Making the Daf Daf-y

During the month of Elul, my attention begins to turn toward the High Holy Days and the ways our tradition draws us into cycles and repetitions. There is beauty and wisdom in these rhythms, which have carried us across generations. Yet repetition carries a risk: when practices become habitual, we may lose the possibility of newness, of noticing freshly. The novel encounter—whether it excites us or unsettles us—has the power to pull us into a distinct mode of noticing. For a people who root so much of our practice in repetition and return, from the repetition of nusach and liturgy to the return to familiar Torah stories, the question arises: how do we bring the power of novelty into our gloriously rhythmic traditions?

Rashi, commenting on Devarim, reminds us of this very danger: “This suggests that they should ever be to you as new commandments, as though you had heard them for the first time on that day.” Our ancestors understood that newness is part of falling in love with Torah. Yet we have inherited little instruction on how to sustain that “new relationship energy” with our tradition.

This is the paradox at the heart of Jewish text study. The tradition is vast, overflowing with daf after daf, sugya after sugya, and for so many learners, the pressure has been to move quickly–to cover ground, to “finish” Torah. SVARA’s method turns that model on its head. Instead of speeding up, it slows us down. Instead of chasing perfect understandings, it courts confusion. Instead of the illusion of completion, it insists on staying with the text, even a single word, until it becomes strange again. 

In his 1917 essay “Art as Device”, Viktor Shklovsky introduced the concept of defamiliarization: the task of art is not to transmit information but to “make the stone stony,” to renew our perception by slowing and complicating it. He insisted that perception, once it becomes habitual, becomes automatic — we recognize but no longer see. Art, he said, must “deautomatize” perception, offering us “a new way to see what we thought we already knew.” Shklovsky’s provocation was aimed at writers, but it lands just as powerfully for us as learners. Might it be that great learners, like great artists, are the ones who make the familiar strange again?

This is precisely what learning at SVARA makes possible. We resist the automatisms of recognition by treating each and every word of the daf as newly strange. Each root, each grammatical twist, each rabbinic turn of phrase becomes vivid again. A text that might otherwise pass by as “already known” reappears as something unfamiliar, demanding fresh attention. As Rabbi Benay Lappe recently described in her reflection on SVARA’s Daf Shenati: “We were in no hurry. We learned slowly and carefully, until we understood each and every word, then each and every sentence, then each and every move of the stamma.”

The German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht taught that interruption itself can reveal truth. A gesture on stage—a pause, a look, a break—could expose the social relations beneath the illusion. In his 1964 essay “Brecht on Theatre,” he outlines his theory of the “V-Effect” or alienation from the familiar. It “consists in turning the object of which one is to be made aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected.” 

SVARA’s method is itself such a gesture. In our slow, root-by-root way of learning, we surface truths that the illusion of a well-ordered daf can obscure. We estrange ourselves from that illusion of order, exposing the social relations, the dynamics of power at play in the text. Brecht went further: “The spectator was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience uncritically… but was made to adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism.” That is what slow learning does to us as well. It refuses us the comfort of automatic reception and draws us into a posture of critique and curiosity. Without this estrangement, we risk missing not only deeper personal learning but the possibility of transforming the very power structures embedded in our tradition.

Returning to Rashi, what would it mean for Sinai to happen again and again—for Torah to be received as if brand new each day? It means Torah is not locked in the past but waits for us in every moment of study. To move slowly through a daf, to circle it, to get stuck, to turn it and turn it until it opens, is to live inside this renewal. 

As Pirkei Avot teaches: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” But turning is not fast. It is patient. It is unhurried. And perhaps most importantly, it is bewildered.

It is this slow turning that makes the familiar strange, and in that strangeness, Torah is renewed. In our slow turning of Torah, we become the artist that Viktor Shklovsky imagined more than 100 years ago. For Shklovsky, the work of the artist is to “make the stone stony.” Our task, as learners of Talmud and as holders of this tradition is the same–to make the daf daf-y.