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.

Another student, Maurice, echoes a similar theme. “There’s a bit of a puzzle there [when we study Talmud]. It’s challenging mentally, but that’s part of the reward, I’d say.” Maurice makes the motivational dynamic explicit: When something is challenging, that makes it more rewarding to overcome the challenge.

I really love how messy it gets when there are four different answers and three new questions for every initial inquiry … I really, really enjoy the satisfaction of finally understanding a discussion after sometimes a week of going over the same couple of lines and not making any headway. I just really love that satisfaction.

Sarah offers a characterization here of shakla vetarya, the famously confusing Talmudic “give and take” in which each answer seems to generate a new question. These difficult logical puzzles, when finally solved, provide her with “satisfaction.” Sarah, Maurice, and Brandon all seem to enjoy the complexity of Talmud and the puzzling nature of the text.

Likewise, in more recent data gathered from older students at Pardes by rafa kern, the theme of Talmud as a puzzle emerged again. For example, when asked what she likes about learning Talmud, Shira says:

It’s so fun! So many fun logic puzzles… And like, then they’re further messy because you have some 500 years of history and editing and people smushing things together and unpacking that. And then you have the added layers of people commenting… I really like puzzles and Gemara feels like one big, really, really complicated puzzle.

Omri answers the same question in a similar way:

So first off, it’s just intellectually enjoyable… Trying to figure out, what are you talking about? It’s an enjoyable process. It’s like solving a puzzle or trying to figure out who done it before they reveal the murderer.

For Shira and Omri, Talmud as a puzzle is part of what keeps them engaged. These students are not just saying that Talmud is hard in the way that, say, astrophysics or some other technically difficult subject is hard. They are saying that it is hard in a particular way—like a puzzle.

Now, it is certainly possible that students say these sorts of things about the Puzzling Talmud because they hear them from their teachers. For example, Shaye Cohen, among the leading academic scholars of Talmud, adopts the same theme in an essay titled, “Why Study Talmud.” He has several answers to the question, including the following:

I enjoy it because … the Talmud is a feast for the mind. Its technical terms, abstract subject matter, argumentative twists and turns, nonlinear logic, and contrapuntal style, make the study of Talmud difficult, challenging, and fun. I enjoy logic puzzles. I enjoy … brain teasers of all kinds.

Cohen then introduces a particular example of a Talmudic passage that he claims is an “intentional brainteaser,” but goes on to reflect on unintentional brainteasers—those passages “in which it is not clear how a question is a question or an answer is an answer,” passages that are present on every page, challenging the reader to decipher them.

The example of Shaye Cohen suggests the possibility that the Puzzling Talmud may well be a trope in our contemporary discourse. School subjects have meaning because of the cultural contexts in which they are embedded. Perhaps the Puzzling Talmud is part of that cultural context for these students in Jewish day schools and at Pardes.

However, in the work that I did several years ago to develop a “Menu of Orientations to the Teaching of Rabbinic Literature,” for which I conducted dozens of conversations with instructors of Talmud in diverse institutional locations, I did not hear this theme emerge in the way that it did from the students. So, on the one hand, it is plausible that teachers do talk about Talmud as a puzzle, as Cohen did. But on the other hand, when they are focused on conceptualizing Talmud as a field of study—which means that they are thinking about the purposes and pedagogies of Talmud—the Puzzling Talmud did not emerge as an orienting framework for their teaching.

This suggests that there is an aspect of the lived experience of studying rabbinic literature that is present to the consciousness of at least some students in a way that it is not present to the consciousness of their teachers, which only emerges when we listen carefully to the voices of the students. Talmud is a puzzle. Talmud is confusing. When we confront this confusing puzzle, our task is to figure it out. That may not be the ultimategoal of studying these texts, and the conception of Talmud as a puzzle surely does not preclude other kinds of meaning-making. Still, it’s a proximate goal that dominates the pedagogic space, that affects how we talk about what these texts are and what we are supposed to do with them, and that presumably affects the pedagogic strategies that we employ.

So, what are the implications of thinking about Talmud as a puzzle?

Most obviously, people seem to like puzzles. Not all people, of course, and not all puzzles. I am not much of a puzzle person myself. But lots of people play Wordle or solve crossword puzzles or gather around a jigsaw puzzle as a shared activity. There seems to be something appealing to people about the artificially constructed difficulty of puzzles: Someone specifically designed this puzzle to be challenging, in just the right way, not too easy but also not impossible to solve. And even though we know that we have not really accomplished anything in the “real world”—even though, frequently, the thing we do immediately after assembling a puzzle is to disassemble it—there’s a feeling of satisfaction or accomplishment in completing a puzzle.

The Puzzling Talmud is not artificially constructed in the same way as Wordle, with the same intentionality. Still, the students quoted above articulate a feeling of accomplishment in solving the puzzle of a Talmudic sugya. In our normal lives, moments of accomplishment like these are actually fairly rare. Our projects take too long to develop, and most of them are not susceptible to a binary switch from “incomplete” to “complete.” That’s not how we relate to the most important things—our relationships, our spiritual lives, or our careers. Our academic projects, likewise, are rarely ever entirely complete. But when you complete a puzzle, when the last piece goes in, it is done. Apparently, the study of Talmud—working out the puzzle in a satisfactory way—can convey the same sense of accomplishment.

Moreover, the attractive quality of puzzles is also related to what they are not. Puzzles have no instrumental purpose. Pointlessness is a feature of puzzles, not a bug. We might say that puzzling is one of the places where we can do something entirely lishma, for its own sake. That pointlessness may be something that we humans crave, as a refuge from the intentional activities that occupy so much of our lives. We learn to play as children, but we seem to spend the rest of our lives increasingly eliminating opportunities for pointless play. When we do play, we often feel the need to justify our play in therapeutic or instrumental terms, namely, as contributions to our health, as opportunities for “recreation” or for social connection. When we are engaged with a puzzle, on the other hand, in a flow state, we set aside the entire world of purposes and instrumentality. Likewise, when we are engaged with the Puzzling Talmud, we can set aside the world of instrumentality.

Now, this observation about the lishma-ness of puzzles may lead to questions about purposes. As educators, do we want students to think about Talmud as “pointless” in the way that a puzzle is? Is that enough? Do we want them to feel a sense of accomplishment in working out the logic of a sugya, or do we want them to think about a much larger trajectory of study, in which solving the puzzle is merely the first step—perhaps the first step towards understanding an important principle of Jewish thought or practice? These are good and valid questions, and presumably, these questions have something to do with why, as I mentioned above, the educators with whom I spoke in developing the “Menu of Orientations” did not identify a Puzzle Orientation to Rabbinic Literature. Surely Talmud is not just a puzzle. Surely the purpose of encountering these texts in an educational setting is not limited to the momentary sense of accomplishment of working out a complicated sugya.

Yet I am reluctant to ignore what these students are telling us about why they enjoy studying Talmud. Not all students will agree, of course. Not all will enjoy the Puzzling Talmud. But for some, clearly, the puzzle-like qualities make Talmud fun and sustain their interest even when—particularly when—the going gets tough. And the fact that they hold a conception of the Puzzling Talmud in their minds, that they think about the text in this way, is a pedagogic resource that we ought to notice and employ.

What I am suggesting, in other words, is that we ought to develop an intentional pedagogy of the Puzzling Talmud. If we are to take our lead from our students and focus on Talmud as a puzzle—recognizing that there may well be tradeoffs—what are the pedagogic implications? What should we ask our students to do or not to do, within this focus? What texts might we study or not study? What skills might we work on and which ones might we defer?

Teachers of Talmud often worry that this ancient text is not “relevant,” and develop strategies to make it relevant. So much of the world of Talmud, and its logic, is strange to us, and this strangeness is assumed to be an obstacle in the way of students’ engagement with the text. Often, the effort to increase its relevance focuses on showing how what appears to be abstruse can be interpreted in terms that are contemporary, for example, how a rabbinic mahloket about a technical point actually reflects a fundamental human-existential issue that is familiar to the students. In other cases, the effort to increase its relevance instrumentalizes Talmud in the service of some other pedagogic goal.

But many years ago, Israel Scheffler (in “Reflections on Educational Relevance”) critiqued a conception of relevance that is driven by “the student’s initial problems.” He argued that there are many diverse ways for a subject to be relevant and cautioned against “[making] education relevant by making it instrumental.” Our students may be telling us something similar about Talmud. The Puzzling Talmud suggests that, perhaps, the effort to develop an argument for the relevance of Talmud is misplaced. Maybe it already has all the relevance it needs.

This article draws on data from the second stage of the Students’ Understanding of Rabbinics project, a research partnership between the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University and the Davidson School at the Jewish Theological Seminary. (Visit the project webpage for more about the project.) Arielle Levites was the director of the second stage of the project; she deserves credit for the data cited within as well as for the initial identification of the theme of Talmud as a puzzle. I am grateful to her, and to our colleague Jeff Kress at JTS, for the initial conversation about this topic. This article also draws on data gathered by rafa kern, as part of his doctoral research, and graciously shared with me. I also thank rafa kern for pointing me to the article by Shaye Cohen, quoted within. Finally, I appreciate the contributions of Jenny Small and Ziva Hassenfeld to the development of this article.