I’m really excited about the I SURVIVED JEWISH HISTORY Spring Semester of Jewish History Lectures beginning later this month. Please check the flyer for the live lectures with our New York audience (please join us if you’re in town!). Here’s a tentative syllabus of the online dates and times for the release of those lectures.
The Live Lectures are free and open to the public. YouTube Members (Students, Researchers, and Colleagues) will receive Advance Viewing privileges of the rough cut (their comments will help me edit out the bad jokes). The Online Premiere (something new for me) will be open to the broader community, and I plan to participate in the real-time chat session with viewers during the Premieres.
Please save these dates! HMA
I SURVIVED JEWISH HISTORY
Seminar I 1. Origins to the Maccabees
Live Lecture: January 29, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for January 30
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, February 3
2. Rome and Early Christianity
Live Lecture: February 5, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for February 6
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, February 10
3. Revolt and Exile
Live Lecture: February 12, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for February 12
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, February 17
Seminar II
1. Sassanian Persia and the Talmud
Live Lecture: February 26, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for February 27Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, March 2
2. Under Crescent and Cross
Live Lecture: March 4, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for March 5
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, SUNDAY, MARCH 8 (note change of day)
3. The Glory of Spain
Live Lecture: March 11, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for March 12
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, March 16
Seminar III
1. The Scientific Revolution, Popular Uprisings, and the Jews
Live Lecture: March 18, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for March 19
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, March 23
2. Hasidim, Mitnagdim, and Maskilim
Live Lecture: March 25, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for March 26
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, March 30
3. The New World
Live Lecture: April 1, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for April 2
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, April 6
Seminar IV
1. The Holocaust
Live Lecture: April 22, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for April 23
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, February 17
2. The State of Israel
Live Lecture: April 29, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for April 30
Online Premiere: 8:00 PM EST, Monday, April 27
3. The 21st Century
Live Lecture: May 6, 7:30 PM @ YILC
Advance Viewing for Members: upload scheduled for May 7
Thanks to Sandy Eller of Mishpacha Magazine for writing this piece about one of my best chevrusas ever, Rabbi Nati Gamedze. Here’s the link to thefull piece, pasted in below.
It was the unlikeliest of pairings: a Swazi prince and a Toronto PhD candidate. But as they squared off over their open gemaras at Yeshiva Ohr Somayach in Yerushalayim, each found depth, meaning, and connection.
The year was 1992. Henry Abramson remembers his younger self as an overly confident intellectual enjoying a year-long sabbatical in Israel. He used that opportunity to immerse himself in his first yeshivah experience as a baal teshuvah, but faced a significant obstacle finding a chavrusa whose learning style dovetailed with his own. He shared his frustrations with his maggid shiur, who turned to the rosh yeshivah, Rav Mendel Weinbach, for help.
“They unleashed a secret weapon on me — Nati Gamedze,” recalls Abramson, now an academic dean at Touro College and a highly respected lecturer who has authored six books and numerous scholarly articles.
Like Abramson, Gamedze was anything but typical. A relatively recent convert to Judaism who hailed from Swaziland’s royal family, Gamedze had graduated Oxford University with honors and was fluent in 14 languages. His journey to Judaism was equally unconventional — after getting closed out of a course in Russian at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, Gamedze noticed someone reading a book in an unfamiliar script that ran from right to left. Looking to add another language to his already impressive repertoire, he decided to register for a class in Hebrew and the rest, as they say, was history. Gamedze found himself inexplicably drawn to Judaism.
Now the two unusually cerebral academics were learning in Ohr Somayach, and Rav Weinbach paired them up as chavrusas.
Abramson was blown away by his new study partner, who ultimately earned his semichah after learning for several years at Brisk.
“We were certainly a match, although I was definitely, without question, the junior chavrusa,” says Abramson. “We would walk into the beis medrash and take our seats, with me facing the aron kodesh and Nati facing the bimah. He would lean way back, with his hat perched on his head and he would say to me, ‘So, Hillel, what language should we learn in today?’ ”
The two typically delved into their studies in either English, Hebrew, French, or German, with much of their discussion on the Gemara framed in the contemporary thoughts of 19th and 20th century thinkers. As the arguments got heated, the conversation usually reverted back to Abramson’s native tongue.
“He would be in low gear and I would be trying so hard,” shares Abramson. “He would ask delicate questions that would make me realize I was going the wrong way. I think I won maybe one argument out of every 20. Then again, Abaye and Rava had thousands of arguments and Abaye won only six, so it was a pretty good rate.”
In the course of their chavrusashaft, the unusual pair learned Bava Metzia and Kiddushin, with special emphasis on the Rambam’s commentary. On Fridays they would meet with Rav Weinbach to review the material they had covered, sharing discussions that Abramson recalls even today as particularly humbling.
“The Rambam’s Mishneh Torah is written in fairly straightforward Hebrew and any 14-year-old with reasonable skills can learn it,” recalls Abramson. “Nati and I would learn the Rambam together and possibly have some disputes, but we were sure we had gotten it and that it was no big deal. Then we’d walk in on Friday and Rav Weinbach would destroy us both, showing us how we had missed everything. It was like a massive freight train had passed us by and we just missed it week after week after week.”
Their shared time in the beis medrash often led to long walks through Maalot Dafna as they talked out their learning, a process that laid the groundwork for a solid friendship. While Abramson was already married with children, Gamedze was faced with the daunting challenge of finding a shidduch and was a frequent Shabbos guest at the Abramsons’ Shabbos table, regaling the family with his inimitable ability to throw his voice across the room or discussing his 32 surnames, each of which corresponded to an ancestral achievement but was kept secret in an effort to avoid being cursed by Swazi witchdoctors.
From his earliest exposure to Yiddishkeit, Gamedze found himself mesmerized by the story of Akeidas Yitzchak. Abramson, in turn, was fascinated by the notion that someone who was completely conversant with the latest philosophical trends and thoughts could be so deeply moved by the Torah.
“My time spent studying with him deepened my connection to Judaism profoundly,” notes Abramson. “He understood that the Torah was not a cold, intellectual body of knowledge, but a living, breathing tradition and he became a role model for me of someone who saw a kaleidoscope of color where I had only seen a small spectrum.”
Equally inspiring was appreciating Gamedze as a modern-day Onkelos, someone who gave up everything after coming to appreciate the Torah’s beauty and brilliance.
“It was a humbling experience, both intellectually and spiritually, to see someone with a phenomenal brain that was so much more powerful than mine, who saw the awesomeness of a connection to Judaism, something that inspired me in my own personal journey,” says Abramson.
More than a quarter of a century later, the memories of his chavrusashaft with the man now known to the world as Rabbi Natan Gamedze remain fresh in Abramson’s head, particularly as the Siyum HaShas draws near. Preparing for the upcoming daf yomi cycle, Abramson has been collaborating with the Orthodox Union on its All Daf program since April, creating short videos drawing on a single element of each day’s daf yomi. Ever a high achiever, Abramson hopes to record the final video in 2024, shaving three years off the daf yomi’s seven-and-a-half-year-long cycle.
“One of my rabbis told me once that I should be doing seven daf a day,” muses Abramson. “I’m pretty sure he was joking, though.”
Asked if he thought Rabbi Gamedze was doing daf yomi, Abramson pauses for a moment before answering.
“Nati doing daf yomi?” he says, the smile evident in his voice. “Now that would be interesting.”
(Originally featured in ‘One Day Closer’, Special Supplement, Chanuka/Siyum HaShas 5780)
By now your social media feed (not to mention your news feed) should be filled with the phenomenal Siyum HaShas, the monumental gathering of Jews in celebration of the global study of the Babylonian Talmud. I was privileged to be among nearly 100,000 Jews gathered in Met Life stadium yesterday, along with tens of thousands of Talmud enthusiasts the world over, marking seven and a half years of dedicated study. Would you like to be with us in 2027 when we celebrate, G-d willing in Jersualem? Here’s three basic skills to help you get there.
Skill One: Start.
The Siyum this year gave us a little bonus in terms of the secular calendar. It was barely 40 degrees at MetLife, but using the secular calendar date of January 1 gave us the advantage of delaying the actual communal beginning of the new cycle to Sunday, January 5! As per the tradition, as soon as we finished the final page of Talmud, we immediately began the study of the first page, but that was largely ceremonial: the global calendar actually concludes on Shabbat, and begins on Sunday, perfect for the beloved procrastinators among us.
To start alone is to succeed. The only trick is, you have to start several times (2,711 times, to be precise). But this cycle you have a few days to prepare yourself.
Skill Two: Join a Learning Community.
The Talmud teaches that Torah may not be acquired except in a community (Berakhot 53b). You can’t do this alone. Ideally, this should be a live gathering of real people, but we are living in a technological moment that makes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press look like the difference between the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 5s. There are three zillion online communities to meet the needs of two zillion Talmud students! (This is important because, as the joke goes, every Jew has to have two synagogues: one to pray in and another synagogue never to be caught dead in).
I’m tempted to list a whole pile of learning communities, but I will restrict myself to only two with which I am personally connected, one live and one virtual. If you are in the Five Towns (a section along the iron river of the Long Island Railroad that is a modern recreation of the Mesopotamian Talmudic communities of Babylonia), join us on Sunday at 9:00 am at Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst for a formal, communal beginning with breakfast (the Internet hasn’t quite figured out how to serve free food).
Online, I’m super excited about All Daf, certainly the most advanced online app and website to serve Daf Yomi students. Check it out at www.alldaf.org.
Skill Three: don’t just learn talmud, learn _about_ talmud too.
Look, I study stuff for a living. I’m a Professor and a Dean at Touro College. The hardest part of Daf Yomi is not getting out of bed on cold winter mornings to make a shiur, it’s not scheduling your day to squeeze in time to listen to a class online. Those things are tough but entirely manageable. What’s the hardest part? Without question, it’s the dark-night-of-the-soul question that comes up when the material gets difficult: why, exactly, am I doing this?
In my experience, this thought comes up whenever I lose focus on the subject at hand. It may be an arcane question in Jewish law that is entirely theoretical, or the reconstruction of a specific debate on tiny incidental features, or the dissection of a given verse, letter by letter, vowel by vowel. You’ve got to be a Gemara superhero to get yourself through some of those sections.
Prepare yourself for the inevitable by getting a hold of some incidental materials to pull yourself through the difficult sections. For me, it’s Jewish history (obviously) but there are some really amazing biographies, literary studies, artistic representations and even novels. I suggest you poke around to find things that appeal to you personally, but I’ve published some elsewhere.
Friends, if the second best thing is to go to the Siyum Ha-Shas tomorrow morning, certainly the very best thing is to start Daf Yomi on Sunday. Let’s do it together at YILC! And for those of you who live too far away to enjoy the breakfast: be sure to download the free All Daf app for Apple or Android.
Feedback on this lecture was very positive, but one person suggested I was “the Grinch who stole Chanukah.” Kind of an ironically Hellenistic comment. So viewer beware: this is a more historical treatment of the social, economic, and political roots of the Maccabean revolt. Happy Hannukah!
Judas Maccabeaus (16th c. engraving by Harmen Muller)
Tonight at YILC: a deeper discussion of the Maccabean Revolt, from Antiochus’ inferiority complex to fissures between Jewish factions under Yehudah Maccabee’s role. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly) relevant issues for our own times.
What else are you doing tonight? Join us at the Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst at 7:30 for a timely talk on Chanukah. Free and open to the community.
With about 4,000 students a day in my internet classroom, it’s hard to have meaningful interaction with anyone. But here’s an exciting new development: because the channel grew so large, YouTube recently enabled the creation of three levels of optional memberships to facilitate more meaningful conversation about key topics in Jewish history. Sounds interesting? Please click on this link to learn more. Have a fantastic day!
Note: not intended for undergraduates currently enrolled in my classes. This is for the “vorld vide veb.”
Holding a 250-year old Torah Scroll in Carpentras, France
Always distracted but historical minutiae, I don’t think I was ever going to be a great Talmud student. Now, with the introduction of the amazing All Daf app (slated for launch on December 22), there’s finally a place for my approach to Talmud!
Please enjoy this brief video from the recent Torah NY conference at CitiField. Best viewed with the Prezi that accompanied the lecture, which is available here.
Henry Abramson 