The first elephant I wanted to catch was actually a pretty easy target: What did other mitzvot did people feel should be added to the list?  Teaching my son(s) Frisbee was my personal favorite (it is a healthy sport!), but I was sure other people had different, possibly better ideas.   So I included the question on the survey and received a wide variety of answers.    Of course, as with all open ended questions, it was too hard to just put on an excel sheet, so I decided I would capture this particular pachyderm with a tag cloud.

For those of you who do not know what a tag cloud, here’s a brief explanation.  A tag cloud is a graphic display of of text which uses relative size to rank the importance of words, much the same way Egyptian art pictured the Pharoah as much bigger than his  subjects.  I took all the answers and categorized them, fed them into a tag cloud maker and got the following graphic:

 Midot, that is, moral behavior, was the clear winner.   It included suggestions that ranged from “respect other people” to “be a mentsch” and few other choice examples.  Of course, I feel that this was inherent in teaching Torah — like Hillel told the impatient man “That which you hate, do not do to your friend – this is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary.  Now go and learn.”

If a father isn’t  teaching that to his son, he’s just not teaching Torah.  I won’t get into analysis, here, but let’s just say I am very happy people put midot at the top of the list as an integral part of our legacy to our kids.

With the next set of questions though, my elephant hunt really went underway.  Where were the mothers and daughters?  How did we manage to leave them out of the list all these years? And how would we reframe the list now?

The first question in the set was: What should fathers teach their daughters?  The answers were as follows:
The most common answer (given by both men and women) was that fathers have the same obligations to their daughters as to their sons.  Some people took one or more of the items from the list and made them the key responsibility  (teaching Torah, teaching a trade).  Others added new responsibilities reflecting contemporary life skills.

The second question was: What should mothers teach their daughters?  The answers here were:
Here Torah was the most common answer, with “Same as sons” in second place (just the opposite of set of answers to the previous question.)  But also showing up on the list — though not as frequently — were ‘Parenting,’ ‘Self-Respect.’   and less often, ‘Self-Defense’ and ‘Understanding Men.’

Finally, I asked the big question.  If the list were expanded to include mothers (much more common in today’s world):  What are the mothers’ obligations to their sons?  Here are the answers:

On the one hand, the popular response was the same obligations as the father.  But neck-in-neck to that was housework, followed by  ‘Torah,’ ‘Derekh-Eretz’ and ‘Respecting-your-Wife.’

One interesting point is that the idea of respect for husband/wife showed up more prominently in the list of  the mother’s obligations, not fathers.  In teh father’s new list, the closest was teaching daughters to understand men.

I leave the interpretations up to you.

The End of the Hunt

I began with the idea that the list in Kiddushin was not complete, and from the survey responses I received, so did everyone else.  I was also curious as to how including women in the list would change it.  But could the responses be acceptable to an observant Jew like me?  Was I setting myself – and anyone else – up?  We saw the list change over time but could it change so much that we could add women to it?

I believe the answer is yes.

In Kiddushin, the list is meant to show the difference between those who are commanded to observe a mitzvah and those who are not.   The guiding principle is: one who observes because he is following God’s commandment is greater than on who observes because he feels like it.  A commonly held interpretation is that one who is commanded gets a reward, and one who isn’t commanded doesn’t    illustrated by the sages’ story of Dama ben Netinah, a non-Jew who is handsomely rewarded for honoring his father.  If one who  is not specifically obligated  to observe  is rewarded, the sages go on to say, how much more so would one be rewarded when he is  obligated!

But like the list he principle itself  has evolved.

In its earliest incarnation, it became a reason for excluding those who do the mitzvah without being oblgated.  Unfortunately, elements of that interpretation still remain to this day.  Later, it developed into an attitude of tolerance:”No, it’s not a mitzvah for you, but if you do it, well, we won’t necessarily stop you.”

For me it was always psychology.  One who observes out of personal desire or ‘me-too’ism may stop observing when the attraction fades.  One who observes because s/he  is commanded, however,  will do it because s/he has to.  Based on that that I came up with a new interpretation (which I gratefully discovered later was actually a teshuvah)

This interpretation says that when you take upon yourself a mitzvah as a mitzvah, then you are as obligated as if you, yourself, were commanded.  And today, we live in a time when men and women equally take upon themselves the commitment of participating in the community and society then for everyone the mitzvah of raising a child is an obligation – a mitzvah.  Therefore, there are no real exclusions from who is responsible for these basic parenting requirements.  Today, men and women are equally obligated to teach their sons and daughters those skills that are on the evolving list.

It’s a Man’s World.  Not!

The conclusion –we are all obligated to teach all our children what they need to know to stay safe, to succeed and to live Jewish lives. Fathers and mothers share this responsibility equally,  whichever way they can.   And even if it does take a village to raise a child, the mitzvah is for the parent(s)  – man and/or woman.

Although our sages wrote this list in their time, they wrote it for all time, but like Talmud itself, it was not meant to be left alone.  It was a starting point.  In every generation we need to examine it anew and reframe it to accomplish the same ends they intended in ways relevant to us for our time.

That’s the Talmudic way.

Thanks to Evan Winiker who showed me the graphic potential in a page of Talmud.

Talmud is the original “open-source” platform.
Talmud is not Gemara.  Gemara denotes finality, a closed book.  Talmud is not closed, and it’s certainly not a book.
Talmud is a verb, not a noun.

We are Talmud, a living, open conversation, a flow of ideas that began thousands of years ago —  before words  were chiseled on stone or put topaper — and will probably continue to flow thousands of years into the future.

We all have the opportunity to be part of that flow.

We will touch on classic scenarios, Mishnaic sources, Talmudic explanations, conversations.   We will try to understand the people who took part in these conversations, “get into their heads” and learn to see the world through their eyes.  But we willalso try to see what they say through our eyes, too.

These, and other elements will accompany us as we travel along.

I invite you to “Talmud” with me and others on this site.  Read and learn.  Add and others learn with you.

So come, join the flow.

Rabbi Sidney Slivko,
Jerusalem, Israel

Kfar Menachem is one of the more established kibbutzim of the Shomer Hatzair group.  Its members were of Bulgarian or Polish extraction. I was not familiar with their customs, and did not know Hebrew or the Yiddish that some of them spoke.  They were a hard-working people who kept to themselves, decisive and action-oriented. They expected us, the youth group, to bear our share of work, as well as to receive the basic amenities that were available to all.  As youths, we were expected to work only half a day, and study Hebrew and other subjects the rest of the day.  Religion was kept in the background; we were all Jews, but were not expected to keep to strict religious traditions.  Hard and productive work was our motto. We were Jews in a Jewish land, free men and women, and did not have to appease the Moslem majority or be subjected to their rule of fear.  It was a heady feeling and it took some time getting used to.

The Bavli group was assigned an instructor. Haim, a Canadian, was a veteran member of the kibbutz and became our mentor and counselor.  He lived alone in a small round tower at the entrance to the kibbutz that used to be the guard house.  He was kind and unassuming, and I felt very comfortable with him. Sometimes he smiled to himself at our enthusiasm for the new and exciting things, and at our wonderment at this new world.  He talked to each one of us individually probing our reactions to kibbutz living.  After these talks, we felt more at home.  He explained some aspects of Kfar Menachem and its members, of which we were unaware.  Most of the kibbutz members had either been in a Nazi concentration camp, or had relatives who were exterminated in one.  In Bagdad during the war, my father had faithfully listened to the news from the BBC at nine o’clock every night, and I had listened with him.  I had joined in the excitement when the British and the Allies won a victory and was filled with anxiety when they lost.  But there was not an inkling of the extent of the holocaust and the methodical extermination of the Jews of Europe. When Haim told us about those horrible deeds, we began to understand why these people were so withdrawn and uncommunicative.

We knew that the War of Independence had been over for a year and a half, and a cease fire agreement existed between us and our neighbors.  But we also knew the Arab mentality, and that an agreement would not hold them back if they decided it was in their interest to attack.  They were probably still full of hatred, just waiting patiently for Israel to show a sign of weakness.  Arab infiltrators (fedayeen) attempting to break in at night was a common occurrence.  The kibbutz members considered them dangerous pests whose main purpose was to steal what they could, and kill those who got in their way. That a person could do such a thing was completely against the kibbutz doctrines of cooperation, mutual respect for property, and hard work.  In Israel, the Jews fought back bravely, and considered it a foregone conclusion that they would overcome their enemy.  It brought up in me a deep feeling of admiration for these people, some of whom had only a few years ago been released from Nazi concentration camps, and I wished so much to emulate them.

Back in Bagdad, I had been used to the policy of appeasement that was advocated by the community leaders, and it had seemed a natural way of living.  Even though many youths had tried to voice opposition to the attempts of the Jewish community to placate the ruling Muslim classes with flattery, gifts and bribes, we were always brought down to earth by our elders.  Usually, my grandfather would ask to speak to me, and explain that I was endangering the safety of my family, and the rest of the community, and always came up with very persuasive arguments.

Since we had started a new life in a new country, Haim suggested we Hebraize our names.  To each one of us, he suggested a Hebrew first name; family names he left alone.  My first name, Fahim, he suggested I change to Peretz.  He told me that it was the name of a popular Sephardic writer. That was the first time I came up against the term Sephardic, and wondered why there was so much emphasis on this label for a Jew whose ancestors came from Spain, North Africa, the Arab and Muslim countries (or basically, non-Ashkenazi).  Ashkenazi Jews were considered to be more educated and cultured.  In Bagdad, there were rich Jews and poor Jews, educated and uneducated, well-mannered and ill-mannered, but they were all Iraqi Jews. Here, Jews were stereotyped by their country of origin.  On every form we had filled out, we had to state our country of origin, place of birth, date of aliya (immigration to Israel) and parent’s names.  Why this emphasis? Was it not enough that we were judged by the quality of our work, level of intelligence, and social behavior?

I soon noticed that those youths of East European origin, the Ashkenazis, integrated into kibbutz life so easily and rapidly, even those who spoke only Yiddish and did not know Hebrew.  They were not brought in groups from a certain country, as we were; but individually.  At work, they worked side by side with a veteran member, and it was soon apparent that they felt more comfortable with each other than they felt with us, the Bavli group.  They sat together in the dining room hall and seemed to have a lot to talk about.  This did not bother me since I myself did not feel at ease with the veteran members.  It was only when somebody would ask me seriously if I had worn shoes in Bagdad and whether we had lived in tents that I began to wonder whether maybe these people were right.  Even though we did wear shoes and lived in houses, we might have been living under a misapprehension; that our own cultural values and traditions were primitive and we, as a Jewish community in an Arab world, were out of touch with the modern world.

The Bavli group worked during the mornings and took Hebrew lessons in the afternoons.  In the evening, after dinner in the communal dining hall, we sat with the rest of the kibbutz and listened to discussions about work assignments, work ethics and daily problems.  Work assignments were handed out by the labor supervisor, who also worked side by side with the rest of us.  Because of my good physical condition I was assigned to work with a dour old man to carry heavy sacks of grain from a grain silo to a tractor wagon.  I don’t remember him saying a word to me except to grunt and gesture with his head.  Eventually I caught on to what he wanted me to do, and I think he even started to like me a bit.  Once I got the hang of it, it wasn’t really too hard.  The sacks were stacked on the wagon at almost my height.  I had to balance one on my back and walk over to the platform and swing it over, then come back for more.

After lunch break I joined my group for Hebrew lessons and we spent the rest of the afternoon studying Hebrew and learning about our adopted country. The evenings were spent dancing the hora and talking, sometimes through the night.  There wasn’t much time left to feel homesick.

The Iraqi girls in our group behaved and dressed differently than the girls I had known in Bagdad.  They dressed in short pants and open-necked shirts, touched and hugged boys in public whenever they felt like it.  They did men’s work as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  This was a great change in attitude, in conformity with the new social order. The members of our group, with the exception of me and a few others, had been members of the Tnou’ah in Bagdad.  They had trained with weapons and were ready to defend other Jews if there was another progrom, as had happened in 1941 in Bagdad.  The boys and girls of the Tnoua were taught different standards; they learnt to defend themselves by fighting back, a fact that was considered in complete disregard of the strict admonitions of our Iraqi Jewish elders.  They were part of the new Israel, even back then in Bagdad.  One boy and me were strangers to this kind of behavior; we were still part of the old values we had left behind.  At first, we would sit on the benches against the wall and watch the others dance and be merry.  Then one of the girls from the group, Sarah, became friendly towards me and tried to draw me in to their circle; I was grateful to her and responded gladly.

Sarah was self-confident and acted as if she was on the same level as the boys.  I was trying to get used to this new situation, never having touched a girl before, except by chance when brushing against somebody in a crowd, or when learning to dance.  Even then it was a fleeting moment of ecstasy that passed quickly.  Deep down I envied those boys who felt comfortable holding hands with a girl as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  There was a lot to learn.

For the next month the grain silo kept me busy.  Apparently, the old man liked my work and had asked the member in charge of work assignments to keep me on.  He even told me his name, Zvi, and smiled crookedly, as if it hurt.

During some afternoons our group would go on tours of the kibbutz.  I liked the people and their cooperative way of working and sharing.  A man was judged by how good he was at his work, and that was all.  No more being judged by the ranking of your parents and family and their bank balance.  The more efficiently you worked, the more respect you gained; it was as simple as that.  However, that did not entitle you to more privileges.  The principle was: Each according to his or her needs. Somebody in poor health would be assigned to light work and get more leisure time, but still receive the same food and housing.  There weren’t too many amenities.  Chocolate was scarce and we, the young, received two bars for the month, whereas the older members received only one, or not even that.  One small tube of Israeli toothpaste a month was sufficient, if not, you had to trade with your friends and exchange your chocolate or cigarettes. Luckily, I did not smoke and could trade cigarettes for chocolate.

The kibbutz was situated on high ground overlooking fields of grain and vegetables.  The buildings of the kibbutz, the housing, chicken coops and workshops, were surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence that was flooded by bright floodlights at night.  We were told that Arab infiltrators were constantly attempting to penetrate the fence to steal or kill.  One night, after being assigned to guard duty, I sat with another boy behind a low ridge overlooking the lighted fence, holding a gun I did not really know how to use, watching for infiltrators.  I must have dozed off, because there was somebody shaking me and smiling at me. It was the guard supervisor and he told me that it was forbidden to go to sleep on guard duty.  I could see that he sympathized with me, and he knew that I wasn’t used to staying up at night, but security could not be relaxed.  The next night I was put on the milk run.