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“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What happens when people stop buying what their leaders are selling? The rabbis of the Talmud weren't just rewriting Jewish practice. They were figuring out how to convince everyone else that their radical innovations were what God had intended all along. But in this episode, Benay and Dan uncover a surprising possibility: What if some of the Talmud's arguments were deliberately designed to fail? What if the rabbis were teaching their students not just what to say, but what not to say?

From eye-for-an-eye justice to interfaith marriage and LGBTQ inclusion, they explore the uncomfortable relationship between truth, persuasion, and changing a tradition. Sometimes the argument most likely to convince people isn't the one you actually believe. So when you're trying to move a tradition toward something better, how much truth can you afford to tell? And at what point does finding the right message become something more troubling than persuasion?

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the Talmud is supposed to make you laugh? Not politely chuckle, but genuinely laugh out loud at the absurdity of its arguments. In this episode, Benay and Dan wrestle with a bizarre legal question: What happens if you poke out someone's eye as punishment, and they accidentally die? The rabbis' answer leads to an unexpected detour through Jackie Mason, Jewish comedy, and the possibility that generations of scholars have been taking seriously something that was meant to be a joke.

But beneath the laughter is a provocative question about what the Talmud is actually for. When they discover a seemingly airtight argument that the rabbis never bothered to make, Benay and Dan begin to wonder whether the missing argument is more important than the ones they included. If so, what if the Talmud isn't meant to be a book of answers at all? What if it's just a training ground designed to teach its readers how to think, how to argue, and ultimately how to create something the rabbis themselves never imagined?

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the rabbis knew their arguments were ridiculous? And what if that was precisely the point? In this episode, Benay and Dan uncover a startling possibility: some of the Talmud's most elaborate interpretations weren't designed to discover what the Torah meant, but rather to persuade people to accept what the rabbis had already decided was right. From sleight-of-hand magic to political messaging, they explore one of the uncomfortable ethical questions at the heart of leadership: Is it ever okay to mislead people if you're leading them toward something good?

But the real revelation might be hiding in the laughter. As they examine a rabbinic technique built on the premise that God never wastes a word, they discover arguments so spectacularly inconsistent that we begin to suspect the absurdity is intentional. What if the Talmud is winking at its readers, inviting them to recognize the difference between discovering truth and selling it? And what happens to a tradition when generations of readers stop getting the joke?

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the Torah says exactly what it means, and we decide not to follow it anyway? In this episode, Benay and Dan return to the troubling commandment of “an eye for an eye,” confronting a question that reaches far beyond ancient punishment: When a sacred text demands something we can no longer morally tolerate, are our hands really tied? From Jewish divorce to homosexuality, this episode explores how the Talmud itself might offer a radical precedent for changing even the clearest of biblical laws.

But there's another problem: What happens when the law simply doesn't make sense? Through bizarre legal hypotheticals, a dying murderer, an ill-fated attempt to be a helpful patient, Benay and Dan uncover the absurdities of applying rules without judgment. Along the way, they ask whether we've forgotten how to use the Talmud's most powerful tools and whether recovering them might change not just how we read ancient texts, but how we imagine the future of Jewish tradition.

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the most important interpretive tool in the Talmud is basically: “Oh, come on”? In this episode, Benay and Dan encounter an argument for taking “an eye for an eye” literally that cuts through layers of textual gymnastics by simply appealing to reality. And that leads them to a surprising possibility: maybe svara isn’t only lofty moral intuition. Sometimes it’s just cultivated common sense.

But once you start looking for svara that way, you see it everywhere. It may never announce itself, yet it quietly shapes and evolves the tradition, much like judicial discretion operates inside a legal system. Dan and Benay ask what happens when we stop searching the Torah for hidden meanings and trust something much closer at hand: our capacity to look at the text, look at the world, and say, “Come on. We know better than that.”

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

The Talmud wants you to think you’ve figured it out. Then it pulls the rug out from under you. A proof that seemed so convincing suddenly falls apart. An argument you accepted without question turns out to have a hole you should have noticed. And Benay and Dan suspect the frustration is intentional.

Because maybe the Talmud isn’t just teaching you how to interpret Torah. It’s training you to hold your truths lightly. In this episode, Dan and Benay continue to explore a text designed to destabilize certainty and form people capable of noticing when the tradition they inherited is no longer working. The goal isn’t endless doubt. It’s something harder: becoming confident enough to act, but flexible enough to realize when you’re wrong, and courageous enough to change.

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the rabbis were magicians? Not because they possessed supernatural powers, but because they knew how to make radical change look like it had been hiding in the Torah all along. An eye for an eye turns into monetary compensation. The trick works because you’re looking exactly where the magician wants you to look.

But Benay and Dan argue that somewhere along the way, Judaism forgot that the magic trick was a magic trick. Techniques designed to transform the tradition whenever it needed transformation became sacred artifacts that later generations believed they were no longer authorized to use. In this episode, Benay and Dan ask whether rediscovering the rabbis’ techniques of transformation might also recover something much more important: our permission to change Judaism again.

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

If you have one good argument, you make it. If you don’t have a single good argument, you make ten. That may be exactly what the rabbis are doing with “an eye for an eye.” As each new proof that the Torah really always meant monetary compensation gets weaker, stranger, and more strained, Benay and Dan begin to wonder whether the arguments are actually designed to fail.

Because maybe the Talmud isn’t trying to convince us that the Torah always meant money. Maybe it’s trying to make sure we realize that it didn’t. In this episode, we follow the rabbis through some spectacular interpretive gymnastics and uncover a possibility hiding underneath them: sometimes changing the tradition requires admitting that you’re changing it.

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What do you do when your sacred text is clear and you think it’s wrong? In this episode, Benay and Dan return to “an eye for an eye” and discover something more radical than a clever reinterpretation. The rabbis aren’t just changing the law. They’re building an entire toolkit for changing the law, while insisting that the Torah meant the new thing all along.

That raises a much bigger question: What if Jewish tradition isn’t ultimately about preserving the Torah’s answers, but preserving its trajectory? Through some ingenious, and sometimes hilariously unconvincing rabbinic arguments, Benay and Dan explore a Judaism that treats sacred text not as the end of the moral conversation, but as the beginning of an ongoing attempt to move, generation after generation, toward greater justice.

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

"An eye for an eye" seems perfectly clear, until the rabbis decide it doesn't mean what it says. In this episode, Benay and Dan dive into one of the Talmud's most famous reinterpretations and ask a surprising question: Is the goal to prove that the Torah always meant monetary compensation, or to quietly teach future generations how traditions evolve?

As the conversation unfolds, a debate about personal injury becomes a much bigger story about authority, moral intuition, and religious change. Along the way, they explore why the Talmud sometimes buries its boldest ideas beneath layers of argument, what happens when our deepest convictions collide with sacred texts, and why understanding how the rabbis argued may matter even more than the conclusions they reached.

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

Does the Talmud preserve tradition or secretly rewrite it? In this episode, Benay and Dan welcome back professor Menachem Fisch for a conversation that overturns the way many people read one of the Talmud's most famous texts. What looks like a debate about human dignity becomes a masterclass in how the rabbis hid their boldest innovations in plain sight.

As the conversation unfolds, the focus shifts from what the Talmud says to how it says it. Why does the text laugh at a crucial moment? Why does it leave certain contradictions unresolved? And what if the Talmud's deepest message isn't a legal ruling at all, but an invitation to question, reinterpret, and even challenge inherited tradition? If you've ever wondered how a religious tradition can evolve without abandoning itself, this conversation is a fascinating place to begin.

Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor of History and Philosophy of Science Emeritus, and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He has published many books including Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture.

This week’s text: Berakhot 19b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

Breaking someone's arm is easy to see. Breaking their future is harder to evaluate. This episode opens with an ancient legal question about damages, but the rabbis refuse to reduce injury to bones and bruises. They ask about pain. Lost wages. Medical bills. Humiliation. Even the emotional cost of being hurt. Suddenly, what looks like a legal code starts to read like a blueprint for taking human suffering seriously.

Then the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Benay and Dan discover that responsibility doesn't necessarily end with the wounding and physical recovery—it can continue as long as its consequences endure. Along the way, we uncover surprising connections between ancient tort law and modern debates about trauma, reparations, emotional harm, and justice itself. This isn't just an episode about what we owe someone after causing harm. It's about how far our responsibility to one another really reaches.

This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“[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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

The Torah says one thing. Life keeps saying something more complicated. This conversation turns one of Judaism's oldest texts into a living laboratory, asking whether every generation has the responsibility to expand inherited tradition when it no longer reflects the world as we know it. The result is a conversation that challenges not only how we read the Talmud, but why we read it at all.

We have a guest today – Gwynn Kessler, a professor of religion at Swarthmore College. Together with her, we explore gender, power, interpretation, and the surprising ways ancient rabbis wrestled with a changing world. Along the way, we ask a bigger question that reaches far beyond Judaism: Is faithfulness about preserving the past exactly as we received it—or having the courage to tell a truer story today?

Gwynn Kessler’s research focuses on rabbinic interpretation of Scripture—or midrash—and more specifically on rabbinic theology and rabbinic constructions of gender and identity. Her book Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives explores rabbinic traditions regarding the fetus for the purpose of examining rabbinic constructions of gender, ethnicity, and theology.

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“  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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

The most radical thing about the Talmud is its method and not its conclusions. This episode asks whether these ancient arguments are really about arriving at the right answer, or about handing the next generation the tools to challenge, reinterpret, and even overturn the traditions they inherit. Beneath a dense legal discussion lies a startling invitation: learn how the game is played, because one day you'll be the one changing it.

From human dignity and legal loopholes to the Supreme Court and Neil Gorsuch, Benay and Dan explore how lasting change often comes by mastering the language of tradition rather than rejecting it. If you want to know how communities evolve without abandoning their foundations, this conversation offers a compelling—and surprisingly practical—answer.

This week’s text: Berakhot 19b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if one of Judaism's most revolutionary teachings wasn't rejected, but deliberately buried? Deep inside the Talmud sits a breathtaking claim: human dignity overrides the Torah. And then, almost immediately, the rabbis begin qualifying it, narrowing it, and surrounding it with exceptions. The question is no longer whether the principle exists. The question is why the tradition seems so nervous about it.

In this episode, we explore whether the Talmud is suppressing a dangerous idea or teaching future generations how to handle it responsibly. Is human dignity the hidden center of the Jewish way, tucked carefully beneath layers of argument? Or is the real lesson that even our most beautiful principles require wisdom, restraint, and judgment? By the end, our conversation moves from ancient legal debates to a question every tradition must face: when do we follow the rule, and when do we need to remind ourselves what the rule was for?

This week’s text: Berakhot 19b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the most radical idea in the Talmud has been hiding in plain sight? A tiny legal principle expands into a sweeping claim: human dignity may override the Torah itself. Suddenly the conversation is no longer about funerals, ritual purity, or wool and linen. It's about whether preserving human beings matters more than preserving the rules.

But the rabbis seem nervous about their own conclusion. One generation opens the door to a breathtaking vision of dignity, while another works frantically to narrow it, qualify it, and explain it away. We follow an argument from ancient mourning rituals to modern constitutional law, asking whether Judaism's most expansive ideas survive precisely because they were never completely erased.

This week’s text: Berakhot 19b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

The rabbis began with a thought experiment about a lovesick man, which we discussed last week, and they end their analysis with something far stranger: the suggestion that the entire world has been broken ever since the Temple fell. Maybe that man wasn’t sick with love at all. Maybe he’s simply human. His desires are disordered, his longings are misplaced, and his inability to find satisfaction becomes a mirror for everyone else. What starts as a legal argument about one troubled man gradually turns into a meditation on what it means to live after a catastrophe.

Along the way, we stumble into questions far beyond sex. What if the rabbis understood themselves to be living after the end of the world? What if our deepest desires are shaped by loss? And what if the work of tradition is not inventing new values, but discovering the old values that were hidden there all along? The conversation moves from forbidden desire to human dignity, from constitutional law to climate change, and from a broken Temple to our own broken age.

This week’s text: Sanhedrin 75a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This week’s conversation begins with a lovesick man, a woman he barely knows, and a rabbinic ruling that seems almost impossible to understand. The doctors insist the man will die unless he has the woman. The rabbis refuse. They refuse when sex is proposed. They refuse when the doctors suggest she merely stand before him. They even refuse when all that’s required is a conversation from behind a fence. Again and again, they choose to let him die.

What unfolds is far larger than an ancient argument about desire or modesty. We discover a hidden crack inside the rabbinic system itself: a moment that’s in conflict with a principle we thought we had established: saving a life trumps everything. But here, saving a life is not the highest value. The conversation moves from misogyny and objectification to feminism, queer liberation, systemic injustice, and the possibility that every tradition contains the tools needed to remake itself. If the rabbis could add new values to Torah, what values might we be called to add today?

This week’s text: Sanhedrin 75a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This episode begins with a surprisingly modern question: are we discovering the truth, or are we making it? We begin with myth, storytelling, and the uneasy feeling that every generation reshapes Judaism even while claiming to preserve it. The rabbis may have left us only a few scattered hints, but those hints point toward a dangerous possibility: perhaps the people themselves carry the wisdom needed to guide the future.

By the end, our conversation gets to an even more radical place. Hillel forgets the law, the experts lose their certainty, and ordinary Jews become “children of prophets.” The future, the Talmud suggests, does not arrive through leaders protecting the past. It arrives through leaders humble enough to notice what the people are already becoming. In a moment when authority feels fragile and communities are changing faster than institutions can respond, this ancient story asks a startling question: what if the people already know what God wants?

This week’s text: Pesachim 66a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What happens when the people start changing Judaism before the rabbis are ready? This episode begins with a tiny legal question about the blessing over water and the width of an eruv beam, but it quickly explodes into something far bigger: who actually shapes Jewish law: the authorities at the top or the ordinary Jews already living differently?

As Benay and Dan unpack the rabbinic principle of puk chazi, which translates as “go out and see what the people are doing,” the conversation turns radical. The rabbis aren’t just tolerating the behavior of everyday people. In some cases, they’re treating it as revelation. Which means the future of Judaism may not emerge first from rabbinic rulings or institutions, but from the people already stretching, resisting, and quietly remaking the tradition from below.

This week’s text: Eruvin 14b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

Who owns tradition? God? The rabbis? Your teachers? Or you? This episode begins with a strange Talmudic argument about whether rabbis can “give up” the honor owed to them. But underneath that legal debate is a far more explosive question: who actually has authority over Torah once it enters human hands?

As Benay and Dan trace the argument deeper, the text starts to crack open. A verse from Psalms gets reread in real time. A rabbi changes his mind mid-argument. And suddenly the rabbis seem to be saying something breathtaking: Torah begins as God’s Torah, but through study, struggle, and deep internalization, it becomes yours. Not to preserve behind glass. To wrestle with. To reshape. Maybe even to save.

This week’s text: Kiddushin 32a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the point of tradition isn’t preserving it, but changing it? This episode begins with an obscure Talmudic line just three words long: “agra, de shmata, svara” or “The reward for tradition: svara,” and spirals into a radical argument about what Judaism is actually trying to produce. Not perfect obedience. Not perfect memory. But people capable of moral courage, intuition, and transformation.

Along the way, Benay and Dan unpack a series of strange rabbinic aphorisms about weddings, funerals, fasting, and study, each one overturning what you thought the “point” was. The real reward for learning might not be knowledge. The real reward for mourning might not be comfort. And the real reward for engaging tradition might not be preserving it exactly as you received it… but bringing your full self to it so completely that the tradition itself changes in your hands.

This week’s text: Berakhot 6b

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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 roll up our sleeves and really start messing with this thing.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This episode starts with a heretic on the side of the road — and turns into a radical argument about what Torah actually is. Benay and Dan unpack a strange rabbinic parable where God gives two servants raw wheat and flax. One preserves it exactly as he received it. The other grinds, kneads, bakes, weaves, and transforms it. And according to the rabbis, only one of them understood what God really wanted.

From there, the conversation spirals into some of the biggest questions imaginable: Was Judaism always meant to evolve? Did the rabbis secretly know Torah was human interpretation all the way down? And what happens when the myths that once held a tradition together start breaking under the weight of history, archeology, and modern consciousness? This episode isn’t just about oral Torah versus written Torah. It’s about whether faithfulness means protecting the inherited details or protecting the timeless purpose.

This week’s text: Tanna Debei Eliyahu Zuta 2

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

Something shifts in this episode. The rabbis start with a list of questions about what kind of life is a life well lived… a life of honesty, hope, wisdom, responsibility. But then they introduce one final twist: even if you answered every question correctly, it still might not count. Why? Because maybe the point was never just about being right. Maybe the deeper question is what anchors you when you have the power to reinterpret everything.

From there, our conversation explodes outward. Benay and Dan wrestle with one of the most dangerous and liberating ideas in Jewish tradition: that Torah isn’t static, it grows through radical reinterpretation. Not by abandoning the tradition, but by digging so deeply into it that new possibilities emerge of what the tradition might actually be. Along the way, they touch everything from postmodernism to queer Torah, climate change to accountability, asking a question that feels larger than Judaism itself: How do you change a tradition without losing your connection to the people who carried it before you?

This week’s text: Shabbat 31a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

Fifty episodes in, and Oral Talmud turns the mirror all the way around. Not “What does the text say?” but “How did you live?” This episode opens with a deceptively simple premise: the questions you’ll be asked when it’s all over. Not theology. Not belief. A test. And the rabbis don’t hedge, they hand you the exam in advance. Were you honest when it actually cost you something? Did you make space for what mattered, or just hope you’d get around to it? Did you live like redemption was possible or like nothing really changes?

But the deeper provocation isn’t the questions — it’s the audacity behind them. The rabbis reverse-engineer a good life and then dare you to build it on purpose. This isn’t about getting the right answers someday; it’s about refusing to drift now. Every category cuts closer than it first appears: business becomes character, study becomes priority, hope becomes responsibility, and argument becomes a test of wisdom. By the end, you’re left with something unsettling and clarifying at the same time: you already know what matters — the only question is whether you’re actually living like it.

This week’s text: Shabbat 31a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

Passover is supposed to be a ritual. Instead, it starts to look like a construction site. In this episode, Benay and Dan pull apart the Seder we think we know and reveal something far messier, more alive, and more unfinished. The Talmud doesn’t hand you a script. It barely even describes a meal. What it gives you instead is fragments: a story to tell, questions to provoke, and a tradition that’s still being built in real time.

Then the deeper disruption lands. The “Haggadah” isn’t a book, it’s an act. The questions aren’t a checklist, they’re the curriculum. And the Seder itself? Not ancient, not fixed, not even fully formed. Benay and Dan expose how much of what we treat as sacred structure is actually later invention, from printed scripts to Maxwell House marketing, and ask what it would mean to stop reciting and start telling. This episode doesn’t just reinterpret Passover. It dares you to rebuild it.

By the way, we are aware that this episode is coming out a couple of months after Passover. That’s because we are re-releasing the Oral Talmud as a podcast, and we’re releasing it in the same order that we recorded it. We recorded this one just before Passover. But if you find that it gets you thinking about doing Passover differently next year, you have many months to make your plans.

This week’s text: Pesachim 116b and Mishnah Pesachim Chapter 10:4

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on 

The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ 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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the law isn’t what it says but what we need it to say to remain who we are? In this episode, Benay and Dan speak with constitutional law scholar Richard Primus to crack open a question that cuts across traditions: when we interpret sacred texts, whether the Torah or the Constitution, are we uncovering meaning or creating it?

What follows is a collision between legal theory and lived reality. Originalism, precedent, moral intuition, narrative, none of them stay in their neat boxes. Instead, they reveal something more unsettling: the system only holds if we keep it alive. This episode doesn’t just compare Jewish law and American law, it exposes the deeper game that both are playing. The text doesn’t control us. We’re the ones deciding what it means and whether it still speaks for who we are.

Richard Primus is the Theodore J. St. Antoine Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where he teaches the law, theory, and history of the U.S. Constitution. His work on the relationship between history and constitutional interpretation won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies in 2008. He’s also one of my college roommates and one of my closest friends, so this is an exciting one for me! And I know that it will be for you as well.

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“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

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

The most powerful rabbi in the world is dying and everyone around him is fighting to keep him alive. Prayers are flying, desperation is rising, and no one is willing to let go. No one, that is, except the one person who sees what’s actually happening.

In this episode, Benay and Dan dive into a story that flips everything: authority, compassion, even what it means to do the “right” thing. A nameless maidservant dares to break ranks, not out of rebellion, but out of clarity. In doing so, she exposes a deeper truth that the sages can’t see. This isn’t just a story about death. It’s about who gets to decide what mercy looks like and whether moral courage sometimes means going against the very tradition you’re trying to honor.

This week’s text: Ketubot 104a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“  We're meant to be profoundly, deeply, intimately, radically empathic with one another. My understanding should be influenced by what I know is in your mind. I need to get into your head and I need to get into your heart, and I need to understand how this is gonna land for you. And I need to intertwine my consciousness with yours before I know what the right thing to say is.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

A wedding. A fragile moment. A question no one wants to answer honestly: what do you say when the truth might wound? The rabbis don’t dodge it. They stage a collision between two instincts we all recognize: tell the truth no matter what… or protect someone’s dignity at all costs.

In this episode, Benay and Dan crack open a deceptively simple dilemma that turns explosive fast. Can kindness justify a lie? Can empathy override Torah itself? What emerges isn’t just a ruling, it’s a radical claim: morality isn’t about rigid truth-telling, it’s about learning to feel your way into someone else’s reality. And once you see that, everything changes.

This week’s text: Ketubot 16b-17a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ I think the value that's being privileged here is relieving suffering. It's not fiscal responsibility, it's not caution, it's not never making a mistake in giving to an undeserving person. Those are values, but making sure someone who's suffering isn't suffering, even if it's gonna cost us more money, that's a more fundamental value. And that's the Svara that wins.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

In this episode, a community collects its money, lines form, and the demand is always greater than the supply. Some people are hungry. Some are exposed. Some are lying. And someone has to decide—right now—who gets helped and who gets turned away.

Benay and Dan dive into a brutal rabbinic argument about triage: Do you check up on the claims of the hungry and risk their suffering, or trust them and risk being fooled? Beneath the surface, the question cuts deeper, what matters more: preventing abuse, or preventing pain? And who gets to decide when those values collide?

This week’s text: Bava Batra 9a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ I now read the Talmudic literature as a paradigm of rationality, where you realize that to be rational you have to be self-critical. But you can't be fully self-critical merely by talking to yourself.” - Menachem Fisch

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

A philosopher of science walks into a Talmud conversation and everything shifts. In this episode of Oral Talmud, Dan & Benay sit down with Menachem Fisch, who didn’t grow up inside the Talmudic world and that outsider lens changes the read. What he sees isn’t a tradition handing down answers, but rather a system designed to generate argument, doubt, and transformation, where truth emerges not from agreement, but from friction.

But the story doesn’t stay clean. As Menachem Fisch traces this radical, dialogic vision, cracks begin to show. Some voices are welcomed in, even radically different ones. Others are shut out completely. The same tradition that thrives on disagreement also draws hard boundaries around who gets to speak. We follow that tension all the way through: between openness and exclusion, evolution and control, courage and comfort. This episode doesn’t tie it all up. It leaves you inside the argument, exactly where the Talmud wants you.

Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor of History and Philosophy of Science Emeritus, and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He has published many books including Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture, which serves as a launching point for this conversation.

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ The rabbis would acknowledge that's not the reading that is closest probably to the original intent. It's nevertheless a justifiable reading because the ends is justifiable. And we're using our reading as a way of not completely breaking the chain. We still wanna have some connection to the past, even though we know this is the most strained connection possible to the past. And that actually feels like a more laudable reason to do misreadings than one in which you're trying to fool people.” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

The rabbis don’t just read the text, they bend it on purpose. In this episode, Benay and Dan pull back the curtain on one of the Talmud’s boldest moves: deliberate misreading in service of a better world. From constitutional debates to ancient law, they trace a throughline — sometimes the reading isn’t the goal. The outcome is. And the text gets stretched just far enough to carry it.

Then the stakes get real. A city must be destroyed. A house must be torn down. The rabbis refuse both, twisting the text, again, until violence becomes impossible. But just when it feels clean, controlled and resolved the tradition interrupts itself again. Just like what we saw in the case of the wayward and rebellious son: yes, it did happen. Cities did fall. Houses were destroyed. This episode lives in that tension, between moral imagination and moral memory, and asks again what it takes to change a system without lying about the harm it once caused.

This week’s text: Sanhedrin 71a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ The power of the methodology that is modeled over and over and over in the Talmud is that it makes very clear that we are not limited by the original intent or the obvious meaning of a text. So even if a text actually does mean what it looks like, it means, and we find it difficult, we are not bound to continue perpetuating that norm in the tradition.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

In this episode of Oral Talmud, Dan & Benay bring the “wayward and rebellious son” text to its end game. After spilling so much ink to narrow the law into absurdity, the rabbis finally say the quiet part out loud: this law was never real. No one was ever executed. No one ever will be. So why is it in the Torah at all?

Because the purpose all along has been transformation. Dan and Benay surface one of the Talmud’s most radical claims: some texts exist in order to be argued out of existence. Not to follow them, but to outgrow them. But just when the tradition seems ready to erase its past, another voice interrupts: it did happen. People were harmed. And you don’t get to rewrite history just because you’ve evolved. This episode is a gut-punch — a blueprint for moral courage that refuses both blind obedience and convenient amnesia.

This week’s text: Sanhedrin 71a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“The whole myth of ‘God wrote this,’ which I don't believe the rabbis bought into, is necessary in order to make these rationales convincing. It isn't so much intended to guarantee people's compliance and observance. What if that myth, ‘God wrote this’ is necessary to justify the hyper literal interpretations away from the text?” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What if the purpose of a question isn’t the answer, it’s how the question teaches you to think? In this episode, Benay & Dan keep tightening the screws on the “wayward and rebellious son,” a harsh law the rabbis seem determined to make impossible to put into action. The pre-requirements stack up: exact food, exact timing, exact circumstances, exact parents. Until the whole thing starts to feel less like law and more like a deliberate unraveling.

But then the real twist hits. The digressions, the absurd scenarios, the hyper-literal readings. They’re not mistakes. They’re the method. Then, Dan & Benay crack open a deeper claim: maybe the Talmud isn’t just solving problems or offering answers, it’s training a mind. Teaching us to follow threads, question assumptions, and even outgrow the text itself. This episode turns from legal analysis into something sharper: a theory of how traditions evolve, not by blind obedience, but by people learning how to think their way beyond what they inherited.

This week’s text: Sanhedrin 71a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“That’s one of the reasons there's a crash because it's dealing with a new reality where everybody has the potential to know everything. And so there's no more hiding. And so what we have to do is to reinvent a Judaism that is palatable to everybody who's expected to participate.” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What happens when the crowd finally says stop? In this episode, Dan and Benay stay with the case of “wayward and rebellious son” as they unpack a charged Talmudic scene: a rabbi abuses his authority, a colleague is publicly humiliated, and the people shut the whole thing down. Not leadership. Not procedure. The community. It’s a moment of collective refusal that feels startlingly contemporary.

This conversation asks questions like:  Who controls the mic? What happens when hidden reasoning becomes public? And what changes when people gain access to the inner logic of power? They connect ancient rebellion to modern deplatforming, open information, queer inclusion, and the collapse of elite gatekeeping. This episode is about the hard truth that systems don’t change themselves. People do.

This week’s text: (Sanhedrin 71a)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ The big idea of what we're doing is to say, well, if we can see what the rabbis were doing to the Torah, then we can potentially do that to the rabbis in the next era. Then I think the question gets raised, what are the categories that Judaism over the last 2000 years, may have constructed or approved of, that we now would not approve of?” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What happens when a label becomes a death sentence? In this episode, we continue exploring the case of the “wayward and rebellious son” — a law that authorizes killing a kid not for what he’s done, but for who he’s assumed to be. This text reveals the danger of turning identity into destiny.

As we’ve seen in previous episodes, the rabbis again pull a quiet revolution. Instead of rejecting the law outright, they squeeze it — narrowing it, complicating it, stacking impossible conditions — until it practically disappears. Identity becomes behavior. Certainty becomes doubt. Punishment gives way to accountability. We follow this move into urgent territory: who we amplify, who we silence, how private actors spark systemic change, and why justice doesn’t descend from institutions — it rises from people refusing to participate in harm.

This week’s text: (Sanhedrin 70a, 71a)

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ Learning Talmud specifically was a spiritual practice designed to shape us into the kinds of morally sophisticated thinkers that can create a certain kind of world. So, at moments like this, it's not necessarily an odd thing to do.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What do you do when the world feels like it’s on fire? This episode was recorded the day after the January 6th storming of the Capitol in 2021. Dan and Benay wrestle with a raw question: when democracy feels fragile, is studying Talmud an escape or a form of resistance? They argue that learning itself is a discipline of moral formation, a way of shaping people capable of building and re-building a just society.

Returning to the text about the “wayward and rebellious son” from last episode, they push the conversation beyond ancient law into urgent territory: vigilance, social responsibility, systemic failure, and the danger of trying to “solve” society’s problems by simply eliminating the bad actors. Not easy punishment, but harder accountability. We ask what kind of people we must become when the flames are real, and we ask whether cognitive development is itself a civic act.

This week’s text: (Sanhedrin 68b, 70a)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“The Talmud is giving you a toolbox of methodologies and mechanisms to use to write repugnant understandings of God’s will out of existence.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

What do you do with a sacred text that tells you to stone your own child? In this episode, Dan & Benay confront one of the Torah’s most disturbing passages: the law of the “wayward and rebellious son.” The Talmudic text we discuss - Sanhedrin 68b - is a masterclass in moral engineering, as the rabbis methodically dismantle a death sentence, while hiding what they are doing in plain sight.

This episode dives deep into predictive justice, rabbinic power, and the spiritual technology of narrowing bad laws out of existence. It’s not just interpretation, it’s transformation. And it asks a question that still burns today: when adherence to tradition becomes dangerous, do we have the courage to rewrite the tradition?

This week’s text: Sanhedrin 68b

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“What you can't do is try to ratchet it backwards to the original law from the Torah. No, it does not have a special status because it was in the Torah. Once it's overruled, it's overruled. Period. End of story.” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

In this episode of Oral Talmud, Benay and Dan continue to discuss a text about divorce, and they uncover a radical rabbinic principle hiding in plain sight: once the sages change Torah to reduce suffering, you don’t get to roll it back. No nostalgia. No appeals to “original intent.” Just a one-way moral ratchet toward dignity, toward protection, toward repair.

This conversation traces a daring throughline: we don’t inherit justice, we practice it. If you’ve ever wondered whether religious tradition can evolve without losing its soul, this episode doesn’t hedge. It leans all the way in. This Talmudic text is an argument for moral courage: when tradition causes harm, repair isn’t optional. Moving from ancient divorce law to modern constitutional law, Dan and Benay ask, who gets to change the system, and what is the cost when nobody does? 

This week’s text: Gittin 33a

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage   for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“That is a point at which they're gonna say this is such a broken world that we can't let this stand. We're gonna have to repair the whole world to prevent people from falling into this category and that's going to mean overturning a Torah law.” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This episode is a new Talmud passage. It’s about divorce again – but not really. Dan & Benay begin by thinking about how the law can look orderly on the page while quietly unraveling lives in practice. This episode starts with pointing out a strange rabbinic habit: naming how things used to be, even when that past was unjust. Instead of smoothing over the damage, the rabbis deliberately expose it, which invites us to notice where the system itself is doing harm.

From there, the conversation addresses the lives caught in the gap, the people who have slipped through the cracks, and suffering that cannot be fixed from within the rules. This episode lingers in the uncomfortable space where repair requires more than compassion. It requires changing the law itself, and asking whether we’re willing to do the same when our own systems break down.

This week’s text: “Lev Yodea Marat Nafsho” (Gittin 32a & 33a)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

 “What's really important is not just that they're doing it, but they're showing you that they're overturning Torah with what their own svara tells them is a better take on how to be a human being and that's why I think this entire document of the Talmud is an instruction manual for us. I think they meant to teach us how to do it so that we could do it.” -  Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This is the final part of Dan and Benay’s conversation about Tractate Ketubot, pages 2b and 3a, which is a case about conditional divorce that is really about showing us how to change the law when necessary to alleviate suffering. In this episode, we see the moment when the Talmud’s sages stop hiding their most radical move. The rabbis don’t just reinterpret the Torah – they openly claim the authority to override it.

BUT, as the text unfolds, we watch that boldness collide with fear…fear of instability, fear of power…fear of what happens when moral intuition is taken seriously. Throughout this podcast Benay and Dan have argued that the Talmud is a manual for how to handle moments of crash. Here we see the rabbis showing us how tradition can be rebuilt but then they hesitate. Dan and Benay ask the unsettling question: when suffering is clear and the tools to alleviate it are in our hands, why do we so often hold back?

This week’s text: Ketubot 2b & 3a

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“It's always been that if we get to a point where svara tells us that this text is wrong, svara trumps the text.” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

When we were recording this episode in November of 2020, it was feeling very much like we were living in a time of crash in America and in the world, just like the world at the time of the Talmud. That sense still feels true to today, as we release the podcast version five years later. In times like this, the systems we rely on reveal their cracks. This episode leans into that unease, asking what happens when a law that is meant to protect people instead traps them in unending suffering.

Continuing the case we explored last week, from Tractate Ketubot, pages 2b and 3a, which is a text about divorce, we follow one rabbi’s willingness to do something pretty shocking about it: override the Torah itself in order to stop harm to human beings. At the center is svara, or moral intuition, and a radical claim that responsibility doesn’t end with saying “sorry, that’s the rule.”

This week’s text: Ketubot 2b & 3a

Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source  Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“ What this text is trying to say, as is the entire Talmud, is ‘my hands are tied’ is not how we do Jewish. It's never been how we do Jewish, ever since the rabbis at least, and can never be thought of as a legitimately Jewish response to any suffering ever.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

When this episode was recorded back in November of 2020 it was a moment of deep uncertainty surrounding the presidential election. The news felt unresolved, the ground unstable, and many of us were hovering between anxiety and numbness. Instead of rushing to conclusions, this episode slowed everything down and asked a different question: What does it look like to cultivate steadiness, moral clarity, and courage when the world won’t give us answers?

Turning to a startling passage in the Talmud, we explore a moment when the rabbis openly admit they are changing the law. Not because a verse demands it, but because human suffering does. At the center is svara, or moral intuition, and the refusal to say “my hands are tied.” This conversation pulls back the curtain on how Jewish law actually works and why uncertainty may be the very place where our deepest responsibility begins.

This week’s text: “Lev Yodea Marat Nafsho” (Ketubot 2b and 3a)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“The big error is to imagine that a general principle of interpretation applies only to the case in which we learned it.” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This week Dan & Benay work through to the end of the case of a person who is sick and needs to eat (and not fast) on Yom Kippur. We recognize this whole section of Talmud to be a sampler - a presentation of the many moves available to the clever sage who is dedicated to the work of changing the system, rather than letting people suffer. 

Do we want Supreme Court justices who read and reinterpret text like the rabbis of this sugya? How do we react when people use otherwise liberatory tools in harmful ways? What might the results-oriented jurisprudence of this case indicate about the larger debates that our Talmud editors were dealing with in their time? Especially if we believe that by the time all of these defensive arguments were being spelled out, it was the established practice that people who need to should eat on Yom Kippur? What is the role of a constitution in protecting minorities? Recognizing and responding to suffering? When we’re suffering under a system now, what can we do? What can we utilize from our learning to help us?

This week’s text: “Lev Yodea Marat Nafsho” (Yoma 82a & 83a - Part 3)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“Talmud is showing people how you do the sleight of hand. It's like magician school! And this is the manual! A magician never reveals his tricks! But the democratization of the old tricks allows for the new tricks.” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This week Dan & Benay continue to work through the case of a person who is sick and needs to eat on the austere fasting day of Yom Kippur. We give special attention to the moves which the sages make in order to resolve an apparent contradiction between the earlier Mishnah and a later rabbi whose opinion they clearly want to settle on - instead of the primary text taking ultimate precedence. 

How do we appreciate the rabbis without being apologetic for their sexism or ableism? How does noticing the intended audience play into the Talmud and college admissions? Is the more essential value here listening to the individual? or stopping any potential harm? In what ways are Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud constitutions? What are the super “precedents” in Jewish law? What can we do when we recognize helpful legal concepts and tools being weaponized? When it comes to judges, do we prefer one who claims to treat the role as an umpire, or one who is honest about the impact of their worldview? How is studying Talmud like reading a book of magic tricks?

This week’s text: “Lev Yodea Marat Nafsho” (Yoma 82a & 83a - Part 2)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“As almost always, there's a wink in this text. And the question is: has that wink been successful? Or have we lost track of the wink and opened ourselves up to the misinterpretation of this radical approach, for an originalist approach?” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This week Dan & Benay continue to build on the discussion of Pikuach Nefesh – how the Rabbis established and expressed their fundamental value that one should put the preservation of life before almost any Torah law. We bring in a core text in the SVARA yeshiva which explores the case of a person who is sick and needs to eat on Yom Kippur, instead of fasting. The interplay between Torah, Mishnah, and Gemara are fabulous illustrations of their differing agendas, the rules of Talmudic debate, and a timely gateway into discussions of originalism in legal interpretation. 

Is there a time for originalist readings, whether it be the American Constitution or foundations of Halakha? What is the job of law? Is it to define the only rights that we have? Or to assume we have a complete freedom unless otherwise limited? Reading Rashi’s commentary, what guesses can we make about where the debate developed in his time by noticing what he adds to the conversation? What are the implications of using a verse from Proverbs as a proof text?

This week’s text: “Lev Yodea Marat Nafsho” (Yoma 82a & 83a)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“In these moments of new foundings, I wonder the extent to which you have to make some kind of a plausible argument that your changes are actually an expansion of ancient principles. Otherwise, I wonder if they’ll be cast out by the immune system.” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

For the past few weeks, Dan & Benay have been exploring the rabbinic declaration that we should violate *almost* any Torah commandment to save a life or avoid being killed ourselves. But that “almost,” the exceptions to this rule, offer essential insights into the project of the Rabbis, and how we can be emulating their process for making the innovations we need now. In our final episode with this particular sugya, we work to connect the dots and make the analogies that put these fundamental principles into action!

How does our current sugya speak to moments when our society needs a new refounding? How do we help people who have only been taught Torah to understand and appreciate how much the Rabbis built onto Judaism? What do we do now if another layer has to be built We’ll find that the sages teach that we actually should accept being killed if the only other choice is transgressing mitzvot in public, and especially during a time of religious persecution. What’s the difference in these scenarios? What are the implications? When can martyrdom - or non-life-and-death sacrifices (such as sacrificing our jobs) - be necessary for liberation? How are you, the listener, applying what you believe to be the foundational principles of these sugyot to the crises of racism? Climate disaster?Like Benay’s Tile Contour Gauge, what are your metaphors for tradition? (The gauge is in the video version of this episode!)

This week’s text: “Nitza’s Attic - Public and Private” (Sanhedrin 74a - Part 4)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“What's inherent in racism is the idea that you are judging groups of people in terms of value one against another. And I think that's precisely what's underneath – that's the svara essentially – about why you can't murder someone else to save your own life. Because you cannot say: I know my life is more valuable than that person's.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This week, Dan & Benay continue to unpack the exceptions to the rabbinic declaration that we should violate *almost* any Torah commandment to save a life or avoid being killed ourselves. The main focus this week is that we should accept being killed if the alternative is murdering another innocent person. We work our way into the fundamental principles which drive these exceptions, and show how these fundamental ideas map onto the most present issues today. We’ll continue the conversation next week!

What is the difference between killing and murder? How do we derive broader ideas from cases in Talmud? How does that practice diverge from attempts to protect queer Jews by reinterpreting Leviticus? What would we put on the “you can absolutely violate this law if someone will die otherwise” list when it comes to American Law? How do words change their meaning? Why does Steinsaltz translate svara as “logical reasoning”? How can we determine the fundamental principle under a rule, and not get stuck on the words of the rule itself?

This week’s text: “Nitza’s Attic - The Exceptions, cont.” (Sanhedrin 74a - Part 3)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“And since they've shown us their work, we're able to say, ‘I'm not following the substantive rule in this case! I'm following the process rule – which says: How do I think about this new case?” - Dan Libenson

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

This episode is dedicated to the memory and legacies of Ruth Bader Ginsberg & Breonna Taylor.

Dan & Benay pick up where we left off last week, in Nitza’s Attic, and the crucial decision that we should violate *almost* any Torah commandment to save a life or avoid being killed ourselves. This week we begin to explore the exceptions to this rule - but even more so, how those exceptions were narrowed, and the reason for showing the rationale the Talmud builds for narrowing these exceptions. We’ll continue the conversation next week!

What was Talmudic about Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s life and work? How can Talmud’s process help us understand systemic contexts that led to the unjust death of Breonna Taylor at police hands. How do uncover and generalize or re-apply Talmud values to today’s subjects which Talmud does not discuss word-for-word? What is the influential relationship between foundational laws like Torah and Constitution, Custom (minhag), and svara, our moral intuition? When we re-read Torah, how do we learn to recognize which teachings about the Torah we’ve forgotten are not in the original text? What gifts was the stamma (the editor of the Talmud) giving us in showing us the reasoning behind shifting laws and narrowing exceptions?

This week’s text: “Nitza’s Attic - The Exceptions” (Sanhedrin 74a - Part 2)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.

“When the Rabbis start saying: Well, when does this line in the Torah apply? And when doesn't apply? – You forget that their first radical move was to imply: This doesn't always apply. That's enormous. It's that shift that makes anything possible.” - Benay Lappe

Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. 

So far, Dan & Benay have been exploring when the sages overturned Torah on a case-by-case basis, spending the last two weeks on pikuach nefesh and violating Shabbat to save a life. Now we move from a tricky question asked along the road, into a Judaism-defining vote held in a tiny attic: Is there any mitzvah we should allow ourselves to be killed over before transgressing it? How does tradition building work? How do we construct narratives about how tradition changes? How do we groove new traditions so that 2000 years from now people think of our innovations like we think of ya’avor v’al yay’ha’rayg (transgressing rather than dying)? Why is this monumental moment happening in an attic?Do we need to jettison existing traditions in order to make room for new, life-saving traditions? When are tzitzit, tefillin, and kippot serving the right purposes?

This episode was recorded around Rosh Hashana 2020, when there were conflicts between the tradition of coming together in-person to celebrate the High Holy Days, and not gathering in large groups, which was unfamiliar to many people, but would increase the disabling and deadly spread of COVID.

This week’s text: “Nitza’s Attic” (Sanhedrin 74a - Part 1)

Find an edited transcript and full shownotes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.