2,711 pages of Talmud. A gem a day.

Can our prayers protect us? Do we suffer because we have done something wrong? What about when bad happens to the righteous? Or children?

Today’s daf points out that sometimes we hold on to pain, it’s precious to us, when we don’t need to suffer. It also reminds us that everyone needs friend to pull us out of sickness, depression, and to cry with over the fact that beauty fades.
A last gem from today’s page isvthat if you pray but then leave your friend alone in prayer – your prayers are worthless. (I think it means that we are hypocrites if we stand around in ritual righteousness but then don’t DO the righteous thing towards others)

Today, I noticed that the rabbis picture King David as bragging to God about how pious he is (he wakes up at midnight to study Torah!), but by the end of the page, King David seems unsure if he will merit the world to come (a.k.a. heaven). How true! How do we act when we are insecure? Often we – brag, compare ourselves to and put down others – when we are just trying to cover up our own doubts and insecurities. And yet, he was also humble enough to seek out the opinions of others who were well below his station, and admits that often they are right, and he is wrong.
May we learn to seek counsel and allow ourselves to be corrected by others. And may we not feel the need to inflate our achievements or put others down in order to feel good about ourselves.

#dafyomi thought for the day. Rabbi Yosei leaves the main road, going into a ruin where no one would see him, in order to pray. Elijah comes to him and asks him why he didn’t pray in the road, and tells him he shouldn’t pray in ruins. Rabbi Yosei says he was scared of being interrupted. There is a lot of metaphor to unpack (I like to think about ruins as a metaphor for prayer spaces and styles that no longer work)- but, in honor of today being #JewishANDproud, a day to fight antisemitism, I want to share thought about Rabbi Yosei’s fear of praying loud and proud in public. Was he just scared of losing his concentration if he got interrupted? Or was he scared of being so visibly Jewish in a public space?
Today, a lot of Jews are feeling fear of displaying their faith in public. So, today a lot of us are changing our profile pictures and wearing kippot. I hope Elijah is proud of us. And I hope that anyone who runs into us, will be allies.

Okay – so one of my new years resolutions is to read a page of Talmud every day (called daf yomi). The Talmud is a sacred book in Judaism, often called the oral Torah. It is a recording of rabbinic conversations that span about 600 years. Jews around the world take on reading a page a day. It will take us over 7.5 years to finish. January 5, 2020 was the first day and first page of this cycle!

I thought it would be cool to invite others to think about some of the questions raised with daily study. A couple questions tackled on today’s page include: What safeguards do we build in to avoid procrastinating? Are the rules of when you say the shema (our most important prayer) different if you’re rich or poor? And, believe it or not, what if you were up partying all night and missed the designated prayer time?
Good to know the wisest rabbis of old also procrastinated, were conscious of privilege, and knew how to party!