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.

Not so Gemara. The first mishna of the first tractate opens with the question, “From when does one commence saying Shema in the morning?” It assumes that you have some awareness that there is an obligation to say Shema twice daily; once in the morning and again at night. It assumes that you are aware that there are various halakhic times which could alternately be defined as morning. When one concludes the mishna and enters the Gemara proper, one finds no shortage of such assumptions. There is no beginning point to the Talmud, every page assumes knowledge of all other pages. It is an interlinked text to the extent that the more one learns, the more one understands what one previously learned—with the corollary that the less one has learned, the less one understands of anything they are learning. 

While this analogy is beautiful and demonstrates how learning Gemara parallels the way in which we learn life—perhaps that’s the deeper meaning of torat hayyim—it doesn’t help us as educators. Unless, that is, if you have sufficient hours dedicated to Gemara which enable a truly immersive experience and during which enough content can be covered for things to “click into place” for the student. Hence our tricky predicament. On the one hand, we must teach Gemara—it is the crux of Torah Shebe’al Peh, the foundation of Jewish life as we know it. On the other hand, students studying Gemara find themselves in a constant space of frustration, never acquiring competence. While they enjoy some degree of mastery in every secular subject they study, every encounter with Gemara involves hitting an insurmountable obstacle (such as a new concept) that requires knowledge that they simply do not have. And while some outstanding teachers manage to inspire students to barrel through by dint of their personality, that is neither systematic nor replicable on a mass scale.

At Leibler Yavneh College in Melbourne, Australia—where I have taught for the last decade and am privileged to lead the Jewish Studies team—we have designed and implemented an approach that has yielded positive results, both in student attitude and in their achievement. It is not intended as a replacement for more traditional study methods, but as a way to ramp students up to that facility with the text, the same way that arithmetic serves as a foundation for higher math. We identified six distinct challenges in learning Gemara and designed a set of sequential learning strategies, which we call blocks (hence, The Block Method), to address them. Thus, rather than trying to deal with all of them simultaneously, which is often what happens in traditional Gemara study, we deal with them individually to provide students with a sense of clarity, purpose, and a feeling of achievement as they navigate each, as well as a sense of mastery as these steps become increasingly achievable. The following is an outline of those steps and their rationale.

Block 1: Pre-teaching

The first step of engaging with any sugya is to learn the “assumed knowledge” that will be encountered in the text. Take the example of reading a Wikipedia page. As you read, you will notice certain words in blue connoting a hyperlink. Those words are words that contain a meaning that is more than just their literal definition. In fact, they often have their own entire Wikipedia page, which one needs to read if they are to understand the initial page they are attempting to decode. Now imagine that the Wikipedia page you are reading is in Greek. Now you have two types of words, those that just require a translation to understand and those for which a translation will not suffice, rather, you will have to click the hyperlink leading you to a new Wikipedia page in Greek, in order to understand the term. Similarly, some of the language of Gemara requires only simple translation from the Hebrew or Aramaic while others relate to concepts that require “hyperlinks” to decode. Pre-teaching is about providing the background of any concept that features in the Gemara as well as providing the translation for any words for which a simple translation is needed.

An additional aspect of pre-teaching is meeting the characters who will be encountered in the sugya. The Gemara assumes knowledge of who is a Tanna (from the Mishnaic period) and who is an Amora (from the Talmudic era). Even more, the content of the sugya itself is often brought to life when its author is a real person with an interesting story, and even more so when we find echoes of influences of who they were on the opinions they express in the sugya being studied.

Block 2: Flipclass

The next step, perhaps the most challenging, is teaching the content of the sugya—the reading, translating, and explaining of the text. It is where we most frequently lose student interest and attention in frontal teaching, where students need to absorb the complex back-and-forth of the sugya even as they pay attention to small things such as voice modulation and pronunciation. It becomes even more frustrating when some students are able to follow and others are not, forcing the teacher to repeat while boring those students who got it the first time. This is the block in which we “flip” the learning. Teachers prepare a 10-minute video of a frontal presentation of the sugya which the students view at home. Students can watch, pause, replay, and discuss with a family member what they are learning, giving them the ability to absorb the material at their own pace and bring their family into their learning journey. And it’s on a screen, which for some reason is far more interesting than the same thing in real-life. When the students feel like they have mastered the content, they answer a short quiz.

Block 3: Flowchart

The next step is mapping out the sugya, in English, focusing on understanding its logical flow. Students are provided a color-coded flowchart template, customized for each sugya, indicating to students the relationship between the various questions, answers, and statements that make up the sugya, with the color of the borders of the boxes indicating the historical (and hence, authoritative) layers. With the background they received in the pre-teaching and their general understanding of the sugya from the Flipclass, students fill in the template and create their flowcharts. Students are grouped according to the understanding demonstrated in the Flipclass quiz, and those whose understanding is limited (or who did not do the homework) work more closely with the teacher. It is an active lesson, where students are in groups focusing on understanding the give-and-take of the sugya without having to worry about the literal meaning of each and every word.

Block 4: The Text

Once the flowchart has been filled out and reviewed, students are now ready to engage with the text itself. What may previously have been formidable and foreign is now something that they feel is familiar. Many of its terms and its personalities were discussed in the pre-teaching. It has been read, translated, and explained in the Flipclass, and its logical flow has been deconstructed in the Flowchart. What remains is the task of relating all of that to the actual Gemara page. In hevrutot students sit with the text of the Gemara, referencing their work from previous blocks, and pull together the pieces of the previous three blocks as they match them with the text. This important step brings them closer to eventually being able to independently read, translate, and explain the sugya.

Block 5: Analysis

As students learn, two types of questions tend to emerge: those that relate to the basic comprehension of the sugya and others that stem from its comprehension and seek to analyze aspects of its various components. While comprehension questions are best answered on the spot, analysis needs to wait until Block 5. The rationale for this is that often analysis is misguided when it stems from incomplete comprehension, which is the task of Blocks 1-4, as well as the fact that analysis questions will often side-track the lesson, throwing off students for whom comprehension has not yet been achieved. In honoring worthy analysis, when a good question is asked that warrants further investigation, the teacher instructs the whole class to write the question down in the section of their booklet reserved for Analysis. Once its turn arrives, the teacher can thus prepare relevant commentaries focused on the problems that actually bother the students.

Block 6: Assessment

While formative assessments occur throughout, and especially in the stages of the Flipclass and Text, both of which help the teacher tailor the learning and reinforce comprehension where it is weak, at the close of every sugya is a summative assessment. The final stage, normally preceded by a revision (review) lesson, presents an opportunity for students to consolidate their learning and for the teacher to measure their success, both in terms of knowledge retained and skills developed.

Our goal is for students to graduate from the Block Method into the classical style of Gemara learning. The Block Method provides them with an important base from which they can overcome their fear of the traditional printed daf (printed page) of Gemara. They amass a bank of concepts, words, and personalities. They have the opportunity to break down sugyot into their composite parts, learning to recognize questions, answers, and statements, and their Tannaitic or Amoriac origin. They learn to correctly read, translate, and explain the Gemara. And they delve into the mefarshim (commentaries), learning to appreciate the role of those commentaries in the context of their own questions.

Does it work? The method provides order and structure to what can appear to be a disorderly and unstructured text, easing the students into the study of Gemara and reducing the frustration of dealing with multiple challenges simultaneously. Like any curriculum or program of study, however, it falls on the teacher to breathe life into the method if students are to truly engage. A teacher needs to make the method their own; adapting each block, changing their order, mixing up their method of presentation, and selecting commentaries and ideas that relate to the forms of questions that truly matter to their students. And it must be differentiated so it speaks to the spectrum of students in the classroom (indeed, we have built a differentiation guide tailored to the curriculum).

Where to next? One of the aspects of this curriculum that could readily be enhanced is its potential for inter-school collaboration regardless of geography. The division of sugyot and blocks creates a common point of reference by which two schools can align their teaching. Collaborative hevrutot over Zoom, while challenging to implement across time zones, provide students with a sense that Gemara is a common language that connects them to their brothers and sisters all over the globe. Collaboration could occur at the analysis stage, where questions of students across different schools on a given sugya can be studied and responses shared. It both rewards a good question, granting it (and its questioner) international fame and creates a global bet midrash, bringing communities into discussion. Schools can also develop their own sugyot based on the selections they choose, and then share them using the standard templates created, creating an extended bank of sugyot.

If this speaks to you, or you have ideas you would like to share, don’t hesitate to reach out. In the mutual interest of ensuring our students are afforded the highest possible standard of Torah education, we can work together and build on our mutual strengths.