by dan pine
staff writer
Over the span of Jewish history, Talmud study has been called many things. However, Rabbi Judith Z. Abrams is probably the first person ever to describe it as “a hoot and a holler.”
Get the Houston-based rabbi talking about Talmud, and in no time she’s busting out with her explosive laugh. That’s how much she loves the study of Judaism’s seminal storehouse of law and lore.
Abrams will bring her Talmud rodeo to the Bay Area when she spends a Shabbat weekend in residence at San Francisco’s Congregation Sherith Israel, April 20-21 for the annual Rabbi Martin S. Weiner Lecture.. She’s calling her two days of lectures and study “Talmud with a Texas Twang.”
Actually, Abrams doesn’t have a twang. She’s a native of Pittsburgh, Pa., though she’s called Houston home since 1985. These days she runs Maqom (Hebrew for “place”), an online Talmud study group she founded more than a decade ago.
“People have this view of Talmud,” she says, “that it’s serious study with this deep intensity. But it’s this wonderful, fabulous, joy-filled experience. It’s like being at a cocktail party with 500 years worth of the greatest people that ever lived.”
Abrams says Maqom is especially geared for Jews with little or no background in Talmud. No Hebrew or Aramaic required: Her students read the famed Adin Steinsaltz English-edition Talmud.
“It’s better to read it in the original,” she adds, “but you’d be surprised how much you can get, especially if your teacher can guide you, out of just the English.”
That might not always have been true for Abrams herself, who recalls not being thrilled with Talmud study when she was a student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion back in the early 1980s.
Not until her ordination as a Reform rabbi did she turn back to the sources. “It was the first time I’d been out of school,” she says. “I realized I was going to asphyxiate intellectually if I didn’t start learning something.”
Fortunately a local Orthodox rabbi was willing to allow her –– a woman, and a rabbi, yet –– to join his Talmud study sessions, which ran five days a week. “When you do it on that constant basis,” she recalls, “you learn the rhythm, the vocabulary, then you’re hooked.”
The Talmud is best known as a series of legal volumes, but Abrams attests to its universal, almost magical, themes. As an example of the text’s flights of Judaic fancy, Abrams cites the admonition always to drink an odd number of glasses of wine; drinking an even number, one might be susceptible to any demons and dybbuks lurking about.
In addition to running Maqom, Abrams further spread the good word of Talmud by commissioning a musical. Titled “A Talmud Tale,” the work premiered in Houston last year.
What’s it like? Let’s just say Rashi and Rabbi Akivah get to sing and dance before the final curtain falls.
Abrams is also mother to three children, ages 13 to 18. She says it’s too early to know if any of them are budding talmudic scholars, but a mother can dream, can’t she?
Even if her children don’t end up yeshiva bochers, the rabbi still plans on devoting the rest of her career to roping Jews into Talmud study.
Says Abrams, “It’s the most fun you can have looking at a piece of paper.”
Rabbi Judith Z. Abrams will be in residence Friday and Saturday, April 20-21, at Congregation Sherith Israel, 2266 California St., S.F. Information: (415) 346-1720. Maqom can be found online at www.maqom.com.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California