It involves no small commitment to participate in the Daf Yomi (Hebew for “page a day”) program at the Milwaukee Kollel-Center for Jewish Studies.
The group of about a dozen people meets every evening except Friday, and twice on Sundays, in order to survey the entire Babylonian Talmud at the rate of about one-page-a-day in about seven-and-a-half years.
Yet for life coach and mashgiach (kashrut supervisor) Eytan Grinnell and orthodontist Dr. Richard Zussman, the experience is well worth it, even though they joined the present cycle only toward the end.
To Grinnell, who started last May after he and his wife moved here from San Diego, “It is like every day you say the ‘Shema,’ which makes you know that G-d is one,” while the Talmud takes you from that lesson to “how do you get up in the morning and drink your tea. You want to understand every aspect of how G-d invests Himself in the world.”
To Zussman, who has participated for the last year-and-a-half, doing this study “is part of our service to G-d.” While articles he has read “seem to emphasize the intellectual aspects” of the Daf Yomi, “I think the spiritual path is really what it’s all about. We’re committing ourselves to learning the wisdom of G-d,” he said.
Both Grinnell and Zussman will be traveling to New Jersey to participate on March 1 in the 11th “Siyum HaShas” — the celebration of the 11th Daf Yomi cycle since the idea was instituted by Rabbi Meir Shapiro at the first world congress of Agudath Israel in Vienna in 1923.
The big celebrations will be held at two locations: in the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J., where Grinnell and Zussman are going; and at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The two events are expected to draw some 120,000 people in total.
There also will be some 60 venues throughout the world linked by satellite to the New York event. They include Milwaukee, whose siyum will be held at the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center’s Klieger Auditorium, 5000 W. Chambers St.
The Daf Yomi project was, from its inception, designed for laypeople, according to Rabbi Avner Zarmi, vice president of the Wisconsin chapter of Agudath Israel of America.
“Its purpose was to encourage laypeople to study Talmud,” Zarmi said. The page-per-day was intended to give people a goal that would enable them to cover the whole “in a reasonable frame of time.”
But experienced Talmud learners like Zarmi, who has both participated in and led Daf Yomi sessions, and Rabbi Mendel Senderovic, head of the Milwaukee Kollel and the primary leader of the Daf Yomi endeavor here, also find the experience valuable.
For one, as Zarmi pointed out, yeshivas do not cover the entire Talmud in their curricula. They tend to focus on certain tractates and cover them in depth, ignoring others with recondite subjects like the details of the laws of the Temple sacrifices, he said.
Yet “the fact is that any given Gemara [one of the sections of the Talmud] can quote any other” from anyplace else in the Talmud, and “all the great [Torah] commentators can quote from anyplace in the Talmud,” said Zarmi. Therefore, “to acquire familiarity with the whole is useful.”
Further, according to Senderovic, some people like to study in depth, which is the kind of study done at the kollel; while others “lean toward broader understanding” of subjects.
“A mix of the two is best,” Senderovic said. Therefore, for him to go from the in-depth study he does at the kollel all day to the survey learning of the Daf Yomi “allows me to gain and review things in the broader level,” he said.
The schedule for the Milwaukee siyum calls for registration to begin at 4 p.m., mincha worship at 4:30 p.m., and the program beginning at 5 p.m. Admission is $5 per person, $36 family maximum. Light refreshments will be available.
For more information about the siyum or participation in Daf Yomi sessions, call the kollel, 414-447-7999.
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