Gemara Friendship

on ten years of learning daf yomi

Friendship with the Torah can look a lot of different ways. Some Torah friendships are iyyun friendships – you spend intensive hours together, and then go your separate ways after sharing deep connection. But Torah friendship, like all friendships, benefit from bekiut. This is the Torah equivalent of texting during the day about what you’re planning to make for dinner, sending Instagram reels that remind you of your friends as a key love language.

I am coming up on ten years of daf yomi. Two and a half years ago, when I finished my first cycle, was a notable marker in my learning – I celebrated with a siyyum, inviting friends and teachers. I bought a pink corduroy suit. I made a registry, because finishing Shas is surely the kind of life event for which friends ought to buy you kitchenware (I highly recommend registries for non- romantic life milestones). This ten-year mark is more mundane, quieter; there is no particular celebration for daf yomi outside of the dapim learned. I don’t know the date – Hebrew or Engish – when I started, though I could track it down based on knowing I started my learning with the first page of Masechet Nazir.

But this anniversary feels important in a different way. The siyyum marked having seen every page of the Gemara. But this is marking a decade of cultivating daily friendship with Torah. I’ve grown and changed substantially in this decade; I’ve experienced many joys and many heartbreaks (often accompanied by corresponding piercings). I’m a person who would surprise my earnest and serious nineteen-year-old self, and yet who would be totally recognizable. I’m flexible in ways that teenager could have never imagined, and principled in ways she might not have expected. And through all of it, the Gemara has been with me.

finishing shas in my pink suit. i wear the separates all the time so it WAS a practical purchase, thank you very much.

More below the paywall about my shifting relationship with the daf and moving from “being a person who learns daf yomi” as an identity to making friends with the Gemara. Paid subscribers support my work (writing, thinking, teaching) and get full access to personal essays etc; free subscribers get divrei Torah!!