We need a post-October 7 Talmud: a conversation with Liel Leibovitz

It is November 10, 1938. It’s in a small city in Germany. It is the night after Kristalnacht, the night of broken glass that ushered in the mass roundups and the killings that would become the Holocaust, what we call the Shoah in Hebrew.

There are a group of men shoved together in a cell. They are all of different ages. One of them turns to a much younger man, a rabbinical student who was no more than twenty years old.

“You! You are a rabbinical student. You are a student of Judaism. So tell us – what does Judaism have to say to us at a time like this?”

The recipient of that weighty question was young Emil Fackenheim. He would spend the rest of his life coming up with answers to that question. In so doing, he became one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of our time .

In this column and accompanying podcast, we pose that question to Liel Leibovitz. He is an Israeli journalist, author, media critic and video game scholar.  He is a prolific writer, mostly for Tablet magazine. I have followed his work for years.

Liel and I first bonded over our mutual interest in the late singer-songwriter-poet, Leonard Cohen, through his book, “A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen.”

We talked about Leonard, but mostly, about Liel’s sense of what is going on in Judaism today.

Why is this important, especially now, after October 7?

He writes:

Like so many Jews, I’ve spent the last few weeks drowning in a torrent of terrors. The reports from Israel, documenting the worst single-day massacre of Jews since Hitler’s goons were stopped, are soul-crushing…These stories haunt me, making it difficult to go about my day. And it doesn’t help much to step out in my own city, New York, and see pro-Hamas mobs flashing swastika signs and calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

But I’m lucky. I have the best guide ever written to getting through tough times. It’s 2,711 pages long and 1,500 years old, and it’s the greatest self-help book ever written.

It’s the Talmud.

It is not as if Jews lack for sacred texts. In some ways, that has always been all that we have had. In times of exile, as poet Heinrich Heine intimated, the text became our homeland. Liel writes: “Jews became the people of the book.… They became the people of the book because they had no place else to live.” 

We lived, as it were, in the pages and margins of the text. That is the subject of Liel’s new book, “How The Talmud Can Change Your Life: Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book.”

We talk about Liel’s fascination with that often arcane, and central, Jewish text… how the contemporary writer Jonathan Rosen called the Talmud “a drift net for catching God”… and how the Talmud is like an ancient version of the Internet.

More than this: the Talmud opens up a world of intellectual curiosity that can actually save your life:

In an age of screen-assisted loneliness—the rate of teenagers hanging out with their friends in person dropped 40 percent from 2000 to 2015, for example, and continues to decline the more prevalent smart phones, laptops, and tablets become—the Talmud is a call to community, not only inducting readers into a brotherhood of ancient arguers but also encouraging them to seek study partners, online or in real life, and join the rumble themselves.

In a society plagued by deaths of despair—we lose approximately 158,000 Americans annually to suicide, overdoses, and alcohol-related diseases, the equivalent, to borrow a stark phrase from Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, of “three fully loaded Boeing 737 MAX jets falling out of the sky every day for a year”22—the conversations of people who faced conquests, exiles, and oppression and wrote their way out of despair constitute a useful manual.

And yet, the Talmud isn’t a record of how the Jews managed to survive. It’s why they survived—the book itself becoming a shelter to which Jews could safely retreat as their more earthly dwellings were torched.

The late singer-songwriter-poet, Leonard Cohen, himself a Talmud enthusiast, put it this way: The Talmud is a manual for living with defeat, a book about what to do when everything seems broken and how to think about life when little about it makes sense.

This is why Jews love text study — it momentarily takes them out of the world, if only to send them back into the world — better able to cope with what is in front of us.

That is precisely what we need today.