Pushing the Tradition Forward on Every Page

I came to SVARA in 2013 as a learner—just another curious person in the bet midrash, moving through a sugya root by root, slowly discovering how the tradition opens itself when you meet it with the fullness of who you are. Over these last twelve years, I’ve become a SVARA staff member and, most recently, a faculty member, which means I’ve had the joy (and challenge) of preparing nearly every text that shows up in a SVARA learning space. That work has allowed me to become deeply familiar with all of our favorite texts, and yet, every time I return to a sugya through the SVARA method, it feels new. Meanings shift, deepen, and reassemble themselves in ways I could never anticipate. It’s exactly what our tradition is supposed to feel like, I think, and that dynamism is what keeps me here. It has quickly become one of my favorite things to cultivate as a faculty member guiding our Gemirna Kollel students, folks who are similarly inspired by the concept that our tradition is alive and waiting to be shaped by those who are ready to wrestle with it. 

In this first year of the Gemirna Kollel, we are journeying alongside students who are taking Talmud I and Talmud II. In our Talmud II track, we’re doing something we’ve only ever dabbled in at SVARA: we’re reading a sugya straight through. Not the curated excerpts we typically share in our bet midrash—those carefully-chosen, densely-packed pieces that sparkle with insight—but the whole textual arc. Moving in this way, we see clearly that the Talmud pushes the tradition forward on each and every page. By focusing intently on how the Talmud constructs an idea—not just what it says, but how it gets there—we can uncover this radical agenda and claim the tools of the Rabbis for ourselves. We can start to see how the stamma, the anonymous editorial voice of the Talmud, places sources in conversation, how the argument builds through each step of the sugya, and how the entirety of a text reveals the deeper agenda beneath the surface. Moving through this process has felt more focused, more complex, and more alive than anything I’ve taught recently. As our first zman together comes to a close, I’m thinking a lot about how deep we’ve gone together, and how essential that depth is to the future of our tradition.

Our Gemirna Kollel students began this zman with a survey of the last chapter of Mishnah Yoma, which introduces the obligation to fast on Yom Kippur and then immediately begins to explore exceptions to this obligation. We zeroed in on a mishnah that considers two parallel cases: first, a pregnant person who experiences cravings on Yom Kippur, then a sick person person whose illness makes them particularly vulnerable. Our students in Talmud II noticed that this mishnah is an exemplar of the genre—it presents two cases and tells us what to do in each, and in typical fashion, the mishnah does not present its own reasoning or provide a general value or principle. Instead, it leaves the reader to deduce one on their own. So, what value is the underlying motivation for these rulings?

Someone reading this text quickly might discern that these cases belong in the classic Talmudic framework of “life-saving,” examples of pikuach nefesh, the idea that preserving a life is a matter urgent enough and sacred enough to override nearly all of our tradition’s most steadfast prohibitions. 

Reading closely, and slowly, as we do at SVARA, however, complicates this assumption. Rather than assume that both these cases follow the same logic, we explored what makes the cases of pregnancy cravings and illness different from one another. We conjectured that cravings don’t seem to be about immediate nutritional needs. Moreover, while the case of the sick person might be about caloric need, we could all imagine illnesses where not fasting is indicated, even though fasting might not be life-threatening. If our Gemirna Kollel students didn’t slow down enough to witness this subtlety, their interpretation of the text would be vastly different. But, as always, our pace in the SVARA method makes room for deeper understanding—and our own intuition—to take hold.

Our transition from the mishnah into the gemara further bolstered our intuition. The gemara introduces a parallel case: a pregnant person craving pork or consecrated sacrificial meat. We learn that this person may eat these otherwise forbidden foods (albeit only the minimum amount necessary to ease the craving.) Our students observed, that this case is clearly not about nutrition. After all, we aren’t instructed to offer the pregnant person alternative kosher food. Instead, we’re directed to honor and take seriously the experience of this individual. 

Here is where something surprising happens. The stamma quietly slips in to tell us why a person experiencing cravings can eat these forbidden foods. It’s because nothing should stand in the way of pikuach nefesh except idolatry, prohibited sexual relations, and murder. Did you catch that? The stamma is telling us that this case—which our close reading revealed is not a question of life and death—is a case of pikuach nefesh. I always thought pikuach nefesh was about rare, extreme emergency cases in which we suspend our other values in order to protect life at all costs. Together with our Gemirna Kollel students, I’ve watched the Rabbis expand the boundaries of pikuach nefesh to include experiences that are beyond a literal case of survival. They move us away from “saving a life” toward something more like “affirming a life,” insisting that the fullness of a person’s experience matters.

It’s this kind of learning we want our Gemirna Kollel students to witness. We want more people than ever before to understand deeply that the Talmud isn’t a rulebook. It’s a guide for responding to rupture, what we at SVARA call “CRASH.” A manual for the creative, meandering, courageous process the Rabbis crafted when their old pathways no longer led anywhere. When we read slowly, rigorously, with a commitment to seeing how every line builds on the last, we begin to notice the Rabbis are modeling a kind of courage that feels more important now than ever before. When we learn at SVARA, we see that the Rabbis were invested in building a tradition capable of holding real human lives. They are teaching us how to stretch our inherited frameworks to meet the world as it is, right now.

And this, to me, is essential for leaders of Jewish tradition. The Gemirna Kollel is about cultivating the ability to see the architecture of an argument, to trace the movement of a sugya in service of witnessing how the tradition makes itself spacious enough for people to see themselves in it. When I think about a world where more and more people understand our tradition the way our Gemirna Kollel-niks do, I can’t help but feel excited about the future.