Wings of Desire and Daf Yomi

 Today I spoke in shul in honor of our Daf Yomi Siyum of Seder Nashim. Below is the text of the speech. Shortly I will also be publishing, in a separate blogpost, about our trip to the library. 

Good shabbos, everyone. I’ve been wanting for some time to speak a little bit about my experience with Daf Yomi and I want to thank both Kesher and especially our Daf Yomi group for allowing me to do that this Shabbat. 

  To begin, I need to invite you a little bit into my world.

Ours is a family of movie lovers. We have a lot of lists in our household, lists of top favorite movies, favorite movie scores, favorite movie posters and so on. 

Another detail I need to tell you is that my paternal grandfather was a secular German Jew with an exceptional story. He escaped Germany when his uncle had the foresight to leave Germany early and took him to help with a stationery business on the island of Mallorca. He was able to make a life for himself there until the Spanish Civil War broke out and he moved again to the U.S. where he joined the American army. In spite of the Nazis, my grandfather continued to love the Germany he left behind and instilled in both my Dad and me an interest in learning German and other languages.

So it won’t be all that surprising when I describe to you my rather nerdy favorite self-contained movie scene – as in, a scene that is beautiful even without context – It comes from the 1987 German film, Der Himmel Über Berlin. The German title translates into “The Sky Over Berlin” but the English language title is Wings of Desire. The movie is about angels who walk through the world invisible to most mortals and who are able to listen to people’s thoughts. 

In my favorite scene which you can find on youtube under “Wings of Desire Library”, we follow the angels through the city library where they listen to texts being read silently by the library’s patrons. As the angels make their way through the stacks, me mostly hear German which – at least for me – goes by a little too fast to identify the texts, but then we start to hear other languages including English and then for any Hebrew-speaking movie viewers, we perk up upon hearing, “Breishit bara elokim et hashamayim v’et ha’aretz, v’haaretz hayta tohu v’vohu…” The angels close their eyes, smile and soak in the music of the words. The movie’s vision of a place of spirituality is not a church or place of prayer, but a place where people sit and learn.

So now let me share with you how I got involved with Daf Yomi. Mostly, it was by accident. When Rabbi Block shared with the shul that he wanted to take this on I was like, “seriously!? No one has time for that!” But I was a good sport and showed up to the first class. It was held in the beit midrash which was crammed with really smart shul members whose background, Hebrew, history, and Talmud skills all exceeded my secular education. The class lasted 45 minutes, the questions people asked were incomprehensible to me and I left feeling exhausted. There was no way I was going on to the next daf. 

And yet I did. 

And the next day, again, I did. 

We’ve been doing this now since January 2020 and recently passed our halfway point in the cycle. Each of us in the group has our own routine of how we take this in. Some listen to podcasts. Some read the text in Hebrew, others in English. In order to make this sustainable, I’ve personally set myself very modest goals to get through my weekly Daf quota. My bottom line is to look at every page. I read everything in English, sometimes understanding a little, or to make up for lost time as I often catch up on a full week’s worth of Daf on Shabbat. There are exciting moments, both in the text itself, and also in my ability to make sense of it. I love discovering patterns between the stories and am at my proudest when I’m able to ask a really relevant question in class. The experience of flipping through the pages is similar to scrolling through whatsapp chats, looking for the comments or links that draw me in like a good web link or video. 

What’s amazing, of course, is how far this text has come to reach us here today and how it connects us in so many different directions. Reading daf connects us to all those who are reading it now. This daf, on this day. It also connects us to those who have learned and even written it before. Just as our chagim and other traditions connect us backwards in experience, Reading daf connects us backward in history, many generations past when my own grandfather was resetting his life during that period’s upheaval and also back to when my grandmother was a toddler in the pogroms of Belarus. It goes back century after century until we find ourselves eavesdropping on intergenerational chatter and dialogue of our ancestors. These rabbis were incredibly human. Things they say are technical, confusing, weird, even hilarious, sometimes offensive, jaw-dropping or inspirational. I don’t always know what to make of the details of what I’m reading, but I let it wash over me like the angels in the Berlin library soaking in the texts around them.

We’re all going through an awful lot right now with the current crisis. We’re experiencing powerful emotions of panic, fear, grief, solidarity and purpose. One thing I personally struggle with in times of such great intensity is that sometimes I find that I have trouble imagining tomorrow. I mean that very literally. The current experience on some days is so intense that my imagination takes over and I really have trouble remembering that there will be a tomorrow.

However, when we reach backwards and hear the voices from history, voices that have been through thousands of years of our uncanny survival – even if they are talking about strange things like how houses are built, or what the difference is between an ox goring vs. stepping on someone, or just how far it is to Pumbedita, it’s like we’re eavesdropping on real people that came before us. And if we can listen backwards, I can imagine us reaching forwards too. That the moment we are living now is just a moment in a much much bigger history that is yet to be written. As I’ve already said, our texts defy both space and time. They defy trauma and life and death. They can reach us backwards and they can move us forwards. 

May the celebration of our learning today be a source of comfort.