Dr. Malka Simkovich: How Jerusalem Held the Jewish World Together

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

Dovid Bashevkin: I am so excited for this conversation for Talmud Daily, where we are going to be talking about Tractate Shekalim, and I am sitting here with Dr. Malka Simkovich, an old friend of the 18Forty podcast. We’ve had you on many times, and I am so excited to talk about, not an in-depth deep dive in line by line in Shekalim, but really the world that Shekalim represents. And I wanted to begin, A, Malka, it’s a joy to have you.

Malka Simkovich: Thank you for having me, Dovid.

Dovid Bashevkin: Where I wanted to begin is there is something very unusual right up front with Tractate Shekalim in that, when you study the Talmud starting from Berachos, we’re usually in the Babylonian Talmud. But we don’t have a Babylonian Talmud on Tractate Shekalim, so we actually borrow from the what’s known as the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud. Let’s begin by telling me a little bit about kind of the difference between the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud.

Malka Simkovich: The Jerusalem Talmud was completed, I’m not going to say edited, but it was completed probably two centuries or more before the Babylonian Talmud.

The Babylonian Talmud was composed over the course of many generations, and it has what’s called a stama’itic layer, which is to say an editorial voice that sews all of these dialogues from past generations together.

Dovid Bashevkin: Like that anonymous voice.

Malka Simkovich: Right. And that was probably put together in the sixth century, or maybe even later.

And so when you look at the Babylonian Talmud, of course there’s insider language, and there’s a difficult vocabulary, and you have to accustom yourself to obviously Aramaic and all of the different players that come from different generations and different communities, but there is a guiding editorial layer that weaves everything together. The Jerusalem Talmud was edited probably in the end of the fourth century and is not as seamlessly edited, and you don’t have that stama, you don’t have that editorial layer. It’s a little bit harder to understand, and you’re more reliant on later commentaries often to understand what’s happening in its text. A third of the Babylonian Talmud is aggada, which is to say that a third of the Babylonian Talmud is narrative, and includes biblical commentary and various stories and interpretations.

And a fourth of the Jerusalem Talmud is aggadic. So you might think that the writers and the voices who participated in all these traditions that end up being recorded in the Jerusalem Talmud, in the Yerushalmi, value aggada, value biblical commentary and narratives about the rabbis a little bit less. But it’s actually not true, because a very significant amount of the aggada that ends up in the Bavli, in the Babylonian Talmud, comes from the Yerushalmi.

Dovid Bashevkin: And it’s like a reinterpretation, or like added voices.

Malka Simkovich: Right. So this is a community that really values its stories, its narratives, its traditions, its biblical commentaries. Of course halacha‘s at the foundational heart of it, but if you look at what ends up traveling to the Bavli, and all these aggadic stories that end up embedded in the Babylonian Talmud, so much of it comes from this community in the land of Israel.

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s so important that you mention, because a lot of people don’t know this, that they’re dated differently, and that’s a very important factor.

One question that a lot of people wonder is why is the Babylonian Talmud so much more normative? I mean, it’s not even a comparison. All halacha stems from what was canonized in the Babylonian Talmud, as opposed to the Jerusalem Talmud. And the reason that’s given, and this is already cited by Rav Yitzchak Alfasi, known as the Rif, who’s one of the earliest commentators that we we’ve discussed on Talmud Daily, predates the Rambam, he’s kind of like a bridge right after the Geonic period, right as we’re entering the next period of commentaries known as the Rishonim, Rav Yitzchak Alfasi, known as the Rif, writes at the very end of Tractate Eruvin that the reason why the Babylonian Talmud is more normative is because it was written later, and at a certain point we always operate by a principle that we go, in the language of the Talmud, hilchasa kevasra’ei, we go by the later person because they had access to more information. And really the main reason why I wanted to have you on specifically to talk about Tractate Shekalim, and I’m saying this up front, it’s not because you’re the world expert in Tractate Shekalim, but you are one of the world experts in the culture of Israel, and specifically the relationship, which is the really the subject of one of your books, I have it right on the shelf, the name of your book, your most recent book, is

Malka Simkovich: Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity, and it is somewhere on Dovid’s shelf.

Dovid Bashevkin: It is on my Israel shelf, that’s where I’m looking right now.

Malka Simkovich: It should be on your Diaspora shelf.

Dovid Bashevkin: It sh- I need I need a Diaspora shelf. Well, most of my shelves are Diaspora shelves.

But what I found so fascinating is that at the heart of Tractate Shekalim is really about how to build relationships with the Temple, with Jerusalem, and that relati- relationship was not just for the Jews who lived in Israel, it was also for the Jews in the diaspora, meaning the obligation to contribute that half-shekel, that coin which went to the upkeep and operations of the temple, it wasn’t just a tax on, like, I only pay dues for my local shul, but every Jew paid dues to kind of the central temple, and it was a way that diaspora Jewry could kind of build a relationship with the land of Israel, specifically Jerusalem, and most specifically, the temple. And what I wanted to talk about were those relationships. What was the relationship, in the Second Temple period, of Jews living in Israel to the temple itself? I think to myself, like, when I visit Israel, or I’ve lived in Israel, you know, for a year, gap year, how many times do you visit the Kotel over the course of your year in Israel? It’s frequent. It’s not Probably we probably differ.

Were you a frequent Kotel visitor?

Malka Simkovich: Oh, in seminary, yes, all the time. And now we spend summers in Israel, and we’re lucky if we show up to the Kotel one time, I confess. But as an 18-year-old, yes, a regular frequenter.

Dovid Bashevkin: Regular frequenter.

And I would go definitely not weekly, probably not even monthly, but I probably went six times over the course of the year. So tell me a little bit, let’s start with Jews in Israel during the Second Temple period. What is their relationship like to the temple, and where do we have this information from?

Malka Simkovich: There is so much to say, David, and I want to go back to something that you were saying about the differences between the Yerushalmi and the Bavli. You mentioned that the Yerushalmi is less authoritative.

It was, as we said, edited in haste in the fourth century. There wasn’t time to give it all the connective tissue that the Bavli ended up getting because Jews were living under a more oppressive authority.

Dovid Bashevkin: Jews where were living under more

Malka Simkovich: In the land of Israel.

Dovid Bashevkin: Really?

Malka Simkovich: They were subject to law codes under this newly Christian empire that were quite oppressive.

Law codes concerning how you could build a synagogue, whether they could be of a certain height, could they be as high as churches, how Jews had to treat converts to Christianity, they had to be very, very respectful.

Dovid Bashevkin: And these were government laws that were specifically imposed on the Jews, ’cause this is right when Christianity is kind of emerging and it was the Roman government was a Christian government at the time.

Malka Simkovich: That’s right. With the exception of one or two emperors, there was an increasing religious fervor, and that fervor was taken out on the Jews living in the land of Israel, who were still forbidden from going into the ancient city of Jerusalem.

They were not living in that vicinity after the rebellion of Shimon bar Kochba in 135 CE, so they were living in the north, in the Galilee.

Dovid Bashevkin: You just dropped something that was fascinating. Meaning Jews in that period by the government were not allowed to enter the city of Jerusalem?

Malka Simkovich: It was a Roman city. It had been named by Hadrian in 135 or possibly a little earlier.

It had been renamed Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were not living in Jerusalem, as far as we know. They were living in the north. We have all kinds of interesting rabbinic texts about this, about Yochanan ben Zakkai saying, “Give me Yavneh and its sages.” We have these traditions, and they do reflect a historical reality that the Jewish community migrated up north. Of course, there were already Jews living in the Galilee, but that is where they were recording these traditions that end up in the Jerusalem Talmud, in the Yerushalmi.

But the reason why I want to go back to this is because I do see a pattern in antiquity. When there is a spike in oppression, Jews tend to turn inward and express more anxiety about maintaining unity across geographic difference. We see this in the second century BCE with the Hasmonean rebellion. As the Syrian Greeks are issuing edicts that prohibit the observance of Jewish ancestral laws, we suddenly find a spate of texts produced by Jews in Jerusalem that are showing anxiety not in relation to the Syrian Greeks, but in relation to how their fellow Jews who live outside Judea are practicing.

Suddenly it becomes an urgent issue. We have an oppressor. We need to come together. Let’s make sure that our laws are normative, are common.

Let’s make sure that our boundaries are strong. Let’s make sure that we’re showing a common face to our enemy, and by the way, our enemy is your enemy, fellow Jews. In other words, you need to be equally concerned about this enemy, even if you’re living a very good life out there in the diaspora. We need to come together, establish a common boundary around all the Jewish people, and that means that we also have to be in relationship with one another.

And so a lot of the stories that are recorded in the Yerushalmi and also in midrashic texts at this time show an anxiety and a commitment to maintaining unity across geographic difference. And some of the traditions in rabbinic literature about how all the Jews Jews, wherever they lived, would come together and gather regularly in the temple, these aren’t necessarily valuable because they’re historically archival, right? We’re talking about a fourth-century text that’s telling us what life was like back in the pre-70 CE world. But it’s very valuable historically if we think about what it tells us in regards to the imagination of the fourth-century Judean Jew.

Dovid Bashevkin: The ideals they were trying to center, which is so fascinating, especially through like a contemporary lens.

There’s definitely an uptick in anti-Semitism, but what’s fascinating is you feel the vulnerability because the practice of Jews, especially since Enlightenment, has become so diverse that like, wait, so who are, so to speak, the real Jews? It’s not as unified, and when you’re talking about unity, which I absolutely love, you’re not talking about everybody sitting in a circle and singing together, you’re talking about unity of practice, that Jewish life should be unified across geographic boundaries, which is one of the great, brilliant, and sublime goals of halachah. Halachah, you know, has two axes. It is not just connecting us to godliness and godly values, it also connects Jews around the world.

Malka Simkovich: That’s right.

The rabbis are establishing a normative, practicable system that anyone anywhere can observe in the absence of a temple. And the reason why I think this idea is so important, even in the second century BCE, is because we tend to overblow sectarianism. When we think about the Second Temple era, especially the latter half, from the second century BCE to the first century CE, we often think of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Essenes, and that is totally overblown. 99.9% of Jews were not in a sect.

Now, sectarians were often very visible, they were leaders, they might be temple administrators or they might be Torah teachers, but most Jews were not in a sect. They were living their lives and they were practicing their Judaism in Alexandria, Egypt, in Antioch in Syria, in Cyrene in modern-day Libya, in the Greek islands, in Rome, in Jerusalem, in the north, in the east, and all of these Jews are doing the same things to observe their what we call their common Judaism, Shabbos and a

Dovid Bashevkin: I love that term, common Judaism. I think you’re the one who introduced me to that term, and that idea, I read the writings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe when he came to America, and I think he was trying to reintroduce a practice of common Judaism for America. You know, emphasizing candle lighting, emphasizing buying Jewish books, you know, like the tefillin campaign.

Let’s re-establish unified norms for the Jewish people.

Malka Simkovich: That’s right. And a great example is a distinctive calendar. Now, of course, there are differences in precisely how Jews might have built a sukkah in Alexandria versus in the Galilee, but most of them, if they’re identifying as Jewish, they are building a sukkah, or they are, and this is where I’m going in terms of your topic, they are not necessarily going to Jerusalem, but they’re thinking with the idea of Jerusalem.

It’s becoming embedded in their liturgy. They’re writing texts about Jerusalem. They’re thinking about the temple just like today. It’s very contemporary today.

Wherever you are, if you’re an observant Jew, you’ll grow up with songs about Israel. You’ll have a culture of Judaism that really connects you and orients you towards Jerusalem, and it was the same thing in the second century BCE. The plays, the novellas, the conversations.

Dovid Bashevkin: Did you say plays?

Malka Simkovich: I did say plays, in fact.

Dovid Bashevkin: I’m not aware of of the second-century theatrical scene.

Malka Simkovich: Oh, yes.

Dovid Bashevkin: I don’t even What are you talking about? What What is that?

Malka Simkovich: I am so excited to tell you about my favorite tragedian. His name is Ezekiel, Ezekiel the Tragedian.

He was a Jew in the second century BCE, probably living in Alexandria, and he wrote a popular play called Exagoge, the Exodus. It is a play meant to be performed that tells the story of Sefer Shemos, the first half of Sefer Shemos, that traces the Israelites’ miraculous exit and transition from slavery into the wilderness, and then ultimately into the Land of Israel, and he’s writing this from the diaspora. It’s an incredible text.

Dovid Bashevkin: As a Jew? Observant Jew. Ezekiel the Tragedian?

Malka Simkovich: The Tragedian. Look him up.

Dovid Bashevkin: I’ve never even heard of that never even heard of that before. That is, and he made this like popular play, similar to way like like when they were when they were raising money for Israel Bonds, they would like bring people together, and they had, what’s his name, they would try to make like movies that would like galvanize

Malka Simkovich: Oh, I grew up in the ’80s and we had so much, I guess you would call it material culture about the Jews behind the Iron Curtain.

Right, we are leaving Mother Russia, all the music and all the campaigns around, you know, call your local representative and Get Natan Sharansky out of it, all that stuff. It becomes embedded in your thinking, in how you move throughout the world. You’re thinking about what’s happening to Jews over there, somewhere, you know.

Dovid Bashevkin: This is beyond fascinating.

So I want to talk a little bit about specifically the temple is clearly still shaping Jews even after its destruction, but allow me to go back in time a little bit to the time when the temple stood. This is really the focus of Shekalim. It was during Adar time where Jews around the world would send in their their donation, and it was supposed to be a uniform donation, a half a shekel. That’s, you know, your $18 check to federation, very similar model.

But there was one federation, it was the Jews of Israel, and you would send that in. And in the diaspora, they would also send it, but it would take much longer for the money to arrive. And they, you know, they would open up their treasure chest, they would have one right before Passover, and then they would do it again before Shavuos because of the pilgrimages that Jews would make to the temple. And that was both Jews inside of Israel and, hopefully, outside of Israel would trek up.

Now, I don’t know how many Jews or if Jews actually were doing this from the diaspora during the Second Temple period. The three pilgrimages that Jews would do, what was that about? And what information do we have, not from a halachic point of view, but from a historical point of view, what do we know about that diasporic relationship with making an actual pilgrimage to the land of Israel, to the temple?

Malka Simkovich: There are always so many things that you say, David, and then I I feel bad because I have to go back to something that you said a few minutes ago. So you’ve said many things just now, but I want to go back to your question from a few minutes ago first about what the relationship was from within the land of Israel.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yes, okay.

And then I’d love to

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah, then we’ll leave that for after.

Malka Simkovich: tie that in, because we have an incredible source about your very question, and that source comes from the late first century CE historian Josephus. Now, a lot of Jews have heard of Josephus

Dovid Bashevkin: Tell me a word, yeah, tell me a word about Josephus, his reliability, etc., etc.

Malka Simkovich: It’s so funny that you just said reliability. I was about to defend Josephus’s honor and integrity, because very often when I say Josephus, people shudder.

It’s almost like saying Herod, like, oh no, she just said Josephus, and did you know he was a traitor? Well, yes, in fact, I did. It’s interesting to me that if someone has heard one thing about Josephus, it’s not that he wrote the first systematic defense of the Jewish religion to ever have been composed and preserved. It’s not that he was a staunch defender of the integrity of Jewish law. It’s not that he identified up until the day of his death as an observant Jew and a priestly Jew.

It’s none of those things. It’s that he was a traitor. And I feel that one of my missions

Dovid Bashevkin: I like this. I like this like Anger, passion.

Yeah, this like passion for like, stop dragging Jo- I I have this with Moses Mendelssohn. Again, this is now is not the time, but I feel like

Malka Simkovich: Please, this is the time.

Dovid Bashevkin: reputationally, he has a reputation of like, which is not true, founding Reform Right, father of the Reform movement. and like, you know, rebelling and opening up the gateways Heresy.

to Enlightenment, and I’m like, if you really read what he was writing about, like, I think we’re products of his vision, which is the separation of church and state. That was his main bit. And you So, you are a Josephus defender. I like it.

Malka Simkovich: Listen, he was a flawed man.

Dovid Bashevkin: Who among us is not?

Malka Simkovich: Some of us are flawed women.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah.

Malka Simkovich: He is not perfect by any means, so, you know, I’m not going to defend every single thing that we think we know about Josephus.

But one of the reasons why it’s important to defend his integrity is because people use the fact that he did defect to the Roman side, and I can talk about the context, there’s always context, I could talk about the circumstances in which he was essentially forced to do that, but people use that fact, and they say, “Well, nothing he says is reliable. We can’t use Josephus because he was a traitor, he was loyal to the Romans, and therefore he’s not historically reliable.” It’s absurd to take the most important eyewitness of the most important conflict that we have in antiquity between Jews and their oppressors

Dovid Bashevkin: And just throw the whole thing out the window.

Malka Simkovich: I always say, how much can you lie to hundreds of thousands of eyewitnesses? If I talked right now about the president of the United States

Dovid Bashevkin: And just made up something and published a whatever, David Beckham

Malka Simkovich: Yeah.

Malka Simkovich: and and people would be like, “But he’s not the president, right?” Because we know who our president is.

Josephus is writing in 90 CE. His readers have lived through it. How much can he lie? He can’t. We have to take him seriously.

The reason why I bring him up is because he writes, in addition to a 20-volume magnum opus history of the Jews called Antiquities of the Jews, and in addition to the first systematic defense of the Jewish religion called Against Apion, And, probably his least reliable work, an autobiography, he writes,

Dovid Bashevkin: gotta admire the man, fair enough, yeah, yeah, respect,

Malka Simkovich: when he implies that he has prophetic inspiration, we could maybe we could maybe read that with some distance, right. But he also writes a seven-volume work called The Jewish War. It’s a history of the great war that actually begins, I believe that he actually starts it in the second century BCE, because he sets the stage for the story of Roman occupation. And in The Jewish War, Josephus says that towards the end of the war, there was a Roman general named Cestius, who is going through the land of Israel slaughtering Jews.

And the Romans often, there are a few examples of this that I know of, the Romans often select times where they know the Jews will be most vulnerable. By the way, the Syrian Greeks did this, too. The Syrian Greeks looked for the most devout and pietistic Jews who wouldn’t fight them on Shabbos.

Dovid Bashevkin: Like a visible Jew.

Malka Simkovich: More than visible, the Jews who wouldn’t fight back on Shabbos, meaning really So, Judah Maccabee was a visible Jew, but he raised arms on Shabbos.

Dovid Bashevkin: Gotcha.

Malka Simkovich: But the Syrian Greeks looked for the Jews who said, “We would rather die than raise arms on Shabbos.” And the Syrian Greeks slaughtered those Jews.

Dovid Bashevkin: Wow.

Because they knew that those Jews would choose death. And something very similar happens in the first century, in this horrible war, where the Romans are looking for pockets of Jewish vulnerability. And one example comes when the Roman general Cestius is going through the countryside looking for Jews on Sukkos, and he gets to the city of Lod, and no one is there. And Josephus tells us no one is there because the town had emptied out.

They had all gone to Jerusalem.

Dovid Bashevkin: Wow.

Dovid Bashevkin: So, Lod was within the land of Israel, right, but Jews, they were trekking out to Jerusalem.

Malka Simkovich: Their lives were saved.

Imagine being a Jew who had gone, you make the trip, it takes time, it’s expensive, it’s a commitment, and you’re there with your family, you go through the trouble, and then you come back home after the holiday, and you realize that the Romans had been there, and your piety had saved your life. Now, I’m not offering some kind of theology here, because many pious people were killed. They were slaughtered. But imagine the connection that you would feel to that experience of being in Jerusalem, in retrospect, and saying, “Wow, being a visible Jew in this case was what saved my life.”

Dovid Bashevkin: That is fas- And you see how widely spread the practice of going to Jerusalem was.

Malka Simkovich: Yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: That, like, you know, it was it was empty, there was nobody there. They were all going That is absolutely fascinating. An averted Sukkos massacre.

That’s a really like there’s something very powerful about that, and it was averted because all of the Jews were in Jerusalem.

Malka Simkovich: Can I give you the opposite story? This is a really terrible, terrible story. In April of 70 CE…

Dovid Bashevkin: This is before or after the Temple was destroyed? This is like…

Malka Simkovich: It’s a few months before the destruction.

Dovid Bashevkin: A few months before the destruction of the Temple. So, things are already deteriorating in the land of Israel.

Malka Simkovich: That’s right.

The Romans besieged Jerusalem on Passover, and they did that very intentionally, because they knew that that was when the city was at its fullest. And that is why many, many tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of pilgrims got trapped in the city on Pesach, and then starved to death and were massacred by July. So, the reason why the starvation of that siege, and the plague, and the overcrowding, and really why it was as catastrophic as it was, is because of pilgrimage. So, again, I’m not here to offer theology to say pilgrimage will save your life.

In some cases, it did, and in some cases, it didn’t. But what I am saying is that we have very reliable sources which tell us that huge swaths of the Judean community was committed to this practice. And the Romans knew this. And a few years before the siege, they took a census of that region.

There was a Roman senator named Gaius Cestius Gallus, who took a census in Jerusalem. And what he did was he did it by counting the sacrifices. He knew that the Jews would not be amenable to be counted as individuals, so he counts the sacrifices to see how many people are going to be in the city of Jerusalem on Pesach. And like reverse engineers.

Dovid Bashevkin: Like, if you see a thousand sacrifices, you can like approximate how many people this represents.

Malka Simkovich: Well, this is so interesting, because he counts 256,500 sacrifices.

Dovid Bashevkin: We have the number that he…

Malka Simkovich: Josephus tells us in the sixth book of The Jewish War.

Dovid Bashevkin: Okay. How many sacrifices?

Malka Simkovich: 256,500.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s a lot of…

Malka Simkovich: And Josephus says that he knew that the Jews had a practice that you had to have a minimum of 10 people per sacrifice.

Dovid Bashevkin: Are they talking about the korban Pesach?

Malka Simkovich: They’re talking about the korban Pesach.

Dovid Bashevkin: Fascinating.

Dovid Bashevkin: Which need Which, as we will explore on Talmud Daily, and have explored on Talmud Daily, needs to be brought in a group.

Malka Simkovich: Exactly.

It’s not an individual sacrifice in the same way. So, really, the 250 sacrifices represented like 2.5 million Jews.

Malka Simkovich: That’s it. At least.

And Josephus says it was more, because he takes into account all the people who were not, for various reasons, were to purity laws, were not eligible to bring a sacrifice. And so, in fact, the number is quite close to 3 million.

Dovid Bashevkin: You’ve kind of sold me on, like, I mean, the 20 volumes kind of How many volumes is his history?

Malka Simkovich: The History of the Jews is 20 volumes. This is in The Jewish War, which is seven.

Dovid Bashevkin: So like the it’s a It seems a little wordy for definitely a Shabbos read, but to really immerse yourself in the world and see the practices that we are familiar with today as developed in the Talmud, to see pre-Talmudic practices, and you just see this link to Jewish history, it’s very moving.

Malka Simkovich: Dovid, this all strengthens my faith in ways that I can’t explain. When you read Antiquities of the Jews, you find halachic material that predates the rabbis and affirms the ancient nature of these practices. But also, there’s a lot of midrash.

There’s a lot of aggadic material in Josephus’s works that then resurface in later midrash. Well, there are a number of examples that I could think offhand, but do you know the story of baby Moshe, baby Moses, on Paroh‘s lap? It shows up in Shemos Rabbah, which is a very late midrash.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah.

Malka Simkovich: And Paroh is testing him, and he’s very worried because his astrologers have suggested that Moses may one day lead a rebellion against him.

And so they put the jewels They put a bowl of jewels and a bowl of coals in front of him, and he has to choose one, and if he chooses the jewels, that’s a sign he’s going to rebel.

Dovid Bashevkin: And the coals, and then he touches his mouth? Did I I learned this as like as a kid.

Malka Simkovich: Exactly, yeah! And then And then the angel, maybe it’s Gavriel, pushes him away. He’s pushed away from the jewels to the coal, and then he burns his finger, he puts his finger in his mouth, and that’s why he’s aral sefasayim.

Dovid Bashevkin: He can’t speak.

Malka Simkovich: Right. That story shows up A version of it shows up in Josephus.

Dovid Bashevkin: So you see that the narrative ideas are already in development, the values behind the practices and the personalities of Jewish life.

So, come back to these relationships. So, both the averted Sukkos massacre and, sadly, really the ultimate destruction were both taking advantage of the very thick, like almost halachic connective tissue of the Jewish people. Like, Jews were going to Jerusalem, this is where they were celebrating Sukkos from inside the Land of Israel, they were celebrating Passover. This is why, I mean, I heard a very beautiful idea of the six orders of the Mishnah: we have Zera’im, Mo’ed, Nashim, Nezikin, Kodashim, Taharos.

So, we’re talking we’re in Seder Mo’ed, which is all about the festivals. It’s the only one of the six orders of the Mishnah, Mo’ed, which is in singular, because mo’ed literally means it’s a beis va’ad, it’s a gathering place. It’s about that singular point of unity, which now Jews experience through Shabbos, through Yom Tov, etc., etc. But way back when, like we literally had that central geographic location, namely the Temple in Jerusalem. But I want to be able to turn and talk a little bit about the relationship of the diaspora to the Land of Israel, especially when the Temple stood, if that even existed.

Malka Simkovich: There’s so much to say and I just want to wrap up what I was saying about the source regarding that terrible siege in 70 CE. Just to emphasize, Jerusalem was a small city. So when Josephus tells us that 2.7 million Jews were in the city, we can’t be exactly sure of how many Jews lived in Jerusalem as full-time residents, but it’s a really small fraction of that. So again, we don’t know exactly what the numbers of pilgrims are, but we do know that the majority of that number is pilgrims.

Now, an interesting question, and I’m getting to the question of what role the diaspora community plays in all of this, but a big question is, where are they coming from? Are they all coming from the Land of Israel? Now, Josephus, when he retells the mandate, the biblical mandate to make pilgrimage, he makes clear that he thinks this is a mandate for only those Jews who live within the bounds of the land. Philo of Alexandria, who is an early first-century philosopher who lives in Egypt in a city called Alexandria, when he retells this mandate to make pilgrimage, he makes it clear that he thinks it’s an international experience. And I want to be very clear about what this mandate is. The Torah tells us repeatedly that pilgrimage is an obligation.

When we think of pilgrimage today, and maybe it’s because we think of it through a non-Jewish lens, pilgrimage is very important in Christian traditions and other traditions, we think of it as like a nice thing. It’s like kissing your grandma, right, or like kissing the mezuzah. It’s a nice thing to do. You go on pilgrimage if you have the time, if you have the money, if you have the resources.

Dovid Bashevkin: We think of it more of as like a vacation, like we’re going to go to Israel. Like, are you going to Israel for Sukkos, for Pesach? It’s also very financially related.

Malka Simkovich: Exactly. And in the ancient world, it was probably expensive, too, and it took a ton of time just to get there.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah.

Malka Simkovich: But the Torah is very clear: it is a m- mandate. It is a mitzvah, it is a requirement. You go three times a year, right? Every male has to go.

Now, there is a presumption that the Israelites will be residing in the land of Israel and not in Alexandria in Egypt. Deuteronomy 17, Devarim Yud Zayin says, you can’t go back to Egypt! And the reality is that hundreds of thousands of Jews are living in violation of that. They’re living in Egypt by the second or first century BCE. But the Torah is clear, you have to do this.

So any Jew in the Hellenistic era who is reading their Torah carefully, or, you know, even reading it in translation, will see unambiguously that this is an obligation. Now the question is, are they actually doing it? And here we get into very fuzzy territory because we just don’t have the numbers. We don’t have the demographic information to know how many Jews are living in every diasporic city, and of that number, what percentage is going to Jerusalem. We’re not sure, but we have incredible descriptions of what pilgrimage was like from diasporic sources like Philo.

My position is that even though Jerusalem was packed to the gills on the pilgrimage holidays of Pesach, Shavuos, and Sukkos, and maybe Josephus, he inflates his numbers, but I think maybe he’s probably wrong on the numbers, but right in the essence of it, that it was a packed city, at the same time, I still don’t think most Jews were making pilgrimage from the diaspora. I just don’t see it being realistic. Just like today, if you go to Israel on Sukkos, you will hear a lot of languages, and you’ll feel like you’re in this international hubbub, this big gathering of Jews coming from all over the world.

Dovid Bashevkin: And yet, and it’s still not all Jews, yeah.

Malka Simkovich: You go to shul here in Teaneck, New Jersey, and it’s full. Shul is full. So that’s the situation. Now, I can read to you some incredible passages about pilgrimage from Philo, but I also can go in another direction, you’ll tell me what you want me to do.

And that direction is: so what were Jews doing if they didn’t go on pilgrimage? How did they show connection

Dovid Bashevkin: Can I hear both? I would love to hear something about what it was like for a Jew from the diaspora

Malka Simkovich: Yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: to make a trek to Jerusalem, and I would love to know, you know, I don’t always, I mean, most years I don’t make it to Israel with my family for Sukkos or Pesach or Shavuos, though many people, you know, have the ability to do that, which I think is very admirable, but I’m curious like what they were doing instead when they stay back home to kind of, you know, nowadays like Sukkos time, so a lot of people, you know, deliberately decorate their sukkah to look like the land of Israel, they’ll put up pictures of the Kosel, I for sure do that. Tell me both. First, let let’s start with Philo’s whatever testimony he has about the actual trek.

Malka Simkovich: It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful account, and it’s probably not his own personal account. He does talk about seeing the Temple once in his lifetime in passing in a treatise called On Providence, but it’s a passing comment, and we don’t know when he went, but this is how he describes the experience of pilgrimage, and he’s probably writing in the 30s or 40s CE, in the common era. And as I read this, I want you to think about whether this rings historically accurate to you.

This is what he says: “Countless multitudes from countless cities come, some over land, others by sea, from east and west and north and south, at every feast” he’s talking about the pilgrimage holidays “They take the Temple for their port as a general haven and safe refuge from the bustle and great turmoil of life, and there they seek to find calm weather, and released from the cares whose yoke has been heavy upon them from their earliest years to enjoy a brief breathing space in scenes of genial cheerfulness.” Wait, I’m almost done. “Thus filled with comfortable hopes, they devote their leisure, as is their bounden duty, to holiness and the honoring of God. Friendships are formed between those who hitherto knew not each other, and the sacrifices and libations are the occasion of reciprocity of feeling and constitute the surest pledge that all are of one mind.”

Dovid Bashevkin: Hey, the beginning sounds like an advertisement for a new community in Israel. Like calm, like I could see like the, you know, they always have like the exterior, like garden apartments, like he’s

Malka Simkovich: That’s right.

It’s a very positive It sounds like an advertisement.

Malka Simkovich: It’s a commercial. Yeah. It’s summer camp.

It’s a resort. You go and you you have your margarita at your five-star hotel in Jerusalem, and he he uses this language of leisure, of genial cheerfulness, of everyone being fraternity, friendships are formed. I love that. Yes.

But now let’s think about the reality. If Josephus is right that you have a couple million Jews in a very, very small city, and now everyone’s bringing their money in their different currencies and they’re crowding around a few tables and they’re changing

Dovid Bashevkin: And there are a lot of animals.

Malka Simkovich: Oh, I was going to get to that! They’re changing their currencies, they’re getting their animals, they’re bringing their animals to the priest, the priest is offering the animals. Now think about the crowds, and the jostling, and the bustling, and the pushing, and the shoving, and the, “You weren’t in line!” and, “You budged!” and, “You’re in front of me, and I’ve been waiting here for two hours!” And now, think about the smell.

And think about the dirt, and the blood, and the rot.

Dovid Bashevkin: What you’re describing now, which is a real This is the price of like the airport. Do you know what I mean? Like, when you go to Israel, you go for the leisure, but you know there’s going to be a miserable part of that trip. It is usually the airport, customs on both sides.

Malka Simkovich: But in Israel, when you fight with someone, and you’re like on that El Al plane and this kid has just woken up your baby that you spent three hours trying to get to go to sleep, somehow you end up at the end of the flight hugging the guy.

Dovid Bashevkin: Oh, yeah. You’re best friends!

Malka Simkovich: You’re just best friends! That’s how I imagine this, like, “Yeah, we’re like screaming at each other!”

Dovid Bashevkin: And he says that it ends in friendship.

Malka Simkovich: Right.

That probably the erev Yom Tov, when like people are just coming, all the animals are like alive and

Malka Simkovich: Bleating!

Dovid Bashevkin: and the smell is probably crazy, to the modern, you know, nostrils. I assume people were a little bit more comfortable with funky odors in the second Temple period, but I absolutely love that. Like it’s a commercial. He’s telling you, “Come, come to this resort and allow yourself to like be with the Jewish people.” Let’s shift to the other one.

Malka Simkovich: Wait, but can I just say what that Josephus says almost the same thing and probably did not have Philo, which is so interesting.

Dovid Bashevkin: Let me hear.

Malka Simkovich: So Josephus says, but it’s only within the Land of Israel, he says, “Let those that live even as remote as the bounds of the land”

Dovid Bashevkin: Ah.

Malka Simkovich: And then, a few lines later, he says, “Let them, by these meetings and feastings, maintain an affectionate connection with one another, for it’s a good thing for those that are of the same stock, and under the institution of laws, not to be unacquainted with each other.” Again, it’s summer camp.

And then he says, “and by conversing together, and by seeing and talking with one another, and so renewing the memories of this union from year to year.” And now I’m kind of going off of the text, they maintain this connection. Then he says, “For if they do not thus converse together continually, they will appear like mere strangers to one another.” So Josephus is saying, not only do people do Jews from all over the world go on pilgrimage, but they’re motivated because they’re seeing the same people. It’s like going on the same Pesach program every year. Yes! You’re going you’re seeing the same familiar faces, and it gives you a sense of connection, a sense of unity, a sense of community, and a sense that all Jews have these shared practices, this shared common Judaism.

And so people, despite the effort and the cost and the investment that it requires, they put in the effort to go because they are so enriched by this experience.

Dovid Bashevkin: This is a very deep cut that is probably for a very, very, very, very tiny minority of our listeners, but it happens to be that this question between Philo and Josephus about whether or not outside of the bounds of the Land of Israel were people still making the pilgrimage is discussed in later commentaries, and it’s one of like the earlier There is a commentary of the Rashash, who is a very late, I think maybe early 19th-century commentary that’s printed in the back of the Talmud, who discusses this in Gittin, I think on page 4b, maybe 3b, about who was the crowd who actually came to the Land of Israel. Does that also include the diaspora, or is that just limited to people within the Land of Israel? And it has very real halachic questions that emerge from it, especially as it relates to People used to verify contracts during the pilgrimage time, because you could verify signatures then. Say, “Oh, this is Is this your signature? Is this not your signature?” So the question is, were you able to verify signatures even from those overseas during these pilgrimages? That’s what’s being discussed in Gittin.

That’s a very, very deep cut. But let’s talk about the Jews who stayed, because as we know, like I don’t usually go away for I love Sukkos in my home. It’s like took me a long time to fall in love with Sukkos, took me a long time to fall in love with a lot of the Yom Tovim, but I’m in love with Sukkos. I can’t leave.

Like I really like I love being home. So tell me a little bit, what did Jews do who didn’t make the trek?

Malka Simkovich: So there are a number of things that they did, but I would say above all, they sent huge sums of money. But I don’t even want to tie it to the holidays necessarily or to Sukkos specifically. Year-round, donations were coming in, and I’m not sure that this would correlate with descriptions in Shekalim when it comes to the times of the donations, because we have evidence that Jews in the diaspora might not have been so attentive to that donations schedule.

In other words, they were tithing, and they were sending, in the first century BCE and the first century CE for sure, a lot of money to the Temple, but I don’t know that they were sending it on a schedule per se.

Dovid Bashevkin: How does a historian know that? Do they keep the receipts, were they account- How do we know from a historical lens that Jews in the diaspora kind of prioritized giving specifically to whether it was specifically the Temple or the Jews in the land of Israel? How do we know about the ways that Jews in diaspora, like in a through a historical lens, were actually staying connected and remaining connected to the land of Israel?

Malka Simkovich: We’ve got fantastic sources for this. One of our best sources comes from a speech that the Roman orator Cicero gave in 59 BCE. Cicero gives this speech to the Roman Senate.

Dovid Bashevkin: Cicero’s like kind of famous.

Malka Simkovich: He is pretty famous, and he also did not like Jews, that man.

Dovid Bashevkin: He had a lot of enemies. Well, yeah.

Okay.

Malka Simkovich: Jews were not his only enemy. So, Cicero was very concerned by the fact that Jews were sending from all over the Roman Empire what today would be the equivalent of billions of dollars to Jerusalem to support the administration of the Jerusalem Temple. And he gives a speech to defend his buddy, Flaccus, who had heard that there was a convoy of Jewish gold making its way on a Roman highway through Asia Minor, so that would be modern-day Turkey, coming from the north down towards Jerusalem, and Flaccus, this Roman prefect or I don’t think he was a general, but some official for the Roman Empire, hears about this convoy of gold, Jewish gold, that’s making its way down the highway and he intercepts it and he confiscates it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Really?

Malka Simkovich: And the Jews flip out. This money is coming from a variety of different communities in the north, and you know, obviously it takes a lot of organization and a lot of effort and a lot of sacrifice to send this money down. We don’t know how often such convoys were coming down, and we don’t know the precise season. But this is a huge amount of money.

It’s confiscated by the Roman Empire. The Jews flip out, they’re furious. And Rome essentially says, “Well, this money should be going to the capital, and it should be going to the Temple of Jupiter, should be going to our great temple.”

Dovid Bashevkin: Where was the Temple of Jupiter at this time?

Malka Simkovich: In Rome.

Dovid Bashevkin: Okay.

Malka Simkovich: I mean, there were many temples, but dedicated to Jupiter. But there was one well-known, and in fact the fine that every Jew has to pay after the rebellion in 73 CE known as the Fiscus Judaicus, one of the punishments that Jews incurred for the rebellion that took place in the land of Israel was that every Jew, wherever they lived in the Roman Empire, had to pay essentially a shekel, had to pay a small fee and it was a knas, it was an insult, because Rome took that amount and donated it

Dovid Bashevkin: To their temple.

Malka Simkovich: to the Temple of Jupiter.

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s really interesting, and that really relates very squarely to Shekalim where this practice of having like again, like I look at it in many ways like that the $18 check that you always send in to the legacy Jewish organization, like Plant

Malka Simkovich: a tree in Israel.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah, but but this was like the original, which Jews are sending it to their Temple in Jerusalem, and they took it very seriously, and it sounds like they were donating serious money.

Malka Simkovich: Huge amounts of money.

Dovid Bashevkin: And they co-opted that as a punishment, as the way to kind of defeat the Jewish people, is that now all Jews, and it was specifically Jews in the Roman Empire, you’re going to now have to give this nominal fee to our temple.

Malka Simkovich: Exactly.

It’s an insult and it’s also a message. And the message is, “We don’t care if you were directly involved in this rebellion. We hold each and every Jew equally responsible for the headache that we incurred from these rebels in Jerusalem.” And of course, that is a very powerful message that the Jews internalized. I know how contemporary this is, David.

Dovid Bashevkin: That feels very contemporary. Very contemporary.

Malka Simkovich: And and the Jews hear the message and internalize it. Doesn’t matter how you practice, if you live in Rome or somewhere else in the western regions of the empire, you’re a Jew.

Dovid Bashevkin: Even if you’re in the diaspora, you are complicit to the rebellion against the Roman Empire.

Malka Simkovich: You have to answer for the behavior of your brethren across the sea. Absolutely.

Dovid Bashevkin: This speech of that Cicero gives, he the the Jews are outraged that

Malka Simkovich: Oh, yes.

Malka Simkovich: It’s incredible. And by the way, it’s full of conspiracy theories. It sounds very contemporary and it’s anti-Judaism.

Dovid Bashevkin: Can you read a little bit from it?

Malka Simkovich: I absolutely can.

Dovid Bashevkin: Please.

Malka Simkovich: And the part that I have is a little snippet, but I want to say that you can easily find this online. And in the speech, he says, “I see that there are Jews who knew that I was coming here today to defend the actions of my friend Flaccus and I see them protesting in the back, so I’m going to speak quietly so that they don’t have the satisfaction of hearing me speak to you, senators.” So, there So, the

Dovid Bashevkin: Jews were like protesting in the back. Protesting in the back.

This is This could be in 2026.

Malka Simkovich: This is crazy. That’s why I love this period. It is just so resonant.

A little depressing.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah, but it gives you a sense of faith and confidence that we’ve been through difficult times together. Netzach Yisrael lo yeshaker. I mean, we 100% All the cycles of history, they live in our bones.

Malka Simkovich: And when we question ourselves, and when people gaslight us, and when people tell us you’re not experiencing what you’re experiencing, we can look at our own texts, and we could look at outsider texts, and we can can say we’re experiencing exactly what we think we are. Anyway, Cicero’s speech. So Cicero has a lot of wonderful one-liners, and he says when he’s defending Flaccus, he says, “Who is there, oh judges, who cannot honestly praise this measure?” And he’s talking about the confiscation of Jewish gold. He says, “To resist this barbarous superstition—” Now, he’s speaking in Latin.

Superstitio is a Latin word that it’s the opposite of the Roman religio, the legitimate Roman religion. And barbarous is actually from the Greek barbaros, which means to be a non-Greek speaker, but really means to be an outsider.

Dovid Bashevkin: Gotcha.

Malka Simkovich: So, “To resist this barbarous superstition is an act of dignity.

To despise the multitude of Jews, which at times was most unruly in the assemblies, in defense of the interests of the Republic, was an act of the greatest wisdom.” In other words, and again, this is contemporary.

Dovid Bashevkin: They’re not good citizens, these Jews.

Malka Simkovich: To hate the Jews is an act of moral integrity. It might look hateful on the outside, but it’s an act of bravery.

It’s an act of courage. It’s an act of uprightness and loyalty. So don’t feel

Dovid Bashevkin: Rome first.

Malka Simkovich: Don’t feel bad.

Right. Hate away. That’s Cicero. And we have all kinds of other sources, too, about how much gold was being sent to Jerusalem.

Josephus says in Antiquities of the Jews, “Let no one wonder that there was so much wealth in our temple, since all the Jews throughout the habitable Earth sent their contributions to it, and this from very ancient times.”

Dovid Bashevkin: Malka, this is this is beyond fascinating, and it really it it paints the picture in such vivid terms about the issues that we are still grappling with, which is the actual unity of the Jewish people. I’m not talking about liking each other, like the are we a unified nation, the sense of connection and how fragile that connection can sometimes be between the diaspora and Israel, and how the diaspora, like, very often needs to be imaginative and creative in ensuring that their children, the next generation, remain connected to that central land. The play, I mean, he’s my favorite, Ezra, Ezekiel, the The tragedian. The tragedian.

Yeah. And how really that very basic sense of wanting to be a part of a nation is very often weaponized by our enemies to create either conspiracies, or concerns, or or make it it’s either Rome or Jerusalem. You can’t have it both ways.

Malka Simkovich: Right.

And by the way, Jews within and without, but I would say especially without the land of Israel, are really arguing for the legitimacy of what we would call dual loyalty. And they use the language of motherland and fatherland all the time. Philo does say, Rome is the patris, the fatherland, and the land of Israel is the metropolis, the motherland.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s literally what Metropolis means motherland?

Malka Simkovich: Meter in Greek means mother, polis is land, and city.

Dovid Bashevkin: You learn something new every day.

Yeah, so the metropolis Motherland.

Malka Simkovich: Mother city. Mother city.

And what’s more important? I mean, no shade to the fathers out there, but when Philo’s talking about the metropolis, he’s talking about the heart and the soul.

Dovid Bashevkin: Where you feel most safe. A child who you know scrapes their knee, and I’m saying this as a father and no, you run you run to your to your mom to feel like get that that nurturing and that

Malka Simkovich: That’s the word I was going to use, the nurturing. Yeah, the soul of the Jewish people comes from the land of Israel.

Dovid Bashevkin: Now, this was such a great overview of what I think is at the very heart of tractate Shekalim and the idea of giving shekalim, which is creating connections and building that sense of unity that the Jewish people are a unified nation. And not in the sense that like we like each other, in the sense that we are one nation, we are a real people, and the center of that people, the soul of that people, so to speak, that loving mother, is the land of Israel, most specifically Jerusalem and our temple. If you’ll allow me, I always close our Talmud Daily interviews with a brief Talmud questionnaire. You know, I think this is important to surface.

The Talmud is so multifaceted that different people have different relationships with the Talmud. In many ways, the Talmud is kind of the embodiment of like our ongoing oral law, like how we engage in that interpretive community. So I don’t want you to feel any sort of duplicitousness that like you are a world-renowned Talmud scholar. That is not That is not your field of expertise, but the world that the Talmud is describing is very much your expertise.

You have to go through the Talmud for some of it, and I want to talk a little bit about your relationship and engagement with with Talmud study itself. So I want to begin with who do you consider your primary teacher of Talmud, and what did they teach you?

Malka Simkovich: Well, I probably learned the most from Dr. Reuven Kimelman at Brandeis University, and he taught me not only Talmud, but also the world of midrash. I studied Avot de-Rabbi Natan with him, I studied Sifrei Devarim with him, and I studied Sanhedrin with him, which was incredible. And I was also in the classroom of Dr. Chaim Soloveitchik.

That’s… I was not a star in that class.

Dovid Bashevkin: Former 18 — former 18Forty guest, twice. We’ve had him on twice.

Professor Chaim Soloveitchik, somebody who I feel very, very privileged and blessed to have a warm relationship with, but he is known as being much like his father, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, he can be a tough teacher in the classroom.

Malka Simkovich: I take full responsibility for not being ready as a student, as a young student who had no experience studying Gemara. I should probably not have been in that classroom.

Dovid Bashevkin: I definitely think that is fair, and we are not going to get you in any trouble, and we’re not going to make you relive that experience, but I can only imagine that it is not so simple being in the ta — and what was the subject of the class? What were you guys studying?

Malka Simkovich: Oh, we were learning mayim acharonim.

Dovid Bashevkin: The sugya of of the mayim acharonim, which means the final waters, but it’s the water that is traditionally used in some communities before Birkas Hamazon after a meal. And that was the whole semester.

Malka Simkovich: It was.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah. Fascinating.

How would you explain to somebody what the Talmud is, and where do you think you would kind of start if you were sharing with somebody for the first time?

Malka Simkovich: The Talmud is an internal conversation among rabbis about what it means to live and think as a Jew.

Dovid Bashevkin: I like that a lot. Do you think, where would you start? Because you’ve taught in Christian universities.

Malka Simkovich: Where would I start with studying the Talmud? Berachos?

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah, like or like introducing it.

Malka Simkovich: Well, the thing is is that I love theology. I probably would not start with Berachos, although not to say that it isn’t theological, but I love when I teach members of the Christian community, I love to show how there is no disentangling the legal material from the theological imagination. And so I talk about stories related to how those intertwine. For example, the the famous debate between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, and then the story later on of Rabbi Eliezer’s death following his excommunication.

Dovid Bashevkin: Which is in tractate Berachos.

Malka Simkovich: Isn’t it also in Sanhedrin?

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah, it appears, it’s all through there. But that’s really interesting. When you emphasize that when you’re teaching specifically Christians, are you trying to dispel their conception of how we observe the law?

Malka Simkovich: I think that there is a conception that you can take all the good stuff from Judaism, in other words, the ethics, and the values, and the lessons, and then you can do away with the legal material.

Once you start immersing yourself in the world of Talmud, it becomes very self-evident that you really can’t do that. And there have been efforts throughout history to take all the aggadah and, you know, publish it separately, or take all the halachah and ignore the aggadah. You real — that’s not the rabbinic project. These aren’t two separate categories.

And I think it’s a shock when I show these texts to my students and how you weave in and out of a legal conversation.

Dovid Bashevkin: They’re seamlessly intertwined. One moment it’s legal and then you look around

Malka Simkovich: — It’s so lived, right? It’s so embodied. It’s so practiced in who they were.

It wasn’t a discipline that lay inside the book that they were reading, and then they would shut the book and go do something else. It was so embodied, and I don’t know that they’re always prepared for that.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s very interesting. No, cuz usually I’m asking people who have primarily taught other Jews, and it’s interesting, most of your teaching career is teaching non-Jews, and you come in with a very different set, though it’s not altogether different, of misconceptions.

Malka Simkovich: There are misconceptions within the Jewish world with Talmud, but the version in the Christian world is like this very cold, legalistic, just like, here’s the —

Dovid Bashevkin: ritualized —

Malka Simkovich: Yeah, here are the rules, and like don’t ask any questions, don’t think about anything else. What I emphasize is how beautiful and how deliberate the interweaving of the theology and the legalistic is throughout the Talmud. Meaning it’s only much, much later that we have codes of law that are just telling you what to do.

Dovid Bashevkin: Exactly.

Malka Simkovich: Right. Right. The Talmud is live. It’s dynamic.

It’s moving. It’s vibrant. And very often when I’m teaching Christian students, there’s an assumption that to be a practicing Jew today is to practice a fossilized form of Judaism that has been unchanged, and that 2,000 years ago, it was similarly fossilized and unchanged, and essentially dead, right? Dead in the hands of the Jews who practiced it. And when you look at the Talmud, and you study the Talmud, and you see the dialogical nature, and how personalities and relationships figure into these conversations, you cannot argue that this is something fossilized.

It is live. It is breathing.

Dovid Bashevkin: I absolutely love that. It’s beyond important cuz we forget about what the Talmud looks like from that far a distance.

Right. You know, you’re growing up in a different religious culture, and like cuz cuz the Christian world, you see online now, you know, there’s a lot of anti-Semitic hate directed at the Talmud. Right. And a lot of that, because of of your background, the you you understand the anti-Semitic frustration with Talmud.

…is deriving from that discomfort with law itself.

Malka Simkovich: Oh, absolutely. Yes, and how ritual life seems almost superstitious and magical to those who don’t place any value in it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely.

That is so, so important. I appreciate you sharing that. What is your favorite tractate? Do you have a favorite tractate?

Malka Simkovich: I’m not well-versed enough to say. I really appreciate certain tractates that contain a lot of historical information.

Dovid Bashevkin: And what are those? What what are some of the tractates that you, just in your regular academic research, are spending time on because like it’s just chock-full of those like

Malka Simkovich: So I often end up in Gittin, because Gittin has one of the longest passages, one of the longest sugyos about the churban and about the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132 to 135.

Dovid Bashevkin: Churban meaning the destruction of the Temple in Israel.

Malka Simkovich: Yes. And it happens to be in Tractate Gittin that there is a very long aside in the Bavli, in the Babylonian Talmud, about the catastrophe that befell the Jews.

And so these aren’t happy times when I immerse myself in those passages, but you can’t understand the rabbinic experience of these catastrophes without those sugyos.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely fascinating. No spoilers, because I plan on taking this survey for our listeners once upon a time, but by a large margin, Gittin is my favorite tractate as well. It is the only tractate that I have studied in every single yeshivah I have been in.

Malka Simkovich: No way!

Dovid Bashevkin: So I love it, I think it’s fascinating, and there’s so much great stuff there. Do you have a favorite, I mean, you kind of referenced one, do you have a favorite story in the Talmud?

Malka Simkovich: Not so much. I’m very attracted to biblical interpretation, I love retellings of biblical stories that are very, very difficult. Offhand, I can’t say that there’s one story that stands out to me, but I I find certain traditions about the relationship between Sarah and Abraham, Sarah and Avraham, very, very poignant, because they have the most fraught and difficult relationship in the Torah and maybe even in the whole Hebrew Bible, in the whole Tanach.

And there’s this amazing little passage in Bava Basra in 58a, where a rabbi is marking graves, and he comes upon the grave where the patriarchs are buried, and a passerby says, “Oh, what’s in there?” And he says, “Our patriarchs are are buried in this grave.” And he’s asked, “Well, what are they doing? And what is Abraham and and Sarah doing?” And Bana’ah, who’s marking the grave, says, “Abraham is lying in the arms of Sarah and and he’s cradling her.” And I I love images like that, because they speak to how sensitive the rabbis were not just to the question of practice and and application, but the question of relationships, and connection, and intimacy. The intimate relationship between these people were important to the rabbis. And the fact that you can go through these stories and say, “Well, Abraham was a really bad husband, or he didn’t consider her.” The rabbis were were bothered by that, and they wanted to imagine a reconciliation.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely fascinating.

Do you have a favorite personality in the Talmud?

Malka Simkovich: I don’t want to say the glib ones, like Rabbi Meir, or Elisha ben Avuyah, or Akiva, or Hillel. On the other hand, there are such incredible stories! Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurkenus is a favorite of mine. Why? Well, not so much because of the Talmud, but because of the description of how he gives up everything to learn Torah in Avos d’Rabbi Nasan. It shows up in other traditions, too, but he comes from this incredibly difficult background, and you just see the passion for learning and the fire of Torah is lit from within.

There are plenty of other figures who also have this inner passion and give up everything, but I I love Eliezer ben Hurkenus.

Dovid Bashevkin: We can count that. We can count that.

Malka Simkovich: And again, I’m not enough of a scholar to say, “Well, you know, of the 300 or so, you know, tannaim mentioned, I’m going to tell you my very favorite.”

Dovid Bashevkin: No, Eliezer ben Hurkenus is a is a great one and and one of many of of the personalities that are really depicted as like coming to Torah learning through great sacrifice.

Malka Simkovich: Incredible sacrifice, yes.

Dovid Bashevkin: My final question, and this doesn’t have to be targeted specifically in Talmud, but really your relationship to Torah study in general: when and where is your favorite time to study Torah?

Malka Simkovich: I think the first time that we had a conversation, Dovid, I talked about the early morning and walking downstairs into a very clean house with a lot of natural light and finding, you know, a bowl of lemons or avocados, and just having this kind of serene experience by a a large window and opening up a book, and and, you know, this kind of light shining down from the heavens, perfectly landing on the page that I’m reading. That is not my practiced reality, sadly.

But but that is the aspiration, I suppose.

A life that one day I will live. I know that I work best in In the morning. My morning doesn’t start as early as I want it to because of my my family, my precious children who need to be the priority over learning, but my morning starts at around 8:30 and then I can start learning or writing or reading, and that happens in my office with a very uncomfortable office chair that needs to be replaced.

Dovid Bashevkin: Office chairs, we don’t spend enough time talking about them, but finding the right chair that is truly, truly comfortable for long-term sitting, it’s an absolute must.

Whether it’s Talmud study or academics or whatever’s happening, we need to spend more time talking about our chairs. Dr. Malka Simkovich, I am so grateful for you joining Talmud Daily today.

Malka Simkovich: Thank you for having me, Dov.