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question everything

(47,263 posts)
Sat Sep 23, 2017, 11:37 PM Sep 2017

The Worlds Largest Book Club

Books review: If All the Seas Were Ink’ by Ilana Kurshan.

(snip)

Ms. Kurshan had followed her husband to Israel in the footsteps of many other young Jewish couples who dream of making a life in the Holy Land. Within months, she writes, the marriage fell apart. In her memoir, “If All the Seas Were Ink,” Ms. Kurshan tells the story of how she recovered from her divorce, in part through daily study of the Talmud.

The Talmud is a compilation of Jewish law and tradition that dates back more than 1,500 years. Far from being dry, it is a stimulating and lively read, “famous for its nonlinear argumentation, sprawling digressions, and complex analysis of the finer points of Jewish religious law,” as Ms. Kurshan writes. The practice of daily Talmud study is called “daf yomi,” or “the daily page,” which refers to the regimen of making one’s way through all of the Talmud’s 37 tractates (or volumes), one page at a time. At such a rate, it takes about seven years and five months to complete. Tens of thousands of students across the world follow the same calendar of reading and thus study the same page every day. They constitute, one could say, the world’s largest book club.

Ms. Kurshan immerses herself in the demands of daily Talmud study and allows the words of ancient scholars to transform the patterns of her own life. “Like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who measured out his life in coffee spoons,” she writes, “I have come to measure out mine in tractates, referring to periods in my life by what I was up to in the Talmud.” No matter how unstable her life became, she tells us, she held fast to the daf yomi timetable, inviting the sages and their disputes into her life when she barely had space for bookshelves.

She discovers in her reading that for all of the sages the commandment to have children “is so paramount that a man may even sell a Torah scroll so as to have enough money” to do so. The Talmud presents the case of a rabbi who was childless “because the classes taught by his teacher . . . went on for too long.” The text that follows proposes that the rabbi’s virility had been affected, but Ms. Kurshan wonders simply if perhaps his wife was already asleep by the time he got home. We then learn that Ms. Kurshan herself attended late evening classes in order to stall before coming home to an empty house. At that point in her life, she hoped to have children but just didn’t know whether she would marry again. Throughout her memoir, her private musings on rabbinical debates mingle the rigors of Talmudic tradition with the hazards of everyday life.

And everyday life, for Ms. Kurshan, could be bleak. After her divorce, Ms. Kurshan writes, “I lived in four different apartments, wandering through the wilderness even though I’d already arrived in the promised land.” We follow her as she navigates life as a newly single woman readying herself to love again. There is humor and heartbreak in these pages, and the Talmud is not the only text she brings along for the journey. A voracious reader, Ms. Kurshan is just as comfortable sparring with Coleridge, Shakespeare and Dickinson as she is with the sages Hillel and Shammai.

(snip)

Sitting down every day and working one’s way through a page of the Talmud can be diverting, but it is also difficult, a commitment of time and of mind. For Ms. Kurshan, such study provided a kind of intellectual stimulation that distracted her from the sorrow of her divorce. Her memoir ambles through the different memories that she wanted to share with us, but more often it reveals just how many memories she wanted to keep, in large part, to herself. She connects passage after passage of her tractates to brief stories about the demise of her marriage, but the reader is usually watching her struggle through a veil of Talmudic dialogue. We are often left wanting more of Ms. Kurshan and less of the rabbis.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-worlds-largest-book-club-1505861966

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The Worlds Largest Book Club (Original Post) question everything Sep 2017 OP
Thank you for this bobbieinok Sep 2017 #1

bobbieinok

(12,858 posts)
1. Thank you for this
Sun Sep 24, 2017, 01:16 AM
Sep 2017

This book is one I would never have heard about without your post.

An aside--I remember as a 'good Baptist girl' in college in the 50s listening to a presentation of Judaism and realizing with a shock that in some aspects it was superior to the belief system in which I had grown up.

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