Daf Yomi as a Writing Practice
How starting my day with a page of Talmud has made me a more consistent writer
When I really started digging into this project, I decided to start Daf Yomi, a seven year regimen that you can jump into at any time, in which you learn one page of the Oral Torah, and it’s commentaries, a day. At the end of the seven years, you will have read each page—at which point, I imagine, many people start the cycle all over again because this is some very dense stuff.
It’s also sometimes very complicated to read Bronze Age thought from these early years of the twenty first century, particularly when it comes to women. If you want to see what I mean, I give you the incomparable Miriam Anzovin, whose irreverent takes are not where I get my learning, but are where I find some humor on the days when the tractate confounds me a little. Warning: this borders on being “not safe for work.”
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
We’ve just finished Tractate Sotah, which is almost entirely about a pretty horrific ceremony a woman had to go through to prove her innocence if her husband accused her of adultery. I will spare you the details, but one take-away is that I am clearly much happier being a Jew in the rabbinic era than I would have been in the Temple era. But I’m not here to talk about the theology. Instead, I want to talk about the discipline.
During the month and a half we were reading Sotah, I very often did not want to start my day with the daf. I would make excuses not to do it, and then have to talk myself out of those excuses. After a few days, I realized that this was exactly the same as the way I make excuses not to write, but because there isn’t any real expectation that I’ll write every day, I often don’t bother to talk myself out of those excuses. The idea of writing would make me uncomfortable (as it often does, particularly when I’m at the most productive part of the process: writing badly to get to the place where I can write well), I would just let the excuses buy me a morning away from my computer. But by recognizing this pattern when I tried to give myself ways to avoid reading the daf, I’ve been able to see those excuses not to write as what they are: avoidance, rather than reason. As a result, I’ve had a lot more good writing mornings. (Nonetheless, I’m still glad we’re out of Sotah, even if only to go on to Gitten, which is all about divorce.)
How do you defeat your excuses, writer friends?