Fascinating. Infuriating. Uplifting. Complex. Boring. Inconsistent. Logical. Brilliant. Eclectic. Irrelevant. Compelling. Frustrating. Inspiring. Ancient. Contemporary. The Talmud evokes all the above, and more. I vividly remember my first encounter with Gemara. I must have been ten years old, and my family was in a bungalow colony in the Catskills. Rabbi Cohen taught Gemara to the older boys, of which I was not, but I asked permission to sit in and listen. I loved following the discussions and debates, even though I couldn’t read any of it and retained none of the content.

By its very nature, teaching Gemara seems to defy everything we know about education. When we teach math, or language, or anything else, we start with the simple and easy-to-grasp aspects of the study area and gradually increase the level of challenge and difficulty. For example, we begin with addition and slowly move on to subtraction, multiplication, and division. We certainly don’t touch algebra until these are firmly in place. One couldn’t imagine a math class that requires knowledge of Pythagoras’ theorem presented to a class that has not yet mastered multiplication.

A sixteen-year-old American Jewish day school student named Brandon (a self-chosen pseudonym) reports that he likes studying Talmud. What does he like about it? “I like the process,” he says. “It is kinda like a puzzle, that you have to get each word, and fill it in so it creates the whole text.” Brandon approaches his study of Talmud knowing that it’s going to be hard. Every word might take some effort to decode. Eventually, however, he can put it all together.

Pressman Academy is an early childhood through 8th grade school in Los Angeles serving a religiously diverse group of students. The school’s Judaics program, which includes Hebrew language, Jewish history, Tanakh, and daily prayer, affords a maximum of two weekly periods to teaching Rabbinics (in grades 5-8), presenting a significant challenge of what to include and how to approach it.

On Tuesday morning Rabban Gamliel called the gathered people to order. A letter had arrived from a northern district court in the Galilee which required the attention of the Sanhedrin. Rabban Gamliel took his seat at the head of the semi-circle of esteemed Rabbinic colleagues. R. Yehoshua sat on one side of him and R. Eliezer sat on the other.

A relationship to Talmud study is highly valuable to those who possess it. Few other activities manage to combine elements of intellectual inquiry, spiritual questing, and moral development in the almost alchemical way that the study of Talmud does. And yet, there are a number of hurdles students must overcome in order to develop an independent relationship with the Talmud. First and foremost, studying Talmud in the original Hebrew and Aramaic can feel scary to the uninitiated. Second, the logic of the Talmud is foreign to students at first. Finally, students may wonder what a text from 1500 years ago might have to say to them.

Teaching of Talmud in traditional secondary schools has been a conundrum from the day it was decided to teach Talmud as part of the standard Jewish studies curriculum. Programs for yeshiva high school graduates in Israel and around the world are consistently populated by an overwhelming percentage of students who, even after six years of multiple weekly hours of Talmud instruction in secondary schools, are helpless in the independent study of Talmud. These students are successful independent learners of advanced mathematics, natural sciences, complex technology, and even humanities, but in Talmud, they require an embarrassing degree of spoon-feeding.

I teach 5th grade Judaics at Fuchs Mizrachi School, a Modern Orthodox Zionist school (Cleveland). Upon entering the world of Torah SheBe’al Peh, a student is first greeted by the Mishnah—a complex and sophisticatedly interwoven compendium of Jewish law and wisdom. Students struggle to understand its relevance, how and why it was created, and its importance to the scope of their Torah learning. They ask, “Why are we learning Oral Torah?” and “Why should I care?” but underlying those questions is the more fundamental, “What is the Oral Torah?” While some choose to address this piecemeal over the span of many years, I believe that it is important to address it up front, in an organized manner.

You have been there, too, right? You thoroughly prepared a Gemara lesson by formalizing how you will explain the shakla vetarya, you concocted attention-grabbing examples and cases, charts to organize the conflicting opinions, and provided a translation and question practice worksheet. You slowly read the Gemara aloud while students annotated the text or completed linear translation sheets. You patiently and clearly explained the concepts and reasoning on a first, second, and even third pass of the reading.

The rabbis of the Talmud were intentional and thoughtful educators; an example of their consummate pedagogic skill is the way they interspersed narratives into their halakhic writings and teachings. Their use of agadot is an effective teaching tool because, simply put, people love stories. We evolved to tell stories, to become compelled by stories, to connect to the characters, drama, and tension in stories. Stories draw in our students and they have the power to make them care.

One day, in a 7th grade lesson during our unit on tokhehah (the mitzvah of rebuke), a student shouted out from across the classroom: “This is tokhehah leshem shamayim!” In this moment, with one eloquent and original phrase, this 7thgrader had connected the learning in our current unit of tokhehah with the concept of leshem shamayim (for the sake of heaven) from our previous unit of mahloket (disagreement). This delighted us because it showed that the concepts of mahloket we had been teaching were not just retained for the duration of our unit, or for a test, but were concepts students internalized, held on to, and could apply to new settings and used in unique ways.

Teaching Talmud to weaker students can present many challenges not typically found in traditional Gemara classes. Navigating a text in a foreign language, especially one with the unique structure and rules of the Talmud, can be daunting for those grappling with language-based difficulties. Educators must realistically decide which teaching method—skill-based or discussion-based—will best set diverse learners up for success, and how demanding a Talmud course should be for students not likely to pursue this type of Torah learning in the future.

Standing at the edge of the sea can be an awe-filled experience—the incomprehensibly vast expanse of water with no end in sight is both inspiring and intimidating. We would not consider entering it, whether to swim, sail, surf, cruise, or dive without proper preparation. Similarly, the Sea of Talmud is rich with information, personalities, debates, and much more. It, too, can inspire and intimidate with its vastness and complexity, and we should not expect our students to be able to jump in and navigate it without context and a roadmap. To prepare our students as they embark on their journey into the Oral Torah, we need to define our goals and our strategies for achieving them.

In my first year of teaching, I taught a student whom we will call Yossi. From the time he started 1st grade reading groups, Yossi was placed in the lowest track. This pattern persisted through my 11th grade Gemara class. A few weeks into the first semester of 11th grade, Yossi approached me after class to ask me a burning question which he was embarrassed to ask in front of his peers. He asked, “Who is Rabbi Baraita?” I said, “What do you mean?” He responded, “My past teachers kept explaining ‘the Baraita says…’ Who is Rabbi Baraita and why is he referred to as the Baraita?”

As a teacher at Rodeph Sholom School (RSS), I have for some time considered what it means to teach Torah SheBe’al Peh in a Reform Jewish independent school. What I offer here is a taste of how my colleagues and I have strived to shape our 7th grade Rabbinics unit so that it is aligned with our school’s mission and meets the needs of our specific community of learners. And while every school is unique, I am hopeful that the insights I’ve gained from teaching one unit on the development of Jewish law are instructive for any Jewish day school grappling with teaching Torah SheBe’al Peh.

Traditional methods of teaching Gemara, such as hevruta learning followed by an interactive shiur, have stood the test of time. When teaching beginner students, however, this approach is less common, given their lack of prior knowledge or skills. As a result, many teachers prefer a frontal approach, perhaps projecting the daf on the SMART board and presenting the text phrase-by-phrase while students take notes between the lines of the traditional Vilna text. If hevruta time is used, it is often for the students to review material rather than for them to try to decipher the text. In this article, we are going to propose a method for using a modified version of the traditional approach which can be used for learners starting out on their Gemara learning careers.

Some of the articles in this issue describe the joy of studying Talmud, others break down the complex processes to make it more accessible to students or to enable the students to engage with it meaningfully. And just to make sure that we covered the bases of both the how and the why of Talmud study, we asked our authors to weigh in separately on the question: “Why do you think that day school students should be learning Gemara/Rabbinics?” We invite you to join that discussion.