The Flourishing of Torah Study and Daf Yomi

In 5683, at the Agudath Israel congress in Vienna, Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin proposed something simple: let the whole Jewish world study the same page of Talmud on the same day. The cycle runs seven and a half years, 2,711 folios. The first began on Rosh Hashanah 5684. The point was that a Jew in Warsaw and a Jew in Jerusalem, meeting, could talk about the same text, and a traveller on a train could open the same page as everyone else.

Twenty years later most of the first participants had been murdered. But the cycle never broke — it continued in the ghettos, from memory in the camps, in Shanghai, in Soviet prisons.

On 1 January 5780 the Siyum HaShas was celebrated. It drew some 90,000 people to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey and tens of thousands more in Jerusalem, London, Paris and Buenos Aires — hundreds of thousands worldwide. The thirteenth cycle itself ended on 4 January, and the next day the fourteenth began.

The scale has changed in other ways too. The Mir yeshiva in Jerusalem, once carried out through Shanghai by three hundred people, has some nine thousand students today. The Talmud has been translated in full into English, modern Hebrew, French and Russian, and its pages are freely available online. Never in history has Torah been within reach of so many.