehudai Gaon, many people say, “Ach, these are additions of his,” as if he added to the Talmud, and anybody who studies the Talmud knows that there are parts of the Talmud that everybody says, “This is an addition in the eighth century that Rav Yehudai Gaon.” And the question is, why did he do it? Nobody else did it before? No, everybody else did it before, but nobody got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, right? Because they had no copies. So everybody thought, okay, this is how it is. But when Rav when Rav Yehudai Gaon was, in his time there were already written copies. They’d say, “One second, what you’re saying here doesn’t say there.” And that’s okay.

So at that time the Talmud was hybrid. There were written copies, still taught orally from the eighth from the ninth century on, and they were in Baghdad, and it kept continued growing, but they were places everywhere else. So it continued growing a little bit, but not much, because people realized that these are additions. So the Talmud organically stops growing just because once you write it, I always say the writing is the death of the work.

Once you write it, it’s stabilized, you know. Then it’s stable, it’s text, it’s fixed. Everything else is an addition, is creativity. So, it stifles creativity.

In an oral society, it’s very creative because you could just smash it and assume that that has been always the case. It’s always great to create an innovation, and then you make people say this has always been there. So, what happened that in the ninth century now, that’s it, it continues growing, but much less.

Dovid Bashevkin: What’s so amazing to me is that every time that we make a fixed document, whether it’s the Talmud or the later commentaries, every time we fix something, it actually ushers in a whole new age of creativity.

Now we’re continuing the project of Talmud and the chaos is now in the margins, and then those margins become fixed. And now there are outer margins, whether and it continues to this day.

Ari Bergmann: You see, the Talmud up to then was a Wikipedia. Up to that moment, a Wikipedia, there are millions of versions, but you only see the last version.

So they don’t realize that this version has evolved, and that’s the beauty of it. You think that this has been. So it’s called an organic it is called a hierarchical structure, is like a snowball. But once it’s written, now is like when you go to Wikipedia, you could see the version one, version two, version three, so you see that development.

So it becomes a lot less fluid, a lot more structured. So the academies continued teaching in Babylonia orally. And the reason why they teach orally is because they were able to keep the tradition. Once you have a written text, the cat is out of the bag.

As you could imagine, you know what happened the first thing happened, at least at the time when the Talmud became written?

Dovid Bashevkin: What What What I don’t even know what you’re referring to.

Ari Bergmann: That you had a competing Talmud. Anan wrote at that time a competing Talmud called Sefer HaMitzvot. It’s called the distorted Talmud at that time.

Why? Because once it’s oral, you can’t do that, because oral has an oral setting, oral yeshivah. You can’t just make it up. You just have to get the followers. But once there is a written book, a written text, you could write another text and say, “Okay, let’s try if anybody catches it.” So the natural thing is there was a competing Talmud, that everybody says it’s a farce, it’s a farce, that’s it.

But so that’s why they always kept it oral, to maintain the control. So once it’s But this is called the hybrid period that goes from the end of the ninth century all the way to the end of the yeshivot in Babylonia.

Dovid Bashevkin: My last question, and I think so many people, they articulate it in different ways, especially when you read the Torah, we like when authority is very clear from on high, when you have a prophet, when you have revelation, you know this is the will of God. And yet the Talmud, as you described it, emerged very organically, and I’m curious, how do you understand how the Talmud became so authoritative for all future generations as the bedrock repository for all Jewish practice and thought? We didn’t have prophecy.

The skies didn’t open up. We didn’t get the Talmud at at Mount Sinai, you know, in the text that we have today. So, how is it that the Talmud became so authoritative as the bedrock of all of Jewish thought and practice, that any conversation, “What should we do? Are you obligated? Are you not obligated?”, that conversation really begins with the Talmud?

Ari Bergmann: Maimonides and Rav Kook Rav Kook explains Maimonides. Says, you know what the authority of the Talmud? Because that’s the collective Jewish people’s decision.

Like Jungian says, that’s the collective unconscious. That’s the only time you had a whole community for 600 years trying to develop and understand God’s word. This is so unique. These are all the rabbis of the generations sitting and arguing with one purpose only: to reach heaven, to say, “Let’s understand what the Bible wants.” That collective unconscious is the only time the entire community acceptance, the communal acceptance, who believe that God is so connected to us, that the communal acceptance is something that has amazing value.

We believe that prophecy stopped, which God’s talking to individual peoples, but the subconscious connection of the Jewish people to God, that we say, what the Talmud always writes, God is the heart of Jewish people. HaKadosh Baruch Hu is liban shel Yisrael. Our deeper heart, our unconscious, is our souls yearned for God. When you have all the Jewish people, so different, they were more learned, less learned, rabbis which were more strict, less strict, some rabbis which were working, some rabbis which were only dedicated to study, that everybody could come into a consensus.

This is so unique. That’s why the Talmud is unique. I did compare I don’t know any work that was done by a community of people, the entire community, which Jewish community at that we can say is not monolithic by any stretch of the imagination, that the entire community for 600 years worked on this. Clearly, this has a canonical value that nothing matches it.

Dovid Bashevkin: And it’s so interesting that you mentioned, you know, that that God still speaks through the Jewish people. Rav Tzadok points out, and I’m sure you’re familiar with this, that when the Talmud talks about the a certain rabbi’s opinion or a certain opinion, they will use the language aliba de-man de-amar, which means according to this speaker. And Rav Tzadok points out that if you pay close attention to the word aliba, it means what is the heart, lev, what is the heart of it.

Ari Bergmann: On the heart of it.

This is Jungian. This is so Jungian. This is the collective unconscious. And you see something, once it becomes it’s oral, it goes then to Tunisia, which the Talmud has to be written now because now there are no more academies.

The reason academies closed in Babylon is for a simple reason: why does a yeshivah close? Because it can’t raise any more money.

Dovid Bashevkin: I was about to say, fundraising.

Ari Bergmann: The economic situation, fundraising didn’t work. The Sa’adiah Gaon says we can’t raise the money anymore.

So, you move to Tunisia, and now there were great rabbis: Rabbeinu Chananel, there is Rabbeinu Nissim Gaon, there is the school of Rabbeinu Gershom, and they are writing the Talmud. But, you know, interpretation continues, but their interpretation is written also immeshed in the text. They continue this anonymous voice. So, if anybody looks at the Talmud, you see that the early commentaries are all immeshed in the text.

Woven into the text. Woven in the text, so the now the text kept keeps growing up to when finally the Talmud went to Europe, and there was somebody who’s credited, in my view, to closing the Talmud and say, “From now on, interpretation is written outside of the text.” That person is Rashi. Rashi is called, very interesting, Rashi is called, his title by everybody, he’s called the notebook, the kuntres, the notebook. The peirush hakuntres, that’s his work, the notebook.

And the question is, interestingly enough, Rashi wrote commentary on on the Torah. And on the Torah, but the Torah is not called the kuntres, it’s never called the notebook. Never. Never.

Only the Talmud. So, my brother-in-law, who is a great rabbi, he wrote many books on Chumash, says, “Well, look…” Rabbi Yehoshua Hartman, who we love. Yehoshua Hartman. So, you could have said, very interesting, maybe the interpretation on the Chumash, the interpretation on the Bible, was not written on notebook.

But I actually have, I was very lucky to acquire, probably one of the oldest manuscripts of Rashi, which we don’t know, it’s dated 12th century, so it’s within 50 years. Now, we don’t know if it’s his handwriting, if it’s autograph or not, because we don’t we don’t have a control, but a manuscript, and it’s in a notebook. So, Rashi in the Bible is also written in a notebook. So, why is it called a notebook in his commentary to the Talmud, and it’s not called a notebook in his commentary to the Bible, if it was written in the same is it? Same way.

Same way. But that is very interesting. Because to nobody wrote commentaries of the Bible in the Bible, right? Because that’s God’s words, they’re not going to enter to add. So, it’s always written in a notebook.

But Rashi’s innovation everybody understood that now Talmudic interpretation is written in a notebook, because up to Rashi, it continued for hundreds of years that the interpretation is meshed to the text. Rashi says, “No, no. Now we are canonizing the text. The text is done, and this is the beginning of the interpretation.” So, Rashi was credited not for the means of the vehicle where it printed, but by his innovation that interpretations from now on, and that’s why you have It started, Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik says, you see this already earlier by Rabbeinu Gershom a little bit, the incipient.

But most of the commentaries before, people didn’t even realize were commentary, because it’s all meshed to the thing. They have to like break out what’s interpretation, what’s not—

Dovid Bashevkin: Like, where does the Talmud end and the commentary begin?

Ari Bergmann: Yes, we don’t know. Ta-Shma found Rabbeinu Nissim Gaon says it’s a paraphrase of the Talmud. And it’s not a paraphrase.

He’s adding tons of stuff, but that’s what it is. So, this is the canon So, you look at the Talmud, it went through a process. It’s organic. The beauty of the process is the Talmud was not made, the Talmud was not written, the Talmud came to be.

It’s God’s revelation through the Jewish people subconsciously. And that’s the beauty of it. It’s no conscious decision, “We are doing and printing and deciding…” No! It’s the subconscious. So, it’s God speaking through the subconscious of the Jewish people, and Jewish history leading the work to be, up to Rashi, which is the ultimate interpreter, putting an end to it.

Dovid Bashevkin: I cannot thank you enough. That was so beautiful. If you have a little bit more time, I always want to go through our Talmud questionnaire—

Ari Bergmann: Okay.

Dovid Bashevkin: Just to hear from all the educators we—

Ari Bergmann: To answer quickly.

Question number one: Who do you consider your primary teacher of Talmud, and what did they teach you?

Ari Bergmann: I think the beauty of my life is that I had primary teachers that evolved, like the Talmud evolved. I also evolved over time. First, I had my first rabbi, I came from Brazil, and the first rosh yeshivah, he still is the ultimate guide that I have, is Rabbi Ruderman, which I’m sure Dovid Bashevkin also went to the same yeshivah. And I was very close to Rabbi Ruderman.

His love for the Talmud, his love for learning, and his love for the students was unparalleled. I actually knew a little bit of Yiddish from my home, and I come from Brazil, I came from a non-religious home in Brazil also, and I didn’t know anything. And he got close to me, we always spent time, and he was the beginning. Then I left America, I went to learn in Israel.

So then the rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Ruderman sent me to Rav Shach, to one of the greatest Torah personalities in Israel, and I sat next to him in Ponevezh for a time.

Dovid Bashevkin: I didn’t realize you sat right next to him.

Ari Bergmann: Wow, that’s If you want, I’ll tell a little story, a little vignette. Please.

And a year ago, somebody comes to collect money in my house, and he says, “I’m collecting money for my kollel.” I said, “Well, thank you for collecting for your kollel, everybody’s doing it.” He says, “No, my kollel is different.” He says, “Let me tell you how the kollel is different.” I said, “Tell me.” Says, he is telling me like this: He’s a non- he was a non-religious pilot that he went for a one year for a break, and he decided to go to Bnei Brak. He goes to there, and he becomes actually interested in religion, in learning, and he was supposed there to be for a year. But at the end of the year, he realizes that his unit had disbanded, it wasn’t there, nobody even remembered, like Israel, like the army at that time for sure was a mess, nobody remembered he had to go back. But he thought he had an obligation, he didn’t know what to do.

So he went to this Rabbi Shach, who I just told you I sat next to him, and he asked him, “What should I do? And nobody remembers me, I’m afraid I’m going to go back, I’m going to be non-religious.” Rabbi Shach told him, “Lo chen ye’aseh bimkomeinu.” He used a verse of the Bible saying, “That’s not how we do things here. You promised to go, you go back.” And he says, “I went back.” And he tells me, when I went back, my unit was disbanded, so I went to the Air Force intelligence. And he tells me, “I’ll tell you that this is true, you’ll see, because before the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, I actually called Rabbi Shach’s house for them to say Tehillim. I don’t know if they said or not, but they did.” I told him, “You won’t believe it.

I was, in 1973 I was at that time, in 1981, at that in 1981, I was in Ponevezh, and I sat next to Rav Shach, and was a the Shavuot eve, Shavuot eve, and I was in the beit midrash learning, and there was nobody else. And they come to me, and they say, ‘Listen, Rav Shach is asking you, please get a minyan to say Psalms, to say Tehillim, because they asked from the government.’ I told, I said, ‘How can I go? There’s nobody here.’ He says, ‘Go and find people.’ So I went around, I found a minyan, I go to the room next door, we say Tehillim. Then that’s it, came back. Okay, then Shavuot at night, I was in the beit midrash, they said, ‘Wow, you know what just happened? They bombed the the Iraqi nuclear reactor.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Wow.

There were only three people who knew about it: Ari Bergmann, because he got the minyan, Rav Shach, and Menachem Begin.’ I thought Menachem Begin called! In the end, it was not Menachem Begin, it was this guy who came to my house! He was the one! So I told him, ‘Not only the you the gebesht got, I was the one who said the Tehillim for you!'” That is awesome! So that was Rav Shach, so I sat next to him. And then I went to another yeshivah, I kept moving yeshivot. I had Rabbi Moshe Shapira. And in the end, Professor David Weiss Halivni, in Columbia University, became my teacher.

So I evolved throughout. I always say there is a chain: I went from Ruderman to Rav Shach, to Rav Simcha Zissel that was Rosh Yeshivah of Chevron, to Rav Moshe Shapira, and then to Professor David Weiss Halivni. So, baruch Hashem, I had the and that’s the beauty of the Talmud. The Talmud is a combination of people who it it’s the opposite of an echo chamber.

We always know that there is like Jonathan Haidt talks about the echo chamber, the Talmud is the opposite of the echo chamber. It’s a chamber that everybody thinks differently, but everybody discusses. We don’t talk the same language, but we listen. I always say the Talmud teaches one thing: You don’t have to agree with each other.

We have to listen to each other, we have to respect each other, and we have to love each other. We don’t have to agree with each other. The Talmud, I don’t think there is one time in the Talmud that everybody agrees. Just the opposite: If everybody agrees, something is wrong.

So we don’t agree to each other, but we always listen. The Talmud, the interesting part of the anonymous voice of the academy is, when you have two opinions, they make them talk to each other. Even though they were not facing each other, you create a virtual conversation, because the Talmud is this idea: You don’t have to speak the same language, but you have to listen to each other. We have to listen to each other, respect each other and love each other.

That’s it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely beautiful. If you were introducing somebody to Talmud for the first time inside, what is the first topic, what we call a sugya, the topic in the Talmud, where would you start to teach?

Ari Bergmann: I don’t think the Talmud has a beginning. I think you should learn what you love.

You should learn what interests you. The Talmud has so many topics that just pick the topic. The Talmud doesn’t start, you know why? Because it doesn’t end. You know something, the Talmud is not a straight line, it’s a circle.

Because you go back where you started from and just go hadran alach. You say the end of the Talmud. The word siyum, siyum is the end. The Gra says the siyum is four Hebrew letters: samech, yud, vav, mem.

And if you spell the letters, how the letters are spelled, samech is samech, samech which is the samech, and mem chaf. Mem chaf in the numerical value is 40 is 60, and samech is the value 60. Yud is the same thing: yud is 10, and the how you spell the letter is vav dalet, which is also 10. And the same mem.

To tell you that once you finish one way, you go back in a higher way. So there’s no beginning. You go one layer, you go to another layer.

Dovid Bashevkin: Wow.

I never heard that from the Vilna Gaon. That is incredible.

Ari Bergmann: And this is the beauty. The Talmud, there’s no beginning, no end.

You take what you love. And if it’s a labor of love and it’s a learning of love, you should always find a topic that you’re interested and just join the conversation.

Dovid Bashevkin: Next question: Do you have a favorite tractate? What is your favorite masechta, known as a tractate in the Talmud?

Ari Bergmann: I think I love everything in the Talmud. Aw, come on.

It depends on the time. It it depends on the time. I’m now studying the laws of the Nazarite, nazir. This is like crazy, and we love it.

It’s crazy this idea of the Nazarite. What is he? It’s a it’s it’s fun. Again, it all depends on your age, it depends evolves. I I don’t have, I’m sorry to say I don’t.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s totally fair. Do you have a favorite story in the Talmud?

Ari Bergmann: Yes. I have the story of Ilfa. That’s the story that guided all my life.

Dovid Bashevkin: Where does it appear?

Ari Bergmann: It appears in Ta’anit, in the tractate of Ta’anit, folio 21a. And it tells you the story of two people who were in yeshivah. One of them was Reb Yochanan, a great rabbi that actually is attributed that he did the Palestinian Talmud. And then you have somebody called Ilfa.

Ilfa was somebody who decided, both both at that time decided to go work. And they go to work, and the angel says we’re going to kill them. They left life, eternal life, spiritual life to deal with the mundane. So Reb Yochanan heard it, and Ilfa didn’t hear the angels.

So Reb Yochanan said this message must be for me, I’m doing the wrong step. And he decided to go back to yeshivah and he becomes the rosh yeshivah. Ilfa didn’t hear, continued going to work. And the word Ilfa, interestingly enough, in Aramaic means a boat.

Because he was a merchant, he has a boat. He had like some kind of a merchant.

Dovid Bashevkin: Business, yeah.

Ari Bergmann: And then he comes back to yeshivah and they tell him, “Listen, if you’d have stayed in yeshivah, you’d have been the head of the academy.

Now Reb Yochanan is the head of the academy, you missed the opportunity.” And the story evolves. And this talks to me so much because for me also, I was in yeshivah, I decided to go work, but I still love learning. And people say, “Had you stayed here, you’d be the rosh yeshivah.” And if you look at the story of Ilfa, it tells you what he did and his contribution to learning. That was bar none.

And that’s somebody who I emulate, and actually believe that perhaps I am like a spark of his soul coming back in the 21st century.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely love that. Do you have a favorite halachic topic, like a legal sugya in the Talmud?

Ari Bergmann: All of them are fun. No.

Halachic, you keep everything. The stories are interesting because they are paradigms of your life, but halachah follows you throughout, so everything is relevant.

Dovid Bashevkin: Do you remember when you first fell in love with studying Talmud?

Ari Bergmann: When I became religious, right? I became religious, I was a little boy at the age of 15. I didn’t know anything, and I decided to go to yeshivah, and I didn’t know anything about it.

So I decided to take a text, was a Talmud by Adin Steinsaltz, I knew Hebrew, and I just went through it.

Dovid Bashevkin: And that was Just read it straight.

Ari Bergmann: And it was Daf Yomi. I did Daf Yomi at that time, and this is a long time ago.

This was 1975. And I did the Daf Yomi. The more I learned, the more I understood. In the beginning, I had no clue.

But the more I understood, the more I enjoyed it.

Dovid Bashevkin: When is your favorite time to study Talmud and where do you most enjoy studying Talmud?

Ari Bergmann: My favorite time is when whenever I have time, right? Early in the morning or late at night. It depends on the day. And I study in two settings: either myself, that I have time to think and analyze, or sometimes when I study in a study group.

So it depends on the setting. I think there are two settings, there are two times. Late at night, there is advantage because the house is quiet, nobody’s There or very early in the morning, right, that you don’t have any disturbances, you don’t have to be involved with work. And sometimes you want to think yourself, and sometimes you want to discuss with other people.

So, I think both are necessary.

Dovid Bashevkin: Rabbi Dr. Ari Bergmann, my mentor, my friend, I am so grateful. Thank you so much for joining us today. Rabbi Bashevkin, it was such a great pleasure.

On Talmud Daily. Have an amazing Shabbos, Reb Ari, we’ll be in touch.

Ari Bergmann: Thank you, a great Shabbos, and enjoy the learning. People, I hope that you take this opportunity.

The only way you can appreciate the Talmud is actually studying it. Ta’amu ur’u ki tov Hashem. Taste it and you’ll see how good it is. You can’t explain unless you live it.

And be part of the ongoing conversation. It’s a virtual beit midrash, and you’re not studying a book, you’re being part of it.