The Oral Talmud

Institute for the Next Jewish Future

An exploration of the Talmud through the “traditionally radical” lens pioneered by Benay Lappe. Whether you are a beginner to Talmud study or a long-time learner, by listening in on Benay Lappe’s study partnership with Dan Libenson as they explore foundational stories and material from the Talmud, you will discover the how-to manual that the ancient Rabbis left behind for future generations to help us re-imagine a new version of Judaism after the previous version “crashes.”

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26 episodes
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Episodes 26

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#66
Monday · 1 hr
Episode 66: Rules of Interpretation
“This is a really great text to be learning because it shows that something as clear as day in the Torah doesn't mean what the words purport to mean. That doesn't stop the rabbis from legislating it out of existence and ultimately claiming that they didn't, that it always meant that all along.” - Dan Libenson
#65
September 7 · 1 hr
Episode 65: Attractive Instability
“The process that made the eye for an eye a dead letter is exactly the same process that could be used to make the Leviticus against homosexuality a dead letter, and that's what we're called to do because that's the tradition.” - Dan Libenson
#64
August 31 · 59 min
Episode 64: Showing Their Hand with Menachem Fisch
“ I'm always asked, 'You're obviously an anti-traditionalist, so why are you going back to the Talmud all the time?' An anti-traditionalist doesn't need an authoritative history. The answer is that the only way to begin to convince traditionalists of an anti-traditionalist option is to show them that there's a long tradition of anti-traditionalists.” - Menachem Fisch
#63
August 24 · 1 hr 4 min
Episode 63: Calculating Damages
“ When people say, ‘What makes something Jewish?’ A lot of times you're looking for some substantive answer to that, emphasizing the value of tikkun olam or whatever it might be. But no, what makes it Jewish is that it has been part of this process of changing and remixing, that's the essence of Judaism.” - Dan Libenson
#62
August 17 · 1 hr 14 min
Episode 62: The Rabbis and Gender with Gwynn Kessler
“[The Rabbis] show us, and texts from antiquity across the board show us, that any silly political insistence that there are only two sexes and there always have been, is just straight up nonsense. They attest to more than two genders. And yet, we repeat it so often that they inherit a binary system from the Bible and then scholars writing about gender have projected our assumptions about their binaries on the text.” - Gwynn Kessler
#61
August 10 · 59 min
Episode 61: Thinking Like a Jewish Lawyer
“ Even if you accept that we are nothing compared to Moses, nevertheless, we're sitting on the shoulders of Moses and everyone who sat on his shoulders. So we're actually having a higher perspective, even though we're smaller ourselves. That's an argument that accepts the concept of each generation being less impressive than the previous one but nevertheless, they can overturn things because they just see farther.” - Dan Libenson
#60
August 3 · 1 hr 2 min
Episode 60: The Bottom of the Toolbox
“ I'm really starting to land somewhere for me with this text. I think this is an instruction manual for how to apply that very radical and broad directive of prioritizing human dignity over the precise following of the Torah when they conflict.” - Benay Lappe
#59
July 27 · 1 hr 1 min
Episode 59: Is Dignity Greater than Torah?
“It is preferable to break, violate a prohibition in the Torah, anything the Torah says don't do, you can actually go ahead and do it if by not doing it you would cause someone significant indignity or disrespect.” - Benay Lappe
#58
July 20 · 1 hr 4 min
Episode 58: Living After the End of the World
“That's what Rabbi Yitzchak is saying, once the temple is destroyed, we are all in a state of unhealthy living, and our desires can only be satisfied in forbidden ways.” - Benay Lappe
#57
July 13 · 1 hr 3 min
Episode 57: The Lovesick Man
“ The issue here isn't sex. The issue here is objectification. So that can take place in a sexual context, but it can also take place in other contexts. So this potentially gives us the opening to say in a case where you have a disease that you're going to die where the cure would require the treating of another person as an object, that is not permitted. That's a much larger category. ” - Dan Libenson
#56
July 6 · 1 hr 4 min
Episode 56: Children of Prophets
“ There's no question in my mind that retelling, reshaping the contours of the Jewish story is what you do. That's the most Jewish thing of all Jewish things.” - Benay Lappe
#55
June 29 · 1 hr 1 min
Episode 55: The Wisdom of Crowds
“The rabbis ultimately see us being the Rabbi Akiva character, that everyone is an innovator, an upgrader, a potentially radical rewriter. That's the story that they're telling over and over and over and over in the Talmud. That's the message that they're trying to tell one another, to empower one another.” - Benay Lappe
#54
June 22 · 1 hr 1 min
Episode 54: Who Owns Torah?
“ People who learn the tradition own that tradition and therefore can do with it what an owner can do with what an owner owns. If you own your house, you can knock down walls, you can build an extra story, completely change it. You can knock down the whole thing.” - Benay Lappe
#53
June 15 · 1 hr 1 min
Episode 53: What's the Point?
“You’re really wasting your time, you’re doing the wrong thing if you think that your job is to receive the tradition, protect it, preserve it, and hand it off exactly as you got it.” - Benay Lappe
#52
June 8 · 1 hr 5 min
Episode 52: Raw Material
“ God only gave you raw materials. God always wanted you to mess with this. The story of the wise servant who turns the flour into bread, you could equally imagine him turning it into pita or challah or donuts or pancakes. I don't think any of those would've been the wrong answer. Anything that is healthy and nutritious and useful that you make out of it is okay. [This story] should shape how we view Torah. It gives a lot of permission to innovators at a time like now, when I think we've got to
#51
June 1 · 58 min
Episode 51: Reading Between the Lines
“One of the criteria for a good life is did you understand a thing from within a thing? One way we could translate that is, did you read between the lines? Did you dig deeper? Did you reject the plain meaning? If you only read the surface level meaning, you get no merit for that. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Sometimes it's worthy to do, but don't call that Torah.” - Dan Libenson
#50
May 25 · 1 hr 2 min
Episode 50: Ultimate Questions
“You're not going to be judged on how much Torah you know. You're not going to be judged on other elements like how smart you were. You're going to be judged on did you make this a priority? What you're going to be judged on is, did you actually work to live the life that you wanted to live? Or did you just kind of hope for the best?” - Dan Libenson
#49
May 18 · 1 hr 10 min
Episode 49: Passover in the Talmud
“ People often take rites and rituals and they miss the point. It would be like if your doctor wrote you a prescription if you were sick, and then instead of taking the medicine, you take the prescription and you put it on your altar, you bow down, you recite the prescription, ‘Oh, wonderful doctor, wonderful doctor,’ and you keep reciting the prescription. You're not gonna get better. You have to actually take it.” - Benay Lappe
#48
May 11 · 1 hr 7 min
Episode 48: The Myth of Interpretation with Richard Primus
“ We have a Constitution that's almost impossible to amend but it must change to preserve the constant. And the mechanism for change is that we reinterpret it to keep it true, that it reflects our deepest values and highest aspirations. If we did not reinterpret it, there would arise a dissonance between what we think the Constitution says and who we think we are and who we are as Americans is a people who do not tolerate that dissonance.” - Richard Primus
#47
May 4 · 1 hr 3 min
Episode 47: The Maidservant’s Moral Power
“This story raises the questions of who's in our community, who can be in our community, and who’s svara should we be listening to? The answer is much broader on all of those questions than we typically think. She changed the entire tradition. She changed how we think about prayer and life and suffering and our role vis-a-vis God and what should happen in the world because we listened to her, we listened to her svara.” - Benay Lappe

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