A few weeks ago, I spoke at the synagogue I attend about the history and impact of the Daf Yomi Talmud study program in honor of the recent completion of the Talmud by the program’s participants. I don’t upload the text of every speech I give, but this one came out particularly well, so I’ve decided to put it here for those who might be interested.
Here is a link to a Word version. Full text below as well.
From Lublin to MetLife Stadium: Ninety Years of the Siyum HaShas
More than 10,000 people descended upon the city to celebrate. The overjoyed crowd filled the streets. Distinguished rabbis, sitting on a dais, arose one after the other to address the crowd, praising the participants who completed Daf Yomi and encouraging those gathered to further commit themselves.
You might think I’m talking about a recent Siyum HaShas, one of those grand affairs that fills a major sports stadium to capacity in an awe inspiring Torah spectacle (I’ve never been), but you’d be wrong. I’m talking about the very first Siyum HaShas in 1931 at Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin in Poland, the yeshiva founded by the patriarch of Daf Yomi R. Meir Shapiro just a few years earlier. Some sources say that over 10,000 people gathered for that siyum from all over Europe. In 1938, for the second siyum, around 20,000 gathered at the yeshiva. And prewar Jewry’s distinguished rabbis were out in full force.
I once thought that the siyum only became a major event in recent years. But the truth is that it’s always been a big deal. Even the way it was first established by R. Meir Shapiro was awfully grand. The idea actually wasn’t first conceived of by R. Shapiro. There are several antecedents in various books, newspapers, and Torah journals, where people suggested that a great way to unite world Jewry around Torah learning would be to have everyone study the same page of Talmud each day. But R. Meir Shapiro was the one to implement it, and it worked in part because he did it in a big way, making an announcement at the first convention of Agudas Yisrael (Kenessia Gedolah) in 1923. Several rabbis had opposed his plan to make this announcement. Some, like the Munkatcher Rebbe, R. Chaim Eliezer Shapira, wondered how one could learn something so arbitrary as a daf, which often ends in the middle of a discussion. But R. Shapiro went ahead anyway and his idea caught fire. To a certain extent, the popularity that endures today is an outgrowth of that.
Except not completely. Because then came the Holocaust, and in a blink of an eye, European Jewry was gone. Daf Yomi didn’t die completely though; nor did the siyum. Its locus was transferred to then-Palestine, and several smaller siyumim were held in 1945, although they were not as great as the ones in Europe. Incredibly, there was even a siyum held in the DP camp of Feldafing that year.
The siyumim in Israel continued to grow stronger after the Holocaust, but it took a lot longer for things to pick up in America. In 1968 at the Beis Yaakov of Boro Park, 200 or 300 people showed up. But 2,000 came to the Manhattan Center in 1975, where the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah permanently dedicated the siyum to the 6 million killed in the Holocaust.
Shortly after the 1982 siyum at the Felt Forum in NY where there were 5,000 attendees, R. Moshe Sherer announced he wanted to book Madison Square Garden for 1990. The Agudah put down a non-refundable deposit 2.5 years in advance, and people were nervous it would be a waste of money. But 20,000 people showed up, filling the arena to capacity. By 1997, they had to get the Nassau Coliseum as well; now the total in attendance was 45,000 (and these are just the NY area siyumim). 92,000 people came to MetLife Stadium in 2012 – and now in 2020 there were again that number at MetLife and 20,000 more at the Barclays Center. It might be the largest Jewish gathering in America. And there were Daf Yomi celebrations and siyumim all over the world. It’s estimated that 350,000 people participated in a Daf Yomi siyum worldwide.
That’s a little bit of the history. But what explains the rapid growth of the siyum? The most obvious answer is that Daf Yomi has become a big deal; there are so many more people learning the daf than ever before. For one, Daf Yomi has been the concerted project of Agudath Israel in America and elsewhere for a number of years. In the early 1960s, the American organization created a Daf Yomi Commission that printed small gemaras, provided teachers to groups, encouraged and hosted siyumim. Now it arranges the great siyum like the one that just took place.
Also, the technological revolution has allowed daf yomi to flourish. It’s already hinted to in what R. Meir Shapiro said at that first Agudah convention:
A Jew travels by boat and takes a tractate of Berakhot in his arm. He travels for 15 days from Eretz Israel to America, and each day towards evening he opens the Gemara and studies the daf. When he arrives in America, he enters a Beit Midrash in New York and finds Jews studying the very same page that he studied that day, which allows him to happily join their study group. . . . Another Jew leaves the United States and travels to Brazil. He returns to the Beit Midrash and finds people immersed in the very page that he studied that day. Can there be a greater unity of hearts than this?
If you read R. Shapiro’s words, you see how new modes of transportation were making it possible for Jews to be more united—to travel and know what was going on elsewhere in the Jewish world. I think that this kind of simultaneous worldwide project, where everyone is on the same page, must be seen in light of modern communication like radio and telephone and faster travel. When R. Shapiro spoke, the time was right.
It used to be that unless you had a strong yeshiva education and a set of Gemarot, you needed to physically go to a class. Now you don’t need a live class. From 1953 to 1988, there was a weekly Daf ha-Shavua radio program taught by R. Pinchas Teitz of Elizabeth, NJ, in Yiddish. By the 1980s there were cassette tapes you could get featuring shiurim from the Torah tapes lending library. Or, thanks to R. Eli Teitelbaum, you could Dial-a-Daf on the telephone and here a pre-recorded shiur. In 2005 there was ShasPod for the iPod. Now you can just go to the internet and find web based classes, podcasts, and pretty much any resource you can think of. There are Facebook groups devoted to the daf. Erica Brown and others are tweeting the daf.
And the written resources in English and other languages are incredible. You have the ArtScroll Gemarot coming out in the 90s and finishing in 2005 to coincide with the 11th siyum. You have the Koren/Steinsaltz that just finished production for the 13th siyum. Now that Sefaria has put the Koren online (just the text and translation, none of the notes), you don’t even need a physical Gemara anymore.
So it’s easier to learn the daf. But we also live in an achievement oriented culture that’s well suited for the daily regimen of Daf Yomi. People run each day to train for marathons. Some go on diets, count their calories, and schedule their waking hours down to the last moment. Daf Yomi, for better or worse, fits our cultural moment.
The siyum also fits this particular age. Research has shown that people are finding more satisfaction now through seeking out experiences than by acquiring possessions. To answer “amen yehei shmei rabbah” with nearly 100,000 others is a powerful experience that can last a lifetime. American Jews have also become far more comfortable with public displays of religion. The Haredi world in particular has become much more engaged with aspects of the secular world in order to bring religion into a more public place, even as its adherents try to stay away from elements of secular culture. The siyum is a reflection of that. An ethnographic study of the 9th siyum in 1990 by the sociologist Samuel Heilman concludes by noting the wonderful dissonance between the billboard at the entrance to Madison Square Garden, advertising Bud king of beers, and the event, dedicated to God Kings of Kings.
The popularity of Daf Yomi and the siyum has led to some remarkable results. Learning Gemara has become a greater part of Torah discourse everywhere. Learning Gemara is cross-denominational; a Reform rabbi wrote about it in Tablet. Many women are studying Daf Yomi; Michelle Cohen Farber teaches a popular class in Israel. Adam Kirsch, a literary critic, wrote about daf yomi at Tablet the entire last cycle, drawing broader cultural lessons. Author Leah Sokol recently published a children’s book called No Day without Torah about how R. Meir Shapiro’s started the Daf Yomi. So we have an interesting result: the great yam ha-Talmud, that once unfathomable sea, now has a clearly demarcated beginning and end every 7.5 years. Through the Daf Yomi resources available everywhere, this yam can now be studied by anyone, just like the steamship and then the jet plane tamed the Atlantic. But note that Daf Yomi, like the jet plane, provides an overview of the Gemara only from 30,000 feet.
One final point. The growing enfranchisement created by Daf Yomi—with so many different types of Jews learning—has led to some disenfranchisement at the big siyum itself. Daf Yomi has always been an Agudah project, and the Agudah is most certainly not Modern Orthodox. They talk a lot about the unity that the daf creates, and they’re absolutely right, but the siyum itself has to cater to certain Haredi and Hasidic interests. Already in 1938, at the 2nd siyum in Chachmei Lublin, women tried to attend, and a rabbi got up and said that the siyum couldn’t begin until the women left the yeshiva. Eventually they reached a compromise by holding it outside. At the 2012 siyum, women sat in the upper tier of the stadium behind a 12-foot-high mehitzah made of four tiers of curtain that cost of $250,000; at 2.5 linear miles, it was the largest mehitzah ever created. And generally, the speeches at the siyum talk not about women learning the daf, but them making sacrifices so their husbands can learn it.
Some have likewise been upset that in the past, the YU rashei yeshiva have not been allowed to sit on the dais with other rabbinic figures or address the siyum. Some Hasidim opposed R. Yisrael Meir Lau speaking at the siyum in 2012, as R. Lau is a Zionist. In part for these types of reasons, there was a separate Modern Orthodox siyum at Shearith Israel in 2012. And now of there was the Hadran siyum for women in Israel.
Still, as R. Elli Fischer just pointed out in the Lehrhaus recently, even at the big siyum, things have been changing over the last 30 years. There are more kippot srugot; Jay Schottenstein, wearing one, recited a kaddish. Another kaddish was recited for fallen Israeli soldiers. YU rabbis had more roles at the siyum. The OU daf app was mentioned as a resource, which features YU rabbis. Yet overall, it’s still very black hat at MetLife Stadium.
In many ways though, these issues are a sign of Daf Yomi’s success and the culture around the siyum it’s created, not its failure. We aren’t all going to be able to agree on everything, but we are united in learning the Talmud in an unprecedented way. In his recent book on Halakha, Professor Chaim Saiman notes that in interpreting a prophecy of Zekhariah, the Gemara (Megillah 6a) says that in the future, the officers of Judah are destined to teach Torah in public in the theaters and the circuses in Edom. For millennia of Jewish history, that seemed only a messianic vision, even a pipe dream. But the modern siyum Daf Yomi has made it a reality.
Yosef Lindell 