Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz: The Talmud as a Timeless Machine

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

Dovid Bashevkin: It is our distinct privilege and pleasure to introduce one of the most world-renowned Talmud educators in the entire world, my dear friend, mentor, somebody who really I have known since I was a child and has had a tremendous impact on my own approach to Talmud, please welcome my friend and mentor Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz.

Aryeh Lebowitz: Thank you so much. It’s great to be with you again, Dovid.

Dovid Bashevkin: Aside from the fact that you have written works in both Hebrew and English on the, kind of the daily practice of Jewish life, aside from the fact that you are the dean of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, which is Yeshiva University’s semichah program for rabbinic ordination, today I wanted to talk to you about tractate Berachos, which is the first tractate in all of the Talmud.

And I wanted to begin with kind of a general question about the daily life and practice in Jewish life. And there is a passage in Talmud, which I think if anybody came across it, it’s very strongly worded. It is on page, I believe, 8a, ches amud alef in tractate Berachos, and the Talmud says that from the time that the temple was destroyed, miyom shecharav Beis HaMikdash, from the day the temple was destroyed, ein lo leHaKadosh Baruch Hu, there is only space for God, ela bedaled amos shel halachah, in the four cubits, in your space of halachah, of observing Jewish law and Jewish practice. And I wanted to begin because so much of your own life and career is dedicated to teaching how does one practice Jewish life, what are the details, what are the minutiae, how do you get into it, what is permitted, what is prohibited.

I wanted to begin with a very general question of how you understand this passage in Talmud. Why is the Talmud saying that from the day the temple was destroyed, the way that we access divinity is exclusively, specifically through halachic practice, meaning the details of the laws of how you govern each and every day? Why do you think this is so central and why do you think, what’s the basic response to somebody who in exasperation, and probably everyone has felt this at one point or another in their own lives, why does God care so much about the details of my life?

Aryeh Lebowitz: It’s an excellent question. I think as the, the phrasing of, of that passage suggests, it’s expressing a paradigm shift, that there was this paradigm when we were privileged to have the temple in Jerusalem, that if you wanted to access God in the most intense way, His divine presence rested in a particular location and one was able to gain inspiration, meaningful inspiration, not empty inspiration, like real inspiration, by being there. And not only by, by actually participating in the avodah in the Beis HaMikdash, in the, the service in the temple, but by seeing others who do.

There’s a comment that Tosafos has in tractate Bava Basra, which I know is not the tractate we’re talking about today, where he says that part of the economic system was that a farmer would have to bring four out of the seven years 10% of what his land produced just to eat it in Jerusalem. And this forced a person to spend a lot of time in Jerusalem. And the reason for it, Tosafos says, is that when a person comes and sees people who are fully engrossed and fully engaged in serving God, it has a, it has a significant impact on a person. So much so that there’s even an assumption, and this is the context of that comment of Tosafos, that education could only really happen in Jerusalem, that the initial thought of establishing schools was to establish schools in Jerusalem and let everyone send their kids there.

It can’t work obviously, and they discovered that quickly because people didn’t always have the ability to get to Jerusalem, but, but the concept was that there’s this massive burst of inspiration in being in that context. And then the Beis HaMikdash was destroyed, and Jews found themselves for centuries in a number of different realities: in the realities of a secular society, in the realities of persecution, in the four corners of the world where there have been strong Jewish communities, weak Jewish communities, inability to travel, we could be anywhere at any time, and we’re still expected to access God. We’re still expected to have this connection with the Divine. So how are we supposed to do it? So, the system of halachah certainly is a system where God tells us, this is how to live your life, this is how to live with a certain sense of direction and a certain sense of purpose.

And it imbues, it infuses a certain sense of purpose in even the most mundane activities. And when a person is able to have that sense of purpose in everything they do, they’re experiencing the divine in a different way. Not in this overwhelming moment like this epiphany of this great inspiration, but it’ll be inspiration of the day in and the day out, of the moments in time that a person has. That’s where I think the Gemara is telling us that God’s presence can be felt as a replacement almost of the Beis HaMikdash until we get it back.

Now, keep in mind, it’s not saying that halacha only applies when there’s no Beis HaMikdash. It’s saying that halacha has an additional layer of meaning and impact that we can’t otherwise access when we don’t have a Beis HaMikdash.

Dovid Bashevkin: I could not agree more, and what’s so central in tractate Berachos, and a theme that we’ve explored over and over again, is how we’re really placed within our own lives at the center, like we’re so to speak the kohanim within our own lives, which is why the opening to the entire tractate in Berachos is actually telling you when can you say Krias Shema, you know, the daily prayer that we say twice a day at morning at night, it literally couches it within the service of the Temple to say that you can and should be the kohen, the priest so to speak, in your own life. One area that people I think have a very tough time with, and this was introduced to me probably in a very similar classroom that you were in, I believe I learned this in both fourth and seventh grade, but a shout out to my seventh-grade rebbi, Rabbi Judowitz, who I believe you also had.

Aryeh Lebowitz: My seventh-grade rebbi too, yes, yes.

Dovid Bashevkin: The concept of Jewish time, if you ever meet another Jew who is serious about Jewish life and Jewish practice, you may notice that very often, maybe not every second and it’s not always it’s not nervous, but they might be checking their watch a lot. They want to know, what time should we pray Mincha services? Is it too late to daven, to pray Shacharis, the morning services? We pray three times a day, and you have to know when to do things. When does Shabbos begin? When does Shabbos end? These are all questions that have to do with a specific approach to time and how really what emerges from our tractate in Berachos is a new conception of how to even look at how the day and time start.

From the first page, we’re told something very novel: Jewish time begins with the night and then goes into the day. So Shabbos begins in the nighttime and then the day comes, which is a powerful concept in and of itself. We go through that that night, that lack of clarity, only then afterwards can we find that clarity and that daytime. But I was hoping to hear from you because I know this can be so overwhelming for some, and I look at you as quite literally the educator-in-chief of Jewish practice in our community.

Can you help explain, just in a very basic way, how do you figure out the basics of Jewish time? How does one figure out, is there a way to just take, you know, when dawn, what the times in The New York Times, when the sunset, sunrise, to learn how to figure out how Jewish time works and how it should impact kind of every daily practice, whether it’s praying, whether it’s the start of holidays and Shabbos? How does Jewish time work?

Aryeh Lebowitz: Now, it’s interesting because, for the most part, leaving out certain details, but for the most part, what we refer to now as Jewish time a few hundred years ago was just referred to as time. Meaning, the way we tell time is by looking down at our watch or at our phone. The way everybody used to tell time was by looking up. You looked at the sky.

It’s similar to like, I need to know how I’m feeling, so I ask my Fitbit how I’m feeling. And it used to be that if a person wanted to know how they’re feeling, they said, “Oh, how do I feel?” Meaning, we’re so data-driven that we forget that there’s a world around us, there’s a reality around us of the physical world that God put into place. And that’s how time runs. Time runs with sunrise and sunset, and with the sun and the moon, and with the constellations.

That’s how God put the world. That’s how it’s always been running. The idea that that sometimes is scary to newer students who aren’t accustomed to the rules of zmanim, of the time to do this and the time to do that, it was something that was just universally understood that, of course, time is governed by the sunrise and the sunset, and the level of darkness and how many degrees below the horizon. There’s actually a major dispute, we’re not going to go into the weeds on this, but there’s a major dispute when trying to figure out a particular stringency that many people have about when to end Shabbos, whether it should always be 72 minutes after sunset, that that’s the stringency, it’s known as Rabbeinu Tam, the ending of Shabbos according to the opinion of Rabbeinu Tam, or it’s not about minutes, it’s about how dark it gets.

It’s about how many degrees below the horizon the sun goes. Now, to me, it’s most logical that it would not be about minutes. That’s not the Jewish conception of time at all. The Jewish conception of time is the movement of the sun.

It’s how dark it is, how light it is. When does the sun rise? When does the sun set? When is the sun in the middle of the sky? Wintertime, summertime. To answer your question, there’s so much to say over here, but to answer your question, can one look at The New York Times or whatever newspaper and find out when Shabbos starts? The answer is really, yes. At sunset, Shabbos begins.

We have the practice of starting Shabbos 18 minutes prior to sunset. That’s not difficult math to do. And sunset is sunset. It’s when the sun dips below the horizon.

I don’t know if this is true, but I think it was certainly something that was said a lot in the Orthodox community was that in the year 2000, The New York Times ran a front page This was very true.

Dovid Bashevkin: I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Aryeh Lebowitz: Yeah. A front page of what the newspaper will look like on January 1st, 2100, right? Was that it?

Dovid Bashevkin: Exactly, something like that.

In a hundred years from now, they had like a mock cover of what will The New York Times be like in in a hundred years from now to celebrate the the new millennium.

Aryeh Lebowitz: And it happened to to fall out on a Friday, and they had the time for candle lighting because one thing is is certain, empires will rise and fall, the world may turn upside down and backwards a million times, but the Jewish people will still be keeping Shabbos. That’s really the timelessness of Jewish time. It keeps on marching on.

As long as there’s a sun, there’s a moon, there will be the Jewish people. There will be the Jewish people that care about it.

Dovid Bashevkin: One term that you used is zmanim, which is the plural of zman, which literally means time. We’ve spoken about already in Talmud Daily how central time is to the very concept of Talmud, from the fact that the six orders of the Mishnah, the Shisha Sedarim, are Zeraim, Moed, Nashim, Nezikin, Kodashim, Taharos, which is an acronym for zman nakat, choosing time, as well as the opening question of Berachos is literally, me’eimatai, from when? And there’s a great website that everybody should be familiar with called MyZmanim, where you can literally type in your area code and they will give you exactly all of the times, more or less, I think it’s fairly accurate.

I just wanted to go through very quickly a few terms that people may hear, whether it’s from a stray episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm or from just overhearing Jews talk about when to daven Minchah. The first term I wanted to use is alos. Alos literally means the rising. What does alos hashachar correspond to?

Aryeh Lebowitz: Alos hashachar means the dawn or daybreak, when the when the first rays of light, the first faint light of the sun begins to appear on the the eastern horizon of the sky, and most mitzvos that one is expected to perform during the daytime or I should say that are limited to daytime, that cannot be fulfilled at night, technically can already be fulfilled even at that early stage of alos hashachar.

And it is the beginning of the Jewish day, even though most of us, if we’d walk outside at alos hashachar, if you’re an early riser, you would not associate that with daytime.

Dovid Bashevkin: Correct. But people like my my father, quite famously, I believe would get up on most days and it would it would probably be even before alos. That’s like the the most early time.

But there is a term that you will probably hear very often, and I’m going to use it colloquially and then maybe you could explain what this means. You will very often hear people say, “I davened at neitz,” neitz which is spelled nun–tzadi, “What does somebody mean when they say, ‘Are you davening at neitz?’ Or they’ll sometimes colloquially call it a neitz minyan. What on earth does that mean?”

Aryeh Lebowitz: So, the most ideal time to daven, to daven Shacharis, to daven the morning prayer, is at sunrise, to mark the exact moment of sunrise and begin one’s davening, which would be the tefillah of Shemoneh Esreh that one I mean, there’s a lot of preliminary paragraphs of of prayer that precede it, but the core part of davening is the Shemoneh Esreh, the Amidah. If one times it with the sunrise, that is the most perfect time to daven.

So really, it’s there’s nothing in halachah called neitz. That’s a shortened term, as you said, it’s a nickname. It’s haneitz hachamah. And by the way, when we talk about time, it’s important for people to realize why so many in the in the Orthodox community are all up in arms when there is a threat of of daylight savings.

Dovid Bashevkin: Exactly. Why is it people are so worked up over that? Explain that. That’s very helpful. Right.

Aryeh Lebowitz: So people get worked up about it, because if sunrise during the wintertime right now is at, let’s say, can be as late as 7:25, can you imagine if it’s at 8:25? And people prefer not to pray before then, and you live in a suburb where you have an hour commute to work, how are you ever supposed to get to work on time? And and that’s in New York. In places like Detroit, it can be much, much later, and and and much worse for people. If you’re planning on praying with a minyan every morning, at the times that are acceptable to pray, and certainly at the times that are ideal to pray, it could be a real a real problem. Now, we’re not we don’t have to get into a discussion as to how much lobbying we should be doing on that premise and, you know, whether It’s for the political podcast.

Dovid Bashevkin: You can do a Politics Daily. Okay. But let me ask you, now now, this is all the morning terms, so we have the term alos, you mention the term haneitz hachamah, the actual rising of the sun, what colloquially we call neitz. There are a lot of terms associated with the nighttime.

Now the nighttime, as I mentioned, in Jewish life and in Jewish practice, a new day starts at night. So Shabbos begins at night, every holiday begins at night, the Passover Seder begins at night. Night is very tricky to figure out when night exactly begins, and there are three terms I was hoping that you could give a little clarity on. One term which you will absolutely hear people use is what time is shkiah? This may have been made most famous, and you don’t have to comment on it, you can just you’ll just continue to look, you don’t even have to blink, but the this was a comment that was made quite famously on an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where somebody gets stuck on a ski lift, and they’re wondering, “What time is shkias hachamah?” That that’s a term that people have definitely heard, and it’s absolutely a term that people use, shkiah.

There is a second and third term. I want to lay out all three because I think it’ll be very helpful. The second term is a term that people will also use called bein hashmashos, between the suns, literally, and then a final term called tzeis hakochavim, the emergence of the stars. Can you explain what these three different terms are, and when they’re most relevant in Jewish life? Shkiah, which I believe is sunset, bein hashmashos, in between, and then, finally, tzeis hakochavim, the emergence of stars.

Aryeh Lebowitz: Yes. Okay, so shkiah is sunset, as we’ve discussed, and you don’t need a Jewish source to find exactly when sunset is. That’s the moment the sun completely disappears below the horizon, and that marks the end of what is definitively daytime, meaning we are no longer certain that it’s daytime, and it might already be nighttime when shkiah happens, because the sun is no longer in the sky, so to speak, and, therefore, daytime mitzvos, things that you’re supposed to do during daytime, such as praying Minchah, the second prayer of the day, should be done prior to shkiah, should be done before shkiah. I’m going to skip to the third term, tzeis hakochavim, which is the emergence of three stars.

That’s a much trickier term, because what do you mean, the emergence of three stars? Now, I spend some time up in the mountains during the summertime, and there is much less street light, much less air pollution, and you look in the sky, and you see there’s so many more stars upstate than there are here in in North Woodmere, but obviously there’re the same number of stars.

Dovid Bashevkin: So can you end Shabbos earlier, like you can, “Oh, I see stars, I guess it’s the nighttime”?

Aryeh Lebowitz: And the visibility of the stars is obviously much greater in certain places than in other places, and what counts as a star? How big? How small? You know, the larger stars will be visible earlier, the smaller stars only only later. The pared-down definition of the term tzeis hakochavim is the emergence of, let’s say, three medium-sized stars in perfect conditions, meaning in where there’s no street lights and no smog and no clouds and where you’re able to see clearly. Exactly how to measure that is a huge debate among rabbis for many, many, many centuries.

But that is the definitive end of day. I should say the definitive beginning of night. That’s when we know for sure that night has begun. So if we’ve defined sunset as the end of definite day, and tzeis hakochavim, when there’s the emergence of three stars, as the beginning of definitive night, well, obviously there’s a gap of time in between them, and that gap of time is referred to as bein hashmashos, as the in-between time, the twilight zone period of time, and we treat that time as if we are unsure if it is day or night.

There is some debate as to whether we are actually unsure, or whether the reason we treat it as if we are unsure is because we do know for sure that it is both day and night simultaneously. That’s the kind of debate they would have in yeshiva. And there may be differences, but that’s that’s more of a nuanced take, because when you have two opposites working simultaneously together, that we treat it as if it’s a doubt.

Dovid Bashevkin: You know, somebody who’s being initiated to this for the first time might feel a sense of maybe like like a claustrophobia, like I I like I I feel like every second I’m going to be nervous what time this, that.

Talk a little bit about, especially with Tractate Berachos, of how centrally time as a concept of what we’re supposed to feel about time itself. What do you think is the value that halachic practice that emerges really primarily from the tractate that we explored this week of Berachos? What do you think is the value in the relationship that we’re supposed to have towards time that emerges in totality from all of these details, whether it’s the times of starting Shabbos, or the times of when, you know, Yontif and the holidays are over, whether it’s when you can daven, when can you not daven? How is this supposed to develop and affect your character and your relationship to time itself?

Aryeh Lebowitz: I think most fundamentally, the system teaches us that time is valuable. There’s purpose in what you do on a day in, day out basis, that a person should not fall into a rut where, you know, you’ll have your life punctuated by significant moments, and then in between, there’s just dead time, or there’s just dead space where a person isn’t really being productive, and a person is not accomplishing. The whole concept of having three prayers a day, the whole concept of time governing that, oh, now it’s the time for this prayer, now it’s the time for that prayer, now this mitzvah applies, teaches us to utilize every day on the calendar, and every segment of the day in in productivity.

And I just want to address the comment about nervousness. You do find it a lot. You do find that people get very anxious about the restrictions of time and getting this done by that time. I I find that maybe this is not 100% true, but for the most part, the greater the person, people who are genuinely great people, my rabbinic heroes don’t seem nervous at all.

It seems like it’s just a natural, seamless way of living life. And to me, that’s an ideal, that the Torah is not here to make us nervous, to give us anxiety. It’s here to give us purpose. It’s like you have a kid who looks so forward to the end of the school year, but in reality, if there was never school, he’d go out of his mind.

COVID wasn’t fun for him. You know, he would he would go out of his mind. He needs that structure because he feels productive in that structure. And there’s nothing better for a person than to feel like they’re being productive, and to feel like they’re they’re doing something.

So it really invigorates one’s life when you know that day in and day out, there’s productivity that’s expected and that’s attainable for for each and every person.

Dovid Bashevkin: I could not agree with you more. You really set the paradigm for a meticulous and careful observance of halacha, but one that I feel like you model with joy, with calmness, with actually allowing you to raise a beautiful family and build and be a Jewish leader. I could not think of a better example than you, and I hope that people look out for your online shiurim.

You are quite renowned for a series of shiurim, of classes, I’m sorry, shiur meaning a class, called 10-Minute Halacha, which you break down very complex questions in halacha in just 10 minutes, which I I kind of borrowed for our Talmud Daily. 10 minutes seems like the right amount of time, as well as obviously your Daf Yomi classes on the entire Talmud which can be found on the All Daf app run by the OU, or on YUTorah, of course, where you can find thousands, quite literally, of your own classes. If you’ll allow me, I wanted to kind of end with our Talmud questionnaire, just to understand a little bit more about the lives and that forest view of the Talmud of people who have been really dedicating their lives to teaching Gemara. My first question, who do you consider your primary teacher of Talmud, and what exactly did they teach you?

Aryeh Lebowitz: Rabbi Hershel Schachter, who is the most senior rosh yeshiva in Yeshiva University, is definitely my primary teacher of Talmud and and of a lot of things.

What he has taught me was it’s very hard to like summarize in in a sentence. There are so many things that he taught that I’m not big enough to be able to fully integrate. But one thing that I think I really worked hard on trying to integrate into my own learning, and therefore my own teaching, is his incredible ability to simplify that which is complex. Talmud is complex by its nature, and it can be very, very challenging.

And there’s a tremendous skill to be able to simplify, to be able to find what the rules are that the Talmud is working with, that it’s not just a random list of do this and don’t do that, where the Talmud is working with certain more general principles, and to figure out what those principles are. You know, it’s reverse engineering sometimes. You’re looking at the results and you’re trying to figure out what the principles are, but they started with the principles and then achieved the the results. But to be able to simplify the complex and to express it in a way that people should be able to understand.

Dovid Bashevkin: I think you are absolutely masterful at that, and I really should have mentioned the fact, because I think it’s so much of your ability to give over Talmud clearly obviously comes from your rebbe and mine, really, well, the leader of our generation in many ways, Rav Schachter, but really aside from that was your experience as a high school rebbe, where you taught for many years. I never got to have you, I wasn’t in your class, we kind of missed each other, but you taught as a high school rebbe for many years and I would look at the sheets that you put together and the way that you were able to break down a very complex discussion into kind of its core principles, the general principles that animate any discussion. And that really brings me to my next question in the questionnaire, which is, if you were introducing Talmud to somebody for the first time, how would you explain what this is, and where would you begin? Where would you open up to kind of introduce, you know, what exactly the the nature and the importance of Gemara is?

Aryeh Lebowitz: I would describe it as entering a—I wouldn’t even call it a time machine, because a time machine brings you to a different time, but almost like a timeless machine. Entering a a room where all generations are there simultaneously.

It’s extremely powerful when you can sort of—how does one connect with—think about, you knew your grandparents. Did you know your great-great-grandparents? Not one. Would you have anything to talk about if you’re seven generations back? Forget about the fact that you can’t identify them. Would you have anything to talk about with them? Do you have any common—what would the conversation be like? Their entire experience was was so different from ours.

This Talmudic discussion, it’s a conversation that started thousands of years ago, and that we’re still participating in today. I have no doubt that if I were to meet my ten-times great-grandfather, we would have what to talk about, and it would be this. He would not be able to tell me what he thinks about self-driving cars. He would not be able to tell me about any of the the, you know, what he thinks about, you know, the next big, you know, the the society’s—

Dovid Bashevkin: Modern amenities, pop culture, they they—

Aryeh Lebowitz: Don’t—right, none of it! None of it.

But this—now, I I had the privilege of interviewing my rebbe, Rav Schachter, recently. I’m not an interviewer, I don’t know how to do it, so the guy with the camera, after we finished, said to Rav Schachter, “Or maybe also talk about…” because these are questions I didn’t ask, I forgot to ask, he said, “Talk about your father and your mother.” Yeah. So, so Rav Schachter said, “After I got married, most of my conversations with my father, most of my relationship with my father was about Torah.” And I’m thinking, “Okay, we’re going to have to edit that out, because nobody’s going to relate to that, and everyone’s going to think that that sounds very cold and, you know.” And then he paused for a moment and he said, “And isn’t that the way that we bind all generations together, through Torah?” Wow. Meaning, there’s no more powerful binding medium of the generations of the Jewish people than the Torah, and the Torah Shebe’al Peh in particular, the oral—

Dovid Bashevkin: I think that is so beautiful, and honestly, Rabbi Lebowitz, if we walk away with a new term called the Talmud as a timeless machine, where all generations can come together, be bound in the same conversation—I see it with my own life, in my own conversations with my own father.

We love talking about this stuff. It’s so beautiful. And my mother, frankly. I mean, this is what we love to talk about—purpose, ideas.

It transforms families and generations. My next question—a lot of people don’t like answering this one, but I’m going to push you—do you have—

Aryeh Lebowitz: I got a sneak peek at—no, we’re not doing that? Okay.

Dovid Bashevkin: Do you have a favorite tractate?

Aryeh Lebowitz: So, you know, the the Talmud in in Maseches Eruvin says that you’re not supposed to say, shemu’ah zu na’ah, shemu’ah zu einah na’ah, that I I enjoy this teaching and not that teaching, and yet everybody has a favorite tractate. Everybody has things that they enjoy learning more and things that they enjoy learning less.

The year of COVID, when we had Simchas Torah in our shul, where typically you would go and dance in a circle with the Torahs in hand and a lot of breathing on each other and people in close proximity, and we were practicing social distancing. So, what were we going to do on Simchas Torah? Everyone’s in masks, everyone six feet apart from each other. So, based on a suggestion of a dear friend of mine, Rabbi Dovid Sukenik, we encouraged everybody to bring their favorite sefer to shul and dance in their seats for a few moments with their favorite sefer, and learn a little something. And to see what people brought, their Gemara from ninth grade because they remembered that year was a great year, and it was written in and there were translations of every word in between the lines, you know, or this one his, you know, the the sefer that he learned with his grandfather when he was young before his grandfather passed away.

It was just such an unbelievable thing to see how everyone had one. Everyone had one, which is incredible. And if a person thinks in their life, you know, what would my favorite sefer be, and they don’t have one, it’s time to get one, right?

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s time to get one. Beautiful.

Aryeh Lebowitz: My favorite tractate, I’m not sure, but I would say, you know, I don’t know it well, but I I really for some reason I enjoy learning Maseches Nazir. I think it’s because it goes back to a time in my life where I was starting to get very, very busy. It was harder for me to find the time to learn, and I decided that I’m going to put my all into Maseches Nazir. So for that year, or less than a year, I really worked on that masechta.

I didn’t review it as many times as I should have, but nevertheless, that would be it.

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s not my favorite, but it happens to be of my favorites because so much of the tractate is about hair, which occupied a lot of my I went white early, so I I felt a certain kinship to the emphasis on hair in Tractate Nazir. My next question, I’m curious. If you were to give advice to somebody studying Talmud or Daf Yomi for the first time, somebody who at the end of this says, “I want to really jump in and try to get on that treadmill where I’m doing a page a day, or even just find some basic way,” what strategies and what advice would you give to somebody who really is ready to open up line by line and start finishing tractates? What advice would you give someone who’s trying this for the first time?

Aryeh Lebowitz: So, I would give two bits of advice.

The first is to find the right context within which to learn. By context within which to learn, I mean either a group of people who you’re going to be learning with. In a lot of shuls, they have a Daf Yomi chevra. You know, if someone isn’t there, “Oh, we missed you yesterday.

Where were you? You know, everything okay?” There’s a social element to it that keeps you coming, because there are days that it’s going to be very challenging and then you’re not going to feel motivated to come. The other thing I mean by context is to find the right teacher, that if you’re not going to be doing it totally independently, there are some teachers that you’ll connect with better than others, and to find a shiur that really talks to your way of thinking, your way of processing information. There are very, very much larger shiurim than mine that are online and that are doing amazing things, reaching tens of thousands of people. Rabbi Eli Stefansky is with with a For sure.

Dovid Bashevkin: We’re going to try We’re going to try to introduce them all if we can hunt them down, but I’m happy that you’re mentioning them.

Aryeh Lebowitz: Yeah, and social There’s a social element to it. There’s humor. There’s AI.

There’s, you know, and then then you have Rabbi Sruly Bornstein, who does it with lomdus. Like you want to feel like you’re back in yeshiva and like a serious yeshiva, he’s giving you high-level Torah on day in and day out in a serious, intense way. And then there’s a lot in between, but even more than that, it’s local. In your shul, if people you see every day, there’s a local maggid shiur that you connect with, that you can ask questions to during the shiur, that has a great value as well if that’s what talks to you.

So that’s that’s one, is the context within which you learn. The second bit of advice that I always try to give for people who want to start the Daf Yomi: Since there will be days that it is so complex that you’ll feel lost, that sometimes you think that the person saying the shiur, the person delivering the shiur is the only person who understands it, and sometimes you’re wrong because even he doesn’t understand it, and nobody really to try to take out of each daf, out of each day, one thing, something, just take a nugget. You should never feel, “I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and went to shul and sat there for 45 minutes in space, and I have nothing to show for it.” You should be able to say, “What I picked up is that this particular halacha, or the idea that that Rashi says this,” or just one thing, one little nugget, one one something from each daf. Don’t close your Gemara until you have that that one nugget, and carry that with you the rest of the day.

I mean, so much about learning is not just the act of learning. It’s engaging your mind and making sure that you’re thinking about Torah throughout the day. So if you have one nugget, you can carry it with you in your mind, the rest of the day will will bring meaning to the whole day.

Dovid Bashevkin: I absolutely love that.

One of the distinctions we spoke about is the difference between halachic, meaning the discussions that relate to Jewish law, versus aggadata, which are the stories, the narrative, the theology. I am curious if you have a favorite halachic discussion and a favorite story that appear in the Talmud, one of each.

Aryeh Lebowitz: That’s that’s hard to choose from. Well, what I enjoy most about halachic discussions is that usually it’s not in one place in the Talmud, meaning when it comes to real-life halacha, you usually have to be able to gather from different places.

But nevertheless, and I don’t think this is recency bias, we’re learning Maseches Chullin now in Daf Yomi. As someone who teaches aspiring rabbis, one of the primary sugyas that we deal with, or the primary topics that we deal with—it’s going to be too complex to explain it, but it’s the sugya of nat bar nat. It’s a detailed kashrus-related topic. It’s rich in halacha.

It’s rich in lomdus, which is, you know, the—

Dovid Bashevkin: Conceptual—conceptual, sure.

Aryeh Lebowitz: And we have very strong traditions in our yeshiva of Torah in that area, because Rav Soloveitchik had a lot to say.

Dovid Bashevkin: And just for our listeners, nat bar nat is an acronym, which is not going to make it any more clear, so don’t worry, but nosein ta’am bar nosein ta’am, which means something that emits a flavor, and when we look at that flavor as still being kind of halachically viable, that now it’s a dairy flavor, a meat flavor, a non-kosher flavor, we will absolutely get there and get to it. Favorite story, Rabbi Lebowitz? Favorite story.

Aryeh Lebowitz: So this became my favorite story because of a story that happened. Can I share a story—please—that happened? One of the great blessings in my—thank God, a lot of great blessings. One of the great blessings I’ve had in my life is I had the opportunity to learn through about half of Shas with a chavrusa who is so far superior to me in his ability to learn and to teach, Rabbi Shalom Rosner, who now made aliyah and he is living in Yisrael for probably close—

Dovid Bashevkin: To 20—former 18Forty guest.

Aryeh Lebowitz: Former, yeah, great.

So Rabbi Rosner, when he started giving the Daf Yomi and posting the shiurim online, it was the early days of posting Daf Yomi online. There weren’t many people doing it. In fact, when he made aliyah, they asked me to post my shiur because they said, “We don’t have another shiur to put on YUTorah,” which is like now you have like a thousand Daf Yomi shiurim on YUTorah. But they didn’t have someone else willing to put their stuff out there.

So when he started giving his shiur, I was his chavrusa, we would learn together, and he got an email from somebody one day that said, “Rabbi Rosner, I want to express our gratitude to you because—” The person described how their father always wanted to learn, but never really—he had a very busy professional life and he never really got around to learning, and he never really got around to making time to learn. He was a very successful physician, and he one day wasn’t feeling well. He went to the doctor, and the doctor diagnosed him with a terminal illness. And the doctor told him, “You have about three months to live.” And the email continued.

“And my father decided, ‘I’m retiring today and I’m going to start to learn. If I have three months left on this earth, I’m going to spend those three months learning Torah.'” And his children, who are adults living in different cities—I think one lived in Boston and one lived in in Jerusalem, and I think maybe the father lived somewhere in New York, I don’t remember exactly—living in different places, all decided they’re going to listen to Rabbi Rosner’s Daf Yomi shiur, and then they’ll have a conference call—this was before Zoom—they’ll have a conference call at night talking over with each other the the points that were most enjoyable to them. And they did this. They said, “We started Shabbos daf lamed and we were hoping that if we’re up to page 30 in Maseches Shabbos and it’s one page a day, then maybe maybe maybe God will will smile on our father and and allow him to get to the end of Maseches Shabbos,” which would have been four months later, not three months.

They said, “We were happy when we got to the end of Maseches Shabbos. When we got to the end of Maseches Eruvin, wow, we we couldn’t believe he had made it that long and we were overjoyed. The siyum on Pesachim four months after that was was something to behold with all of us celebrating together.” And the letter concluded that, “Our father passed away Maseches Yoma daf pei-daled, and we just want to express that we feel that the learning gave him life, but in a literal sense, that it enabled him to live, to outlive the doctor’s diagnosis and the doctor’s predictions by so much.” And Rabbi Ros—I would have taken that email and said, “Okay, that’s great.” Rabbi Rosner said, “Shabbos daf lamed? Shabbos daf lamed?” He opened up Shabbos daf lamed. The Gemara over there talks about how Dovid HaMelech wanted to know, King David wanted to know when he was going to die.

And God says, “I’m sorry, we don’t give that information out.” So he said, “Okay, at least tell me what day of the week I’m going to die.” And God said, “Okay, I’ll give that information. You’re going to die on Shabbos.” And Dovid HaMelech decided, in order to defeat death, In order to escape death, that he was going to learn Torah all day and all night on Shabbos, because the Angel of Death would have no power over him so long as he is learning. And he— wow— continued to do so, and and the Gemara describes how ultimately the Angel of Death got to him. So he said this man started learning on the day that the Daf Yomi learned the story about how to defeat death, and that’s by grabbing onto learning.

And that’s when he started learning, and that’s how he defeated death for all of these months.

Dovid Bashevkin: Wow. Wow, that brings us back like that that timeless machine, stepping into a place of eternity. It really does.

It is a way of transcending death itself and really stepping into eternity. That is incredibly, incredibly beautiful. Story on Shabbos 30a. My next question: When do you remember first falling in love with studying Talmud?

Aryeh Lebowitz: I first fell in love with a teacher of Talmud, with someone that I admired so much that I wanted to be like, which made me want to learn, I would say in 10th grade with Rabbi Yisroel Kamenetsky.

And actually falling in love with the content of the of the Talmud was probably the following year in the 11th grade. Rabbi Michoel Haft, should have a refuah sheleimah, he should be well, had an incredible ability to show us how to derive meaning from the words, how to decipher the words, and to really feel a sense of accomplishment on our own that wasn’t spoon-fed to us, that we were really accomplishing in our learning.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely beautiful. My final question for today on the Talmud questionnaire: What time and where do you most enjoy to study Talmud?

Aryeh Lebowitz: I would say 5:15 a.m. when the world is still asleep for the most part, and I go to my shul before anyone’s there, and that’s when I prepare the Daf Yomi.

I like to pace. I need to be moving, I need to physically be moving for my brain to be moving, and I’m just pacing up and down the aisles in my shul for an hour before I give the Daf Yomi. It’s totally empty, and I love it.

Dovid Bashevkin: That is so beautiful.

I also happen to love pacing. Rabbi Lebowitz, thank you so much for the Torah that you share with the entire world, which again can be found on YUTorah, can be found on the All Daf app of the OU, as well as many books both in Hebrew and in English. I am so grateful for you joining us today for our conversation for Talmud Daily.

Aryeh Lebowitz: Thank you so much.