Steve Lipman - Staff Writer
Several dozen times over the past seven years, the Levine family
of Greenwich Village has invited a few friends to a private
celebration in a kosher restaurant. Each meal was a siyum, marking
the completion of a tractate of Talmud studied by Danny Levine and
his two teenage sons. “Usually about eight or nine” people came,
Levine said.
Tuesday will be the Levine family’s final siyum,
but a restaurant couldn’t hold everyone coming.
Levine and
his 17-year-old son Hart will join some 20,000 men and women at the
Siyum HaShas, a mammoth night of prayer and learning at Madison
Square Garden sponsored by Agudath Israel of America. The event sold
out weeks ago. The Orthodox organization also is sponsoring siyum
events at the same time at the Continental Airlines Arena in New
Jersey and scores of locations in North America, with a satellite
link to the Javits Center in Manhattan and cities around the
world.
Daf Yomi is the daily study of a page of the
Babylonian Talmud, which takes seven and a half years to finish. The
siyum marks the completion of the 11th study cycle. It will also
end, temporarily, what Levine calls “a positive father-son
adventure,” while other participants will start the 12th cycle the
next day.
To encourage unity in Talmud learning, Daf Yomi was
introduced in 1923 by Rabbi Meir Shapiro, head of the Rabbinical
Academy of Lublin, during the First International Congress of
Agudath Israel. Since then it has attracted more participants each
cycle, becoming particularly popular in fervently Orthodox circles.
Shas is an acronym for the names of the six orders into
which the Mishna is divided. The Babylonian Talmud includes the
Mishna, the oral law compiled and edited around 200 C.E.; and the
Gemara, rabbinic arguments inspired by the Mishna recorded between
200 and 500 C.E. in present-day Iraq. The Talmud contains laws and
stories, discussions on such topics as daily blessings and holidays,
marriage contracts and marital relations, and a wide range of other
practical and philosophical matters.
Learning Talmud is an
often-exhausting exercise in logic, an observant Jew’s version of
law school training.
The celebration of the Siyum HaShas has
spread to the non-Orthodox world. Jewish Unity Live 2005
(www.jewishunitylive.com), an educational and cultural program
coinciding with the siyum, will be held at the New Jersey Performing
Arts Center in Newark, featuring Elie Wiesel, Sen. Joseph Lieberman,
musician Peter Himmelman and journalist Dan Raviv. Related events
will take place in cities across the country, on college campuses
and U.S. military bases.
Levine, the fourth-generation owner
of J. Levine Judaica in Manhattan, said he read about the siyum
events in 1997, and was impressed by the discipline required to
study the 2,711 pages of the Babylonian Talmud.
While many of
the tens of thousands of Daf Yomi participants around the world are
members of the fervently Orthodox community, the Levines are Modern
Orthodox. Clean-shaven Levine, 49, attended Yeshiva University and
its MTA high school; all of Hart’s education has been at Ramaz, a
landmark Modern Orthodox institution on the Upper East Side; Shawn,
19, a Ramaz graduate who will attend the major Israeli Daf Yomi
celebration in Jerusalem’s Binyanei Ha’Ooma convention center, is
studying at a Modern Orthodox yeshiva near Jerusalem.
While
most Daf Yomi participants begin the series as adults, Shawn and
Hart began at 11 and 10, respectively. The Levines also did most of
their learning at home, while many Daf Yomi participants attend
sessions at their synagogue.
“The breadth and the scope of
the accomplishment of people who did it [in previous years] was awe
inspiring,” said Levine, who proposed the learning project over
dinner a month before the last Siyum HaShas. “Why don’t we do the
entire Daf Yomi together?” he asked. He wanted to return to the
Talmud studying he had done at YU, and he wanted a chance to bond
with his sons before they grew up and left the house.
“Right
away, both said they liked the idea,” said Levine. They used the
ArtScroll edition in Aramaic and English. ArtScroll is issuing the
73rd and final volume of its Schottenstein English translation to
coincide with the Siyum HaShas.
Usually the Levines learned
at night in the family room. “We did it every single day,” Danny
Levine said. “We did it on trains. We did it on planes. We did it in
the car. We did it in Israel.” When they occasionally missed a few
days, they caught up. “We would sit for 4 and a half hours catching
up.”
Blu Greenberg, founding president of the Jewish Orthodox
Feminist Alliance, remembers walking out of a JOFA plenary session
at the Grand Hyatt a few years ago and seeing Levine, who was
running the bookstore at the biennial conference, learning Daf Yomi
with his sons in a small room off the main lobby.
“It was all
quiet. It was empty except for Danny sitting learning with his sons.
They were sitting at a table,” Greenberg said. “It was just a
beautiful scene … permanently imbedded in my mind’s eye. It reminded
me of my father, of blessed memory, who did this all the
time.
“It was somebody taking advantage of every minute to
study Torah,” she says. “He could have been tallying up the sales of
his books. He could have been schmoozing in the lobby. It epitomizes
how he managed to [complete Daf Yomi] with his sons.”
Levine
said Shawn, who has kept up with Daf Yomi in Israel, will call his
father and brother on Monday night so they can all learn the
second-to-last daf together.
“I give the boys a lot of
credit,” Levine said. “I never had to force them. They’re both good,
serious boys.”
Their classmates, he said, “are in awe. It’s
unique — no one knows anyone of their age who has ever studied the
entire Talmud, and surely not with their father.”
“This is a
nice example for other Modern Orthodox families, because it shows
that you can get things done with your kids if you set your heart on
it,” Shawn said. “It doesn’t have to be Shas,” said Shawn, adding
that learning the weekly Torah portion, laws of Shabbos, or any
other Jewish text “are all good opportunities to connect with your
child in a Torah way.”
“This excursion has given me a unique
opportunity to get familiar with Gemara, Gemara concepts, names of
rabbis, stories, halachot and other great values,” Shawn said. “I
think this could inspire other fathers to learn with their
children.”
“It has been an incredible bonding experience with
both my brother and my dad,” Hart said. “The Daf Yomi cycle connects
Jews from around the world. To think that I am studying the same
pages as rabbis from long ago and from faraway places makes my sense
of Jewish community and responsibility so much
greater.”
Levine and his sons won’t take part in the 12th Daf
Yomi cycle that starts next Wednesday. Shawn and Hart will be away
at college next year.
But the Levine tradition won’t end next
week, they say.
“I can’t wait to have kids of my own,” Hart
said, “so I can continue the Talmud study that my father started.”
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