Is it time to ‘dump the daf’? Pam Peled ruminates in the second instalment of her new book

Last week, in Brachos 24, Pam Peled attempted to make sense of the current turmoil in Israel by trawling the Talmud (and Shakespeare). Now, in the second instalment of her new book, Doing the Daf as Israel Implodes, the writer tackles the Talmud and the toilet, the handsomest Beatle and the Bard makes another appearance.

Brachos 25.

I spring out of bed uncharacteristically early to squeeze in the day’s daf (a page of Talmud) before my weekly game of bridge. Today not being Monday, and therefore not free for me, I do a click-and-scroll shiur (lesson) – skimming through insights gifting all Bnei Yisrael (Children of Israel) simultaneously from Brazil to Japan. Today we start in the toilet.

Spoiler alert: this is gonna be graphic – take a deep breath. It’s Talmud talking scatology, remember; not me being flippant. Check Brachos (blessings) for yourself if you’re skeptical.

Here’s what we learn about using the loo: when entering that most important room, if you’ve forgotten to unwind your phylacteries, Rav Huna decrees that you should put your hand over them till you finish taking your dump. Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak clarified that this is only until the first lump is excreted; Rav Shimon ben Gamliel extrapolated that if you start to excrete, and then stop, and somehow the piece gets reabsorbed, you might get ‘hadrokan’ (gastronomical disease, in which the stomach swells). There is debate aplenty over what to do if bodily waste (solid or liquid) winds up on your hand (it was unclear to me whether the tefillin – small leather boxes containing Hebrew texts, strapped on during prayer – are wound around it too at that point); someone pops in with a reminder of the customary four steps away from a stink. If someone else passed wind it’s okay to say the Shema (Hear o Israel prayer); you just can’t pray engulfed in your own foul air.

I looked at my morning coffee. Doing the daf, it seemed, provoked a lot of gulping; I swigged and tried not to splutter. I left my granola untouched until I’d skipped through the exegesis about poop on a pig’s snout, and whether urine is purified once it hits the ground. I was too hungry to concentrate on when crap is considered as hard as earthenware and thus not an impediment to saying the Shema; the answer, you should know, is not straightforward. There are two versions of Rabbah bar bar Hana’s definition of “rock-hard”.

Here’s a fun fact: when, according to our sages, is excrement as hard as earthenware, and thus not impure? (Don’t look at the answer below. Tear your eyes away from the page and hazard an educated guess. And then see how well you scored.)

The answer is in two parts – give yourself a passing grade if you got one right:

1. Excrement is pure as the driven snow when it does not crumble when thrown.

2. Ditto when it does not crumble when rolled.

Are you getting a bit tired of the intricacies of these intimacies? I’ll stop soon, but I do want to mention, briefly, the finicky issue of cracks and crusts on the doings; and that’s before even starting on the pee. Take a look if you like, or skip the next few lines of learned dialogue on droppings:

(a) Question: What was the conclusion?

(b) Answer: Ameimar forbid excrement that is like earthenware, Mar Zutra permitted it.

(c) (Rava): The Halachah (Jewish religious law) is, excrement like earthenware is forbidden, urine is forbidden as long as it can wet.

(d) Question (Beraisa – teachings outside those in the Mishnah, the original rules): Urine is forbidden as long as it can wet; if it is absorbed or dried, it is permitted.

1. Suggestion: The case of absorbed urine is like dried excrement; there is no trace of it; but if there is a trace of it, it is forbidden, even though it cannot wet.

2. Objection: It also says that urine is forbidden as long as it can wet – we should infer, if [it cannot wet, but just] there is a trace of it, it is permitted!

(e) Conclusion: The inferences contradict each other, we cannot determine from the Beraisa which is correct.

You get the picture.

What amazed me, and then amused me, and then enraged me, was that a whack of my (and my husband’s) compound earnings have funded studying this study of shit. Literally. It’s just unreal.

Before anyone starts hammering me with death threats for dissing ancient texts, I want to spell something out very clearly. I am all for studying the Bible, the Mishnah, Gemara, Kabbalah, Prophets, Megillot and the Chapters of the Fathers. I am an unapologetic Jew: plonk me anywhere in the world and I’ll seek out a synagogue and happily pray along with my people. But that doesn’t mean I have to pay for others to pray.

Remember: the sane secular in Israel (and the shrinking group of sane religious) work and pay pretty punitive taxes. We also go to the army; we send our kids to the army; some of them get hurt.

The ultra-Orthodox sit for lifetimes studying Talmud, funded by me. They don’t wear their tsitsits (prayer fringes) into tanks, they don’t fly planes, they don’t march for months doing what soldiers do. The closest they get to the army is sending our kids to the front line; zealous men in black coats swing our coalition; they sign off on military agenda for our land.

In the 2023 crazy state budget in the getting-holier State of Israel, 484 billion shekels were earmarked to keep the country on track. About 300 billion shekels of that comes from the upstanding citizens who work and pay their taxes; they are mostly secular, helped by the Religious Lite. Billions of our taxes are funneled to yeshivot (religious places of study). Married bochers (men in yeshivot) in big black hats will receive another 125 million shekels this year – that’s on top of the stipends they already receive. To sit all day – for years, forever! – studying whether one can say the Shema while wet.

Now it’s true, there’s plenty to study: the Talmud suggests that if your heart sees your ‘nakedness’, this is plainly no good; cloudy water might pass muster. If you kick up the bath to make it bubbly, is a Jacuzzi-like mikveh (ritual bath) good for slinging a Shema? Can your heel see your nakedness as you pray? Can your heel touch your nakedness? (Really? Your heel can touch you there? The rabbis, it appears, were advanced yogis.)

Devotees of the daily daf study when spit can annul shit, and if you say the Shema when your shoe covers a pit of it (presumably without spit)? The answer, if you’re curious, is yes, but not if said shoe touches the muck. (No one, unless I missed it, wonders what happens when gunge pre-hardens into earthenware proportions.)

No one is paying me to memorise these regulations and I admit I skipped the deliberations on when urine constitutes urine, and if a bloke having his morning widdle can pop off a prayer in situ, if a bed separates the pisser from the pot. What does that even mean? Does he waterfall the contents of his kidneys’ contents over the bed? The mind just blanks.

At times, I am not ashamed to admit, I debated dumping the daf.

Perhaps becoming a Buddhist is an easier track to Nirvana.

The thing is, and I get it, you have to know the context. It’s like studying Shakespeare: you need to understand the position of Jews in Elizabethan England (there weren’t any) to fully grasp the “Hath not a Jew eyes?” rant. It helps to know Shakespeare’s dark lady love might have been a hidden Jewess. Context is always key.

I understand context; I know that’s true. And yet.

While Elizabethan housewives regularly climbed the steps to the second floor of their wattle and daubs, opened the window wide and flung out the contents of the household chamber pots onto the street (and sometimes the heads) below, scholars of early modern texts don’t spend a lifetime debating the durability of the constituents that splashed down from each home. Romeo must have relieved himself somewhere before Juliet awoke begging him not to be gone, but we are spared the details.

What is it with the Talmud and the toilet? In an effort to come to terms with this oddity I cast my mind deep into my own, a creamy white beauty on a gray tiled bathroom floor, and I came up with my husband.

I’ve already mentioned that my husband, so very sadly for me, is long dead. Martin died 10 years, four months and 29 days ago, as I type these words; that’s a lot of lonely hours.

My darling was 64 when his once-so-beautiful body crumpled and swelled; death from cancer is not a pretty sight. But oh, he’d had his glory days – when he knocked on my door some 30 years earlier I’d opened it to find Paul McCartney standing there, wanting to take me out for dinner. Only a handsomer version of the handsomest Beatle.

It was 1984, on a balmy July Jerusalem evening; Climate Change wasn’t even a concept yet. Martin smiled at me, and I became an Ella Fitzgerald song; I hurled myself, body and soul, into his clear brown eyes and in one nano-second, he morphed into my blood and my skin.

Martin just got more drop-dead gorgeous as the years rolled by. “You’re not a man,” I used to say to him, in times of tenderness. “You’re a miracle.” Martin could do carpentry and cryptic crosswords, he could sing and cook and keep our finances growing. He baked our daily bread and made granola from nuts he picked from our tree and cracked in the kitchen and then brushed to remove residual shells. He loved to garden and he loved to play golf and he loved his work and his kids and hanging with family and friends. But more than anything else he loved me.

And my, oh my, I loved him back. Sometimes, when I encountered a gift resting under my pillow at night, or woke to the seductive joy of hot bread baking for breakfast, I would try to articulate my joy. “You are too nice for one person,” I would sigh. “You should have been twins.”

“It’s not that I love you, Mart,” I would coo, riffing on Wuthering Heights as we snuggled up (Talmudic-ly naked), each night. “It’s that I AM you.”

It got to the point that I wanted only to breathe in air that he’d breathed out. We were married before cell-phones killed conversation at home, before each day’s drama is jerkily related during traffic jams or in supermarket queues. In the early days of our lives together we hardly spoke from morning till night; I kept up a running conversation in my head of what I’d tell him at dinner. He had a job so secret that if I told you, I’d have to kill you; it took him away for about a week a month. So we seemed always on honeymoon. We were never too frazzled for romance because separation always hung in the hallway. Tomorrow we wouldn’t have the chance.

And who could be too tired for someone who slings you sonnets for birthdays, and every anniversary? Martin was that rare sort of man who mastered (sort of) Iambic Pentameter to say “another year has passed and you’re still the one I run to, you’re still the one I kiss goodni-i-i-ight.” The presents that popped up under the pillow – just because – included yummy chocolates that we’d eat in interesting ways. He brought me flowers for Shabbat. He sent red roses on Valentine’s Day, with cards cut out of newspapers proclaiming “From your Secret Admirer.”

My soul snuggled in his for almost three decades, and the going was good and getting better. And then he got cancer. Pancreatic.

By Pam Peled

Pam Peled is a journalist and lecturer in English literature, and writes the Letter from Israel column in Jewish Renaissance magazine. She has lived in Israel for almost 50 years, so it’s safe to say her Zionist credentials stand up to scrutiny. Want to read more? The entire book is available on Amazon: https://a.co/bFCZZ3Q

This article has been reprinted by kind permission from the Jerusalem Report.