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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34 episodes
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#74
Today · 59 min
Episode 74: Bad Arguments
“Imagine the rabbinical assembly has to have a set of meetings where they're like, ‘Hey, guys, the people are onto us…Either we're gonna have to change our position on this or we're gonna have to change the marketing because our old marketing isn't working.’ Maybe we're seeing the transcript of that meeting where they’re like, ‘Let's try this argument. Eh, let's not. They're gonna pick up on this one. Let’s not use that one.’” - Dan Libenson
#73
November 2 · 1 hr 2 min
Episode 73: Taking it Too Far
“The Talmud can be understood as a case book or a teaching tool and… the Talmud may very intentionally be leaving out good proofs because the whole point is to test the students to see if they really understood it and to give them other cases.” - Dan Libenson
#72
October 26 · 1 hr 6 min
Episode 72: When Comedy Becomes Tragedy
“It’s intentionally a joke. And the tragedy is to imagine how this sugya might be studied and nobody's laughing. If you miss the joke, you're actually missing what's being taught, which is that this is not how we figured out the law. This is how we're selling the law.” - Dan Libenson
#71
October 19 · 1 hr 2 min
Episode 71: Hard Cases Make Bad Law
“Hard cases make bad law. You don't take the existence of theoretical hard cases that may rarely occur but do occur and make law based on those hard cases. You say, ‘Yeah, sometimes there are hard cases that the law can't accommodate, and that doesn't invalidate the law.’” - Benay Lappe
#70
October 12 · 1 hr 2 min
Episode 70: Cultivated Common Sense
“Don't think for a minute that the Torah actually meant money at the beginning. It actually did mean an eye and we changed it because that's what we do. That's what our project is. Our project is upgrading Judaism to fit the needs of Jews today and the world today.” - Dan Libenson
#69
October 5 · 1 hr 5 min
Episode 69: Juggling Arguments
“The Talmud has one message, one and only one message, and it gives it in 14,000 different cases, and that one message is, reader, you are tasked with making the tradition as good as you possibly can, and you are not bound to the Torah in doing that.” - Benay Lappe
#68
September 28 · 59 min
Episode 68: Thou Doth Protest Too Much
“The entire Talmud is a response to the bind that we got ourselves into before the rabbis ever existed by claiming that our God writes books. That was the mistake of history. That caused us a lot of problems. To think that God actually writes words down and this document is the word of God was the beginning of the end.” - Benay Lappe
#67
September 21 · 55 min
Episode 67: Sleight of Hand
“ Imagine you're reading some magician textbook, how to do magic… the magician is saying since he transferred the coin from his right hand to his left hand the coin disappeared. But he doesn't actually believe that it disappeared. He's showing you how to make the audience believe it disappeared. If the person reading the handbook thinks the way that you make something disappear is you move it to another hand, the joke is on that person.” - Dan Libenson
#66
September 14 · 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

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