100 Years Since Announcement Of Daf Yomi Initiative: A Historic Appreciation

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — On the 9th of Elul 5683 (1923), exactly 100 years ago, Rabbi Meir Shapiro stood up to speak at the Knessiah Gedolah which took place in Vienna. An air of expectancy rippled around the room as he rose to speak. The 36-year-old rabbi had a warm, charismatic personality, a sharp wit, and was a world renowned speaker. He had served as rabbi in various cities across Poland and Galicia, including Piotrkov and Lublin, and was also actively involved in Agudath Israel as well as in promoting the needs of the Jews in Poland’s Sejm (parliament).

At this point, however, Rabbi Shapiro suggested an innovation, a bold, hitherto untried plan to unite world Jewry around study of the Daf Yomi, one folio a day of the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbi Meir used a statement by Rabbi Akiva to explain his idea.

Tossed into a stormy sea when his ship was wrecked, Rabbi Akiva was given up for lost. This is how he later described his miraculous rescue to Rabbi Gamaliel: “A Daf (plank) from the ship suddenly appeared as a salvation, and I just let the waves pass over me.” (Yevamot 121a)

Rabbi Shapiro cleverly explained the significance of this undertaking by playing on the word Daf to refer to the Daf Yomi: “A daf is the instrument of our survival in the stormy seas of today. If we cling to it faithfully, all the waves of tribulation will but pass over us.”

Rabbi Shapiro vividly described his vision of how the Daf Yomi could unite world Jewry:

“A Jew travels by boat and takes a tractate of Berakhot in his arm. He travels for 15 days from Eretz Israel to America, and each day towards evening he opens the Gemara and studies the daf. When he arrives in America, he enters a Beit Midrash in New York and finds Jews studying the very same page that he studied that day, which allows him to happily join their study group. . . . Another Jew leaves the United States and travels to Brazil. He returns to the Beit Midrash and finds people immersed in the very page that he studied that day. Can there be a greater unity of hearts than this?”

It was not easy to imagine this vision playing out at the time. Any new idea in a highly conservative religious leadership is viewed with suspicion. Would the Daf Yomi adumbrate the intellectual level of study due to the size of the daily requirement? Would the daf catch on for lay Jews or in yeshivas? How many people had access to gemaras to study?  At the time, Jews worldwide were running away from the study of Talmud in droves, ensnared by ideologies which swept the world during the first half of the 20th century. It was unclear whether any of them would adopt such a regimen.

Even after the Gerer Rebbe took a Gemara on the first day of Rosh Hashana 5684 (the first day of Daf Yomi study) and studied the first folio of Brachos, it was far from certain that the daf could become a worldwide enterprise. Some rabbis, including Rav Chaim Elazar of Munkatch, opposed the initiative, arguing that no sugya stops at the end of a daf and people would always be stuck in the middle of a subject.

Rabbi Shapiro himself only merited to see one siyum (conclusion) of the entire Talmud – celebrated by thousands with great fanfare in 1931. By the second siyum he was dead, and by the third – which occurred in 1946-  most of European Jewry was dead, including a vast majority of those that had studied the daf before the war.

A few modest siyumim were held in various places around the world, including one at the DP camp in Feldafing. At this point there were probably only a few thousand people studying the daf around the world.

In the US, the daf took a long time to gain popularity. In 1968 at the Beis Yaakov of Boro Park, only two or three hundred people showed up. But 2,000 came to the Manhattan Center in 1975, where the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah permanently dedicated the siyum to the 6 million killed in the Holocaust.

Shortly after the 1982 siyum at the Felt Forum in NY where there were 5,000 attendees, R. Moshe Sherer announced he wanted to book Madison Square Garden for 1990. The Agudah put down a non-refundable deposit 2.5 years in advance, and people were nervous it would be a waste of money. But 20,000 people showed up, filling the arena to capacity. By 1997, they had to get the Nassau Coliseum as well; now the total in attendance was 45,000 (and these are just the NY area siyumim). 92,000 people came to MetLife Stadium in 2012 – and now in 2020 there were again that number at MetLife and 20,000 more at the Barclays Center. It might be the largest Jewish gathering in America. And there were Daf Yomi celebrations and siyumim all over the world. It’s estimated that 350,000 people participated in a Daf Yomi siyum worldwide.

All this is testimony to the remarkable success of Rav Meir Shapiro’s dream. Aided by the numerous types of gemaras with translations, explanations and annotations, the daf is now accessible to practically anyone – and hundreds of thousands all around the world are attached and devoted to it, cannot go a day without the daily study. One hundred years on, even Rabbi Shapiro would have been stunned by the vibrancy of his initiative, which encompasses Jews of all walks of life, all religious affiliations, with even thousands of women joining daily study groups and completing tractates.

The miracle of worldwide united Torah study is possibly the most exciting, compelling and unifying aspect of a nation still scattered geographically over five continents and riven with disagreements and disputes over practically every other issue. It is truly the Daf of Rabbi Akiva, having survived the Holocaust, the subsequent attacks on orthodoxy and the temptations of the modern hi-tech culture. May we soon merit to greet Moshiach with our mutual study of the daf.