It has not been a good news week for Jews in the diaspora, in particular for Orthodox Jews in New York, but also elsewhere.
Today however Jews around the world celebrate a once in 7.5 years event - the Siyum Hashas, the conclusion of a 7.5 year cycle of study during which Jews study one page of Talmud a day, Daf Yomi, in order to complete the entire series of the Talmud from the first chapter to the last, covering a complex array of Jewish legal texts, legends and history in a mix of ancient Aramaic and Hebrew.
It is no mean feat to study the whole of the Talmud, to wrap one's head around everything from the complexities of the cycle of the rain and agriculture in the Land of Israel to legal discussions on the finer points of tort law, kosher observance and divorce to mystical legends and folklore.
The thousands of Jews around the world who have completed this cycle of Daf Yomi are not just engaging in a challenging and rewarding intellectual exercise, not just fulfilling the religious requirement to study Torah, but also celebrating millennia of Jewish culture, language, faith and tradition, a rich heritage which has endured the scattering of the Jewish people to the four corners of the earth, the most horrific persecutions, forced conversions and expulsions, but which has survived intact.
Centuries after the Talmud, originally an oral tradition, was written down, it's text remains at the core of an ancient Jewish literary inheritance passed down through the generations.
Over sixty years ago my grandfather, born in a tiny village in what is today Ukraine, visited Israel for the first time. He boarded a bus in Tel Aviv. Across the aisle sat a Yemenite Jew poring over a Talmudic text. My grandfather leaned over to see what he was learning and the man motioned for my grandfather to take the empty seat next to him. He spoke heavily Yemeni accented Hebrew, a dialect hard to understand by other Hebrew speakers. My grandfather spoke Hebrew with a distinct Galician Ashkenazi accent, equally hard for many other Hebrew speakers to understand. They bonded over the text of the Talmud though, able to share enough of the key terminology to study together all the way to Jerusalem.
It was the highlight of my grandfather's first visit to to Israel, more than visiting the holy places, more than seeing the miracle of Jewish sovereignty restored to Zion after 2000 years. Sitting with a Jew born in Yemen, he a Jew born in Galicia, united together on a bus ride in Eretz Yisrael over a page of Talmud, to him that was living the prophecy of the ingathering of exiles, of the survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish culture and faith across the gulf of centuries of exile, just as the Biblical prophets had promised.
I remember as a child listening to him retell this tale of wonder, who could have imagined, he, a simple Hassidishe boy from a little shteitl, an aspiring rabbinical student who saw his village burned down by the Cossacks during the First World War, the Jews running to flee in the woods thanks to a Russian Jewish officer galloping in to the village to warn them in advance of the main force of Cossacks. And then not long after, my grandfather was forcibly conscripted in to the Austrian army, a young provincial devout Jew, thrust in to the middle of a war he had no hope of understanding and every chance that he might not survive.
By a miracle he found himself alive but alone in Vienna at the end of the war and happened to meet his Rebbe who with his hassidim had had to flee their shteitl, and his Rebbe, seeing how shattered the young man was by his experiences, no longer considering himself worthy of rabbinical training, appointed him his shammes, his assistant, a position that granted my grandfather a valuable visa to emigrate with his Rebbe's entourage to England, saving him and several siblings from the Holocaust that was to destroy the rest of the family and most of Galician Jewry only a couple of decades later.
Building a new life in London was not so easy either, learning a new language, encountering a different, but still painful, type of anti-Semitism, the general hostility to a foreigner with a somewhat Germanic (to English ears) sounding accent in the years after the First World War.
Diving in to a page of Talmud was all that time a refuge, taking him back to his youth before that life was forever banished by the horrific upheaval of the First World War. It would be many years until he could afford to own his very own set of Talmud volumes, but he could always go to his Rebbe or the local synagogue after work or on Shabbat to immerse himself in Talmud. All his life it was one of his greatest pleasures.
Seeing all the articles, posts and advertisements about celebrations of the Siyum Hashas this week I am reminded of that pure joy he found in the Talmudic text. Of the wonder his voice always held telling the story of being able to share that love of Talmudic study with the Jewish immigrant from Yemen on the bus in Israel, the connection it instantly created between Jews from such distant diasporas symbolising for my grandfather the eternal promise that God would one day reunite the Jews from the disparate lands of their exile.
These may be grim days for many Jewish communities around the world as anti-Semitism once again rears its ugly head, but the Siyum Hashas, a celebration of Jewish survival, reminds us that our ancient culture has survived far greater challenges and will survive this too.
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