Jewish Culture Was Not Always a Response to Non-Jewish Culture

Why read the Talmud as a secular Jew? In part, for its expression of an independent Jewish creativity and spirituality.

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

More than once, in the course of reading Daf Yomi and writing about the experience, I have been asked why I would spend so much time immersing myself in the Talmud. Sometimes the question is asked in a curious spirit, other times impatiently. After all, I am not an Orthodox Jew, and I don’t live my life as if the laws of the rabbis were binding on me. Absent that kind of commitment, why should anyone engage with the difficulties and minutiae of the Talmud? What kind of nourishment does this challenging text offer to a secular Jewish reader?

I’ve thought a lot about this question, and there are several answers I could give. Reading the Talmud is a unique intellectual challenge: It requires escaping one’s usual ways of thinking and adopting the very different worldview and logical procedures of the rabbis. Spiritually, too, the Talmud offers a surprising way of thinking about God and what intimacy with God might mean, one that is very different from the standard Protestant model that informs mainstream American religion, including Jewish religion. And historically, reading the Talmud offers some insight into the lives of our ancestors, for whom it was the centerpiece of religious and intellectual life.

But perhaps the most important thing I am getting out of reading the Talmud is the experience of a time when Jewish culture was not primarily a response to non-Jewish culture. Modern Jewish life, which started with the emancipation of Western European Jews around the time of the French Revolution, is a complicated negotiation between Jewishness and the wider gentile world. How do Jews fit into societies and cultures whose history and assumptions are not Jewish, and sometimes even anti-Jewish? Modern Jewish culture and politics, with all their complicated glories, are all deeply involved with this problem; and while it is much less urgent for American Jews today than it was for our ancestors in Europe, it remains hard to escape.

The Talmud, on the other hand, is not reactive, not a negotiation. It is an expression of an independent Jewish creativity and spirituality—informed by surrounding cultures, as everything human must be (just look at all the loanwords from Persian and Greek), but not primarily addressed to those neighbors. It is remarkable, for instance, how little the Talmud has to say about Christianity, which was starting to dominate the world of the rabbis just at the time the text was being compiled. Reading the Talmud is a reminder that Judaism is not historically a mere guest or victim of other religions, the way we tend to learn about it in school and in history books, but an autonomous tradition, with its own values and achievements. You don’t have to “believe” in the Talmud, in a religious sense, to draw strength from the sense that Judaism rests on its solid foundation.

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