After seeing a recent Facebook post of mine, Shalom asked me if I'd share my thoughts on prerequisites to Talmud study, to spark a conversation with fellow Lookjedders. My own feeling has long been that there are significant prerequisites in terms of skills, knowledge, and affect to successful Talmud study, and that by ignoring them we do our students a disservice. I won't discuss here the reasons we do that, although our fear of not seeming enough like a "yeshiva" or conforming enough to popular views of what Jewish education must look like seem to me to loom large.
On the substance, I offer both a bare-bones list as well as a more ideal list. I start with the reminder that the Talmud expects of its own discussants certain knowledge, all of Tanach and Mishnah. Tanach (or, perhaps, according to Rashi, only the Pentateuch) is seen as a זיל קרי בי רב, as information that even an elementary school student would be expected to know.
As a first step, then, I maintain that before starting Talmud study, a student-- and, to me, this applies equally to boys and girls-- should know the siddur and the Torah. Siddur because we're asking students to engage in a religious activity 1-3 times a day, but treating it as if it's a black box, say these words that you don't yet understand, and be quiet otherwise, and then you'll be done. Without being a student who already understands the conversation with God that Jews conduct each day, how could we think of working on Talmud?
To me, Torah should include all of Tanach, but I could not prove that point. At the very least, a student should have read, inside, themselves (not just been in a class where it was studied), all of the Torah, such that that student could read and understand any piece of Torah put before him or her.
Since the late eleventh century, I think that likely should include the commentary of Rashi, a masterful distillation of much of Rabbinic thought on the Torah, at a length and level of clarity that even relative beginners can engage successfully.
That's Scripture-- where the bare minimum is the Pentateuch, even better with Rashi, even better with more of Tanach, either all of it, or at least the mostly historical books. I note that many of us might immediately dismiss Daniel and Ezra/Nechemiah, because much of those books are Aramaic. But if we're thinking of teaching students Talmud-- granted that Biblical Aramaic isn't the exact same as Talmudic-- how can we let Aramaic be a limiting factor?
Beyond Scripture, there's Mishnah. The Talmud assumes that all its discussants know all of Mishnah, and that, to me, is an ideal. But without having seen at least one Seder of Mishnah-- inside, having read it oneself, and, ideally, with the ability to read it again and understand it-- the project of Talmud will be almost completely alien to a student. The student does not have the modes of thinking that are native, instinctive, and implicit to the Talmud, and is therefore completely unready for it.
If the student is not going to have read all of Tanach and/or will have satisfied him/herself with one Seder of Mishnah, I think a substitute prerequisite could be Ramam's Sefer haMitzvot or Sefer haChinuch-- again, read inside by each student. This will give some of the scope of Torah, halachah, and service of God that the Talmud is dealing with. This is particularly important because Talmud at the middle or even high school level tends to progress at a snail's pace-- 20 blatt a year, maximum, out of a corpus of over 2500! Picking at a piece of one tree for months completely warps the experience of wandering through the forest, unless the student already knows something of the forest.
I said at the outset that this is important for skills-- because, having read that much, with some Aramaic terms and ideas cropping up along the way-- the student's reading skills are significantly closer to being ready for Talmud study. In knowledge, because, having seen more of the breadth of what the Torah deals with, the student will be less challenged by the ideas within the Talmud. Affect is the one we might think of least, but it is there as well-- in having seen more, the student understands better and, hopefully, has absorbed the attitude towards this material and its dictates, in a way that is not true for the average student simply coming from a modern home.
Years ago, in a book called Wisdom from All My Teachers, edited by Jeffrey Saks and Susan Handelman, I pointed out that we today teach siddur in first grade, Chumash in second, Rashi in third, Navi in fourth, Mishnah in fifth, and Talmud in sixth (or some slight variation thereof). With the outcome that our students are illiterate in six literatures by that time. We need to recognize that it is almost meaningless, for the vast majority of students, to study that for which they are not ready.
Imagine if we could take a bunch of eighth graders, teach them calculus-- without having taught them algebra and trigonometry-- and find that some of them will catch on to it, with us filling in the blanks enough for them to learn a bit of it. Would we recommend that, even for those students, let alone for the others, who will flail away, picking up a piece of the calculus here and another piece there?
I am fairly certain we would not, but that's what we do with the Gemara all the time.
Some might say, but you're dooming our students to never learn Talmud; when will they be exposed to Talmud? My answer is that if we are to have dual curriculum schools, we need to understand that more time is a necessity, not a luxury. Our students, today, have 10 weeks of vacation in the summer, plus-- aside from Jewish holidays-- at least two weeks during the rest of the year. That's a quarter of the year we are throwing away. Not to speak of Sundays or, possibly, an extended school day (or, at least, a full Friday when Shabbat starts after 6Pm).
We need more time. If we're not willing to give that more time, we have to be honest about what that entails. One thing it entails is that, other than the motivated students who will put in the effort to fulfill the prerequisites-- perhaps many of our students will not be ready for Talmud until later in their educations than we currently recognize.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/20/2015 08:26AM by mlb.
