Come and Hear: What I Saw in My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey Through the Talmud

Poet and literary critic Kirsch (The Blessing and the Curse) turns his attention to the Talmud in this thoughtful take on the appeal of Talmud study’s intellectual rigor. After realizing his understanding of Jewish literature and history required more of a grounding in the Talmud, he embarked in a program of study usually only undertaken by Orthodox Jews, to “read one page of Talmud every day for 2,711 days, about seven and a half years,” a practice called Daf Yomi. By sharing his reactions to the texts, which cover practical religious questions about what is and isn’t permissible on the Sabbath (for instance, what to do with “just born” items or problems that appear on the Sabbath day itself), as well as more fanciful parsing of rabbinic law—such as whether an elephant can serve as one of the walls of a sukkah—Kirsch gives a tantalizing taste of what reading and seriously grappling with the Talmud is like. The end result meets his goal of sharing the Talmud’s “moments of strangeness and profundity.” This is a great complement to Jonathan Rosen’s The Talmud and the Internet. (Oct.)