Tiptoe Through the Talmud with Miriam Anzovin

Miriam Anzovin Rabbinic Judaism has an oral tradition of teachings, traditions, rules, laws, however you want to put it, that were transmitted, at least this is how it's explained, transmitted generation to generation verbally. And then what happened is the Roman Empire, unfortunately for everybody. And I don't care that they make nice roads. I don't care.

Dan Beecher But- Well, what about the aqueducts? The aqueducts. I don't care. I don't care. You know what?

Dan McClellan What else have they done for us? Yeah.

Miriam Anzovin What have they done? They stole our menorah. Okay, that was the least of what they did. And am I going to the Vatican to get it out of the basement? I will. For anyone who wants to join me on that highly illegal heist.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Man, I'm excited. We got a great guest today. I'm very pleased. I'm going to learn a lot of words that I don't actually know- Yes ... and figure out what the heck they mean, because they're not in my language. So Dan, why don't you introduce our guest? Happily.

Dan McClellan Today, we're going to be talking with Miriam Anzovin, who is on TikTok, is on social media, is an artist, is a creator across a number of different channels, and in a number of different media. I know her from her very popular Daf reaction videos on TikTok, but she does so much more than that. So welcome to the show, Miriam. How are you doing today?

Miriam Anzovin I am so delighted to be here. Shalom, friends, to anybody listening who might be my follower, but to everybody else who is a fan of these two wonderful Dans and Dan's TikTok account, I am just delighted to be here as a fellow fan. So thank you so much for having me. Hooray.

Dan McClellan Well, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. We were very excited to have the opportunity to talk to you a little bit today about things like the Talmud and- Yes ... the representation of women within the Talmud. But I think before we get into that, we want to hear a little bit more about your backstory so we can understand how you're coming at the Talmud and its representation of women, and your experience on social media. And you were mentioning before we got started here that you were producing, editing, hosting a podcast for a community, a Jewish community in the Boston area, before they decided to corporatize and kick things over to a CEO, and you were left in the wind, which then led to what?

Miriam Anzovin It led to me having all of this creative Jewish energy and nowhere to put it, because in addition to hosting that podcast, The Vibe of the Tribe, rest in peace- ... I also did a lot of graphic design. I designed haggadot. I did infographics about Jewish ideas and holidays, and anything that I found fascinating about Jewishness, Jewish culture, I was able to create. I also wrote a series of comedic articles, which were sort of the forebearer, if you will, of what I do now in video format, in Daf Reactions and the other funny yet heartfelt Jewish content I create for social media. But yeah, so what happened was I had all this energy, and I had nowhere to put it, nowhere to put all these Jewish thoughts in my head. And I had been lurking on TikTok for two years over the course of the pandemic. I'm talking right now about December 2021, about two years. And I had been learning the Talmud. I had been doing Daf Yomi since January 5th of 2020. So again, been almost two years of that. And I thought to myself, well, TikTok is a place where I learned so many incredible things about things I never knew, how other people live across the world, what their faith traditions might be like, their interests, their hobbies. Incredible things that were really eye-opening to me is what I found on TikTok, and I also found a lot of humor that really supported me during that dark, dark time. So I thought, okay, I'll make some reaction videos. It'll be like a play on reaction videos, a little bit of a play on beauty influencer kind of aesthetic, which is why I locked myself into a full face of makeup every time I record now. That was my mistake. But at the beginning, I was like, "No one's going to see this anyway, so this is just me having fun." Maybe five to 10 people who are similar to me in a lot of respects, maybe fellow millennials, fellow women who are learning the Talmud for the first time, might also be wrestling and struggling with some of the ideas I was encountering, and trying to rectify that with our current modern mode of thinking. And I was like, okay, I will make some reaction videos, and those people may get it. And I remember the first one I did was a natural fit because it was a story about someone who we would define now as a Karen. And I said, "Oh, this is perfect. This translates beautifully to social media. Let me just take this very old text, this very, very, very old story," but it fits perfectly into a modern internet paradigm, which I found as the work has progressed since that first video, has been the case quite often. It quite often lends itself, and I'm not the first person to have identified this idea. It lends itself well to being discussed online because, and I'm sure we'll get into more about this shortly, the Talmud, the way I describe it to people, it's very much like the internet. You have the Mishnah, which is a blog post, for example, and then you have the Gemara, which is the comment section, and arguments and discussions and fights happening in there. And anyone who has had a comment section or been in one, sometimes you find comments that are brilliant and enlightening, and sometimes you find ones that are just like, I would like to block this. So it's very akin to that, and it's also a very hyperlinked text In a way, before there was such a thing, before the advent of Sefaria.org, where I learn Talmud. They offer the full Talmud for free, which I salute them. They can't see me if they're listening to this, but if they're watching on YouTube, I salute you. And it really, shockingly perhaps to me at the time, because I didn't know, it was a natural fit to make videos about this. So a lot of things happened between then and now, but that's how I first began. That was the genesis, if you will, of Daf Reactions as a series.

Dan Beecher I'm going to jump in here because we've already gotten several of the words that I don't actually know. I've looked them up. I do know them, but I would love for you to explain to our listeners- Yes ... who may not have your particular background. Daf Yomi- Absolutely ... what is that? What are we talking here? Okay.

Miriam Anzovin Well, let me first start with a Mishnah, because there's two basic components of the Talmud, and you'll understand what the Talmud is when I explain the components. So, in Judaism, we have the Torah, the five books of Moses. You might know them as the five books of Moses. And in addition to that, however, Rabbinic Judaism has an oral tradition of teachings, traditions, rules, laws, however you want to put it, that were transmitted, at least this is how it's explained, transmitted generation to generation verbally. And then what happened is the Roman Empire, unfortunately for everybody. And I don't care that they make nice roads. I don't care.

Dan Beecher But- Well, what about the aqueducts? I don't care. The aqueducts. I don't care. You know what?

Dan McClellan What else have they done for us? Yeah.

Miriam Anzovin What have they done? They stole our menorah. Okay, that was the least of what they did. And am I going to the Vatican to get it out of the basement? I will, for anyone who wants to join me on that highly illegal heist. But so what happened was Rome, and because of the Roman takeover, and steamrolling of Judea, and the subsequent destruction of Judaism as it was at the time, surrounding entirely the physical land of Israel and surrounding the sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, this was the sort of basis around which all of Judaism was converged, right? The rabbis of that era, the community leaders of that era, had to figure out a way to preserve Judaism and preserve these teachings. And as part of that, they wrote down these oral traditions, and that is what the Mishnah is. And I believe that ended up being compiled around the year 200 CE. This is a little wiggly. I want to state right now that I am not an academic. So Dan, if you would like to interrupt me at any point and say, "Actually, it was a little bit more like this time period," please feel free. But then what happened after that? So we have that. But not everything in the Mishnah is entirely clear. A lot of it is not exactly comprehensible without additional context and additional discussion. And that is what we find in the Gemara, which is debate, discussion, and analysis of what is in the Mishnah and also what is in the Torah and the Tanakh, all the Hebrew Bible, I guess it's called, right? I only refer to it as the Tanakh, so I think that's what the whole thing as a entirety is called. But these are hundreds of rabbis called the Sages, talking over hundreds of years in multiple locations. So starts out in the historic land of Israel, and then they move to Babylonia, where that became the center of Jewish learning in exile. And there were these academies of learning, and a lot of these discussions that we encounter in the Gemara come from all these different rabbis or houses of study. It's not only Hillel and Shammai being two very well-known names. If you are a Jewish person, you know Hillel and Shammai as two opposing schools of thought, but Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, these schools, their disciples as well. So the Mishnah and the Gemara, plus additional commentary added over various years, added over time, including Rashi from the medieval period, a very, very important figure in understanding a lot of this and providing context, that is the Talmud in a little nutshell. Okay.

Dan Beecher So the Talmud, does it take the Tanakh, the Torah, as the jumping-off point, and then sort of go from there, or is it its own whole thing?

Miriam Anzovin It is interwoven. So let me say it this way. All these different sages, the rabbis, they are arguing, right? Is there agreement amongst them? Rarely, which is why it's so fascinating, because anyone who says that Judaism was a monolith, there was one way of thinking or being Jewish until the modern denominations, is just simply ridiculous. If you learn the Talmud, if that was the case, it wouldn't take so long to learn the whole thing. And that's what's brilliant about it, is I can agree with somebody and absolutely abhor the thoughts of somebody else, and I'm not alone. They also had those sorts of feelings. But in order to prove that Their interpretation or read on something was the correct, quote-unquote, correct one, or the accurate one, or the one that we were supposed to do. They would bring proof texts from the Tanakh. So in order to prove XYZ thing, they would bring a statement, bring a passuk, bring a line from the Torah, the Tanakh, and reference that. So in order to have their arguments have validity, they needed to bring in the written Torah in order to back up their assertions. And so when you go through the Mishnah and you go through the Gemara, you will see always a source text is being referenced, and either they are elucidating it, they are expanding upon this idea or clarifying it, or extrapolating, and this is when it gets a little sketchy, extrapolating one idea from another because of parallel words used in one place that they find in another, and thus they find a connection between the two. I will give a little example from the current tractate I'm studying, although now that I say that, I realize I haven't explained what a tractate is. So a tractate, a masechet, is a volume, I guess we would say, of the Talmud, and there are different ones for different subjects. Do they stay on topic? Rarely. So the first one that I learnt was Berakhot, which is ostensibly about blessings, but it's about a lot of other things in addition to that. So the current tractate I am learning right now is tractate Kidushin, which is about betrothal in marriage. And on the very first page of that masechet, that tractate, the very first daf, that's a page of Talmud, the discussion is how does one acquire a woman, right? And the ways to be acquired are multiple. One is a document, one is exchanging or giving her an item of a certain amount of money or value, and the third is sex. But the way they are discussing the word acquired has also to do, in their minds, they're connecting it to how a field was acquired in the biblical story of getting the Cave of Machpelah, the burial site in which is now Hebron. So they're like, you acquire a field, and you acquire a woman because these two kinds of wording, this parallel wording is taking place. Does that make me feel weird? Absolutely, and I'm sure we'll get into more of that. Why?

Dan Beecher What's weird about that? I know.

Miriam Anzovin Why would I feel weird about it?

Dan Beecher What's difficult about that? It's totes normal.

Miriam Anzovin I am an object. But to get to your earlier question about Daf Yomi, let me just explain that. That is a practice. It's only been 100 years of this practice. Actually, earlier this week was the anniversary of that. But it is the practice of learning the entire Babylonian Talmud. There's actually two. One is called the Jerusalem Talmud. It's the earlier one. It's not as fun, in my opinion. But the Babylonian one is when it really gets good. That's when you have all the demon content that I love so much. But it's the practice of learning one double-sided folio page of the Babylonian Talmud every single day. It's like a worldwide book club, and it's a seven-and-a-half-year cycle. Seven and a half years.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay. Yes. So we're not talking like this is the 30-day challenge or whatever. No. This is a commitment.

Miriam Anzovin And this is why when I see anyone online say, "Well, the Talmud says blah, blah, blah," and they make up something, or they take something very out of context, or they say something that is in there, but completely without the surrounding necessary information, and they say, "I have read the Talmud." And I'm like, "Really? What year are you on?" Yeah. Because I'm only halfway through. The halfway point is actually this coming Wednesday. I know this will probably come out after that, but this coming Wednesday to me is the halfway point. This current cycle began- Congratulations on your halfway. Thank you. The current cycle began on January 5th of 2020, so all of us who have been in this cycle began then.

Dan Beecher And that's the thing, people do it together. Yeah. Everybody dives in at the same time. Yeah. So if you miss it, you've got to wait seven years.

Miriam Anzovin Well, that's not entirely accurate.

Dan Beecher No, no, you're not allowed to. I know. I read about it. No. You're out.

Miriam Anzovin People can. In fact, I am honored to say that some people have started doing Daf Yomi because of my videos, which is mind-blowing to me. But they will continue on, after the end of this current cycle, they will have to continue to catch up on the tractates they missed- Right ... before they started going. So anyone can start at any time. There's nothing wrong with that at all. It just so happens that this idea of being all on the same page and being able to sort of be doing something that another Jew completely different than me around, across the world, who speaks a different language, who has a completely different life than I, but together we are meeting on this page every day for seven and a half years, and it's sort of like this fascinating collective experience. So not to take anything away from people who study Talmud in other ways. People spend years on just one tractate. There's all types of ways to study Talmud. This is just the way that I am doing. I- And so...

Dan Beecher Oh, go ahead, Dan.

Dan McClellan And this crosses, for lack of a better word, denominational boundaries? Yes. Like all different types of- Yes ... we have Orthodox, you have- Yes ... does that include the Hasidic, and other branches? It's something that everyone has kind of come together and said, "Let's try this out."

Miriam Anzovin Well, there are some people who dislike it for- I understand the reason. It is very complex material to get through. Really, really, really hard sometimes. Sometimes easier, sometimes less so depending on what's being discussed and who is being talked about, or is it a fun story? Is it really upsetting? Really depends on is it a complex set of laws? Yeah. All different types of content are within it, and I understand this reticence to devote only one day to a page because there is so much to be gotten out of these pages, more perhaps than one could get in a solitary day. So I understand this sort of pushback. In fact, when this practice was first introduced, it was like, "No, what? No, this is wrong. This is bad." So definitely there are the anti-Daf Yomi people. Yeah. But for a lot of people across different denominations, this has become an exciting thing, a unifying thing. And I say that because at the beginning, before the cycle began, when the previous cycle was coming to an end, and there's this massive party, the Siyum, after the completion, it was just like everyone was so hyped. And I remember so many social media groups popping up or had already existed. LGBTQ Talmud group stuff, Yomi groups, women's Talmud groups, Orthodox women's Talmud groups. Every single day I learn the Daf because I do not speak Aramaic. I know it is a fault. I do apologize. I listen to Rabbanit Michelle Farber. She has a podcast. She is an Orthodox woman, and she teaches this incredible podcast, Hadran, and I hear her in my ear speaking the Aramaic, and I read along, but I can't speak it, so I value that. But it really does cross so many different boundaries of so many different types of Jews, and for example, I myself am a secular atheist Jew, and I am doing Daf Yomi. Right.

Dan Beecher Does that- You know... Sorry. Go ahead, Dan. I just wanted to get at one thing, which is, you mentioned the podcast with a woman sort of expounding on it. When I did a bunch of research for this interview, I found a lot of people talking about Daf Yomi, and most of the ones that I found had significantly more beard than you have. So I'll just put it that way. They wore a different hat. And I'm wondering if you... I just don't think you look like the standard person who would be reacting to the Daf Yomi. I wonder, how has that been being a young... Our listeners can't see you, but you're very made up. You're very put together.

Miriam Anzovin Talk- This is my persona now.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly. So talk about that. The brand.

Dan McClellan The tyranny of the brand. Exactly.

Dan Beecher Talk about how people have reacted to that. Yes. All of that sort of thing.

Miriam Anzovin Yes, indeed. Well, firstly, so when I started creating these videos, and I really didn't think anybody would see them, I never expected to be the center of any type of controversy because no one was going to watch them except people like me, and who wouldn't care that I was a woman or wouldn't care anything about how I looked or that I don't dress according to the standards of modesty that I adhered to when I was an Orthodox person, which is covered up to the neckline, elbows covered, the whole thing. I am a secular person now, and I dress accordingly. So when people started first taking note of these videos, the pushback, the really, really overwhelming pushback, and it has taken me a really long time to sort of acclimate to this. Mm-hmm. If I am acclimated to it, really, I don't know if I am, having suddenly thousands of people with very strong opinions about me, and at first it was all negative, or not all negative, but widely negative. Mm-hmm. And there were several aspects to that negativity. The first is that I am not religious, and I'm an atheist, and in fact, I wrote an article on day two of doing Daf Yomi about why I felt it was important to do this, to learn Talmud, to learn Jewish texts, even if I wasn't believing at the time. I felt it was really, really vital, and I still do. It includes so much about how to understand Jewishness, Jewish identity, as a nation, and I don't mean a state, I mean a nation in diaspora. How to understand all of these things that I really deeply value about being Jewish, about being a Jewish person. So I thought it was really, really vital. So when people started to notice what I was doing, the negative responses were, "She is immodest, not only in her dress, but in her speech. She swears. She speaks like a millennial," because I am one. "How could she do this? She's making jokes about the sages." This is ironic considering the sages make a lot of jokes themselves about each other. And to anybody who does not believe me, please see the book, "Talmudic Insults and Curses." Highly recommend. I believe the author is Arthur Helft. Great book. Nice. Yeah. It just really gives perspective on the levity. That was also a factor they didn't like. You're making jokes. You're being comedic. You're not taking this seriously. This is for men to study in a yeshiva, in a set setting where it's sort of guarded. This text is guarded. It is gate kept very literally. Mm-hmm. And most people are pushed away from engaging with it. That has certainly changed before I started doing this. I don't want to take credit for this because so many women and people who are not men have worked very hard on opening those gates and doing this work. I am not I did not pave this way. I can only walk on this path because others have gone before me. But perhaps they didn't do it on social media in this way.

Dan Beecher With those porn elbows flying left and right. Exactly. It's very distracting.

Miriam Anzovin These scandalous elbows. Certainly not with the vocabulary that I happen to use in my videos. And there was this also like she doesn't believe, how dare she open the Talmud and talk about it, which is ironic considering people have less pushback about someone like me opening the Torah, and reading it, and studying it, which I have theories about why that is.

Dan McClellan That's peculiar.

Miriam Anzovin But we can... Yeah.

Dan McClellan I get a lot of that when I talk about the Bible. Yeah. People say, "You don't believe in it. Why are you even doing it?" Right. But my gender has never come up. Yeah. No one has ever said I don't have- That must be nice. Unfortunately, yeah. That's something that has never come up. But yeah- Yeah ... some people seem to think that if you approach this as a secular exercise or something- Yeah ... you have no business doing that, have no right to it. But that's- And many- ... that's odd that the Talmud would be considered more sacred, more set apart than the Torah.

Miriam Anzovin Well, I'll tell you my theory on that in a second. But I think the thing also that people would say to me is, "Women have made such progress in being Talmud scholars. How dare you come and make all their progress irrelevant?" Ah. You have basically... Yeah, I know. Which is like I'm not the Lorax. I don't speak for all women who learn Talmud. My reactions are my own. I never claim to teach Talmud. I am merely learning. This is a learning process. It's a project of personal learning that has become public, but it's about my own reactions to it, not me telling people what to believe.

Dan Beecher So you're wrong for doing it because you're a woman- Yeah ... and you're also wrong for doing it because you're making the other women look bad.

Miriam Anzovin I'm not the right type of woman. Yeah. Wow. There's a lot- I am a fraud ...

Dan Beecher of hoops that you have not jumped through in their eyes. Right.

Miriam Anzovin And yes, the fact that I wear makeup was indeed a thing because, oh, she's not serious. Oh, she's... And I actually heard this from some people. She's too pretty to learn with. Firstly, my terrible low self-esteem for the majority of my life says, "Oh, what? Really? Wow, thanks. Good to know." Yeah. But I always respond to this with, in the Talmud, there is a particular sage, Rabbi Yochanan, who is notoriously the best-looking human being, and he says it, the Talmud says it- ... everybody says it. It is a known fact. So I said, "How dare you? How dare you disrespect Rabbi Yochanan that way?"

Dan Beecher That's right. No. Okay.

Miriam Anzovin We can be attractive, but we have to be Rabbi Yochanan. That's the only one. Yeah. And actually, historically, I will just note there is a, I forget what era in which she lived, but there was this female Talmud scholar, Miriam Luria, and she was supposed to be very beautiful, and she taught behind a screen, so that she would not- Nobody would be... And I teach behind a screen, too. Not teach, but I react behind a screen. But it's a phone screen, which is different. Yeah. So that is about that piece of that. But to answer your question about why I think people get more irate with me about Talmud comedy versus Torah, people know the Torah, and if they know it as the Torah or the Bible or whatever it is, it is a known known. It is out there. People know what's in it. People have engaged with it. There has been Bible jokes since ever, since forever, literally. It seems more comfortable in a certain way because it's already out there, and you can't take it back. With Talmud, there has been such a sense of protection about it, and I understand why in some ways. Certain things are said in the Talmud that come from a place or written in a time when the Jews were being exiled, they were being persecuted, and they verbally, in these discussions which no one else was supposed to see, push back. And in their minds, this is a protest against their oppressors. So there are some unflattering things said about somebody who is often believed to be that Jesus. I will say, however, that those unflattering things have also been directed at me, so it's just going to be me- It's me and Jesus. And Shabtai Zvi. Yeah.

Dan Beecher So what we've learned about you so far is that you're very attractive and you're Jesus, so- Correct ... that's great.

Miriam Anzovin And I wonder, because we always see depictions of Jesus as gorge, and I think we know who to blame in art history for this. But I'm not on his level. I don't have his abs also. And I also don't want to talk too much about Jesus because that is not my wheelhouse. It's not my faith. I do have to address it when it comes up in the Daf, but there are things for which Jews were persecuted historically because Christians looked at the conversations in the Talmud, found some things that they found offensive, and edited the Talmud or punished people directly for it. And if you still to this day, if you go on TikTok, I did this before I first ever posted a video. I wanted to see if anyone else was doing this so I didn't step on anyone's toes, and I'm like, "Put the Talmud search into TikTok." It is all antisemitic stuff that is the same exact antisemitic stuff as they were saying a thousand years plus ago. Wow. Like literally has not changed. Which is also another reason why I find it very important to learn it, to be able to counter these narratives. But, so there's that self-defense aspect of gatekeeping the text. Mm-hmm. If nobody knows what's in it, we don't have to defend these things, which I don't have a problem with. I don't care what they said about the Romans. I really don't. Like I Do it up. Vent. But on the other hand, the Talmud represents a shift in power. It represents a shift of power from the Kohanim, the Kohain, familial, how do we say, genetic, I guess, leadership in Judea or in Israel before the destruction of the temple, and then that shifts. As the temple is destroyed, now the sages, now the rabbis are in charge, and they are in charge of defining what Judaism will be outside of the land of Israel or in the land of Israel under occupation. And therefore, the power shifts to them. And by kicking at that, what people think I am doing is kicking at that bedrock of modern rabbinic Judaism, which I'm not actually doing. That is more of a threat to some people than doing some light comedy about the Torah.

Dan McClellan It seems to me that one of the things the Talmud is doing is kind of mediating between the Torah and communities who are- Yes ... trying to live these things because- Yeah ... the Torah is very complex, it's self-contradictory in many ways. Yes. It does not provide answers to all possible questions.

Dan Beecher And so- Although, if your ox does fall in a hole, I keep telling you- Yeah ... you know what to do. You do.

Dan McClellan Very oddly specific and never relevant guidance. And so, you have the sages coming in and contemplating all the different ways you can take that ox- Mm-hmm ... the goring ox story and kind of extrapolate all these different principles out from it, and then that becomes kind of the locus of authority. Yeah. Is it that is closer to the people in their living of that religion, that this is actually- Yeah ... what we are, is kind of how we're engaging it more so than even the Torah itself?

Miriam Anzovin I think the sages are looking both backwards and forwards. They're looking backwards to a world that already was in the process of being demolished. So they're looking back and trying to figure out, how do we translate a prayer structure, for example, that at the time before them was about animal sacrifice? How do we pivot away from that and define prayer being a set of written-down prayers that we recite three times a day that correspond to the times when Jews of that era would do sacrifices, but we're not doing animal sacrifice anymore because the temple no longer exists. How do we pivot? How do we change that when we are clearly obligated in the Torah to do these things, but we can't do them anymore? So it's like figuring out what used to go on, how to sort of carry that through in a way that makes sense, if possible, to something that they could do, which was verbal prayer, and how to make this sort of jump between what they knew, what had been Jewishness at that time, or practicing Judaism, and what it had to become in order to survive. So I do want to give a lot of credit. I know I make a lot of jokes, but to be able to survive that long, and I think the credit goes to Yochanan ben Zakai. There's a famous story where Jerusalem is being destroyed, and he fakes his own death and gets smuggled out in a coffin to go speak to somebody who isn't the Roman emperor. I think it's Vespasian. I'm not sure. And he tries to convince him, what do we do? And Vespasian, or whoever is in that position of authority says, "Well, what do you want? I can't stop Jerusalem from being destroyed. It's going to happen. That's going to happen." And so, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai says, "Okay, give me Yavne." Yavne is a city, and that's where he took the sages, took the rabbis, and they reconstituted themselves there. They could continue the process of rabbinic learning and transmission of traditions that way. So in that moment, I think it was really down to him, although obviously a lot of other things happened in that story. I don't know about the accuracy historically of it, but the way it's presented is this is the moment where he saved Judaism by making it portable. Yeah. By making it something that while everything in our tradition is deeply connected to the agricultural cycle of the land of Israel, some of our holidays that we celebrate here in North America do not make sense here in North America, but they do there. But it was that or annihilation. You've got to pick. And so he made that choice.

Dan McClellan And that's very similar to the crisis that Judahites faced in exile in Babylon, and you have different ways of trying to... Ezekiel, for instance, makes God's presence portable by saying- Right ... "What if his throne had wheels?"

Miriam Anzovin Which is cool. And then you have... Yeah. Amerkenvah. It's really cool. Very trippy.

Dan Beecher The deity wheelchair is invented. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I like that.

Dan McClellan But that's a lot of what's going on in the Torah is- Yeah ... similarly responding to crisis and trying to figure out how we can keep our community together- Yeah ... and increase that social cohesion and maintain our identity. And so in a lot of ways, the Talmud is simply doing that. And so I can tell that you have an appreciation for what they're doing, a respect for the Talmud- Yes ... while also having to react to and engage with a lot of rather problematic, a lot of rather sus- Just a tad ... aspects of it. For instance, the fact that women are treated as property in some ways when it comes to... And I don't know what the term in the Talmud is, but in the Hebrew Bible, it's lakach, is what you do to get a wife. You take- Yeah ... a wife. You acquire. Yes. Yeah. And so can you talk a little bit about the The conceptualization of women within the Talmud. Yeah. What kind of questions are being asked, and how are women being represented? And is their agency even a question? Yeah. Or is it just only the agency of the man?

Miriam Anzovin When I go to do workshops with people, and I don't teach them Talmud, I teach them how to react to Talmud, one of the things I recommend is asking themselves who is speaking in this portion of the text, and who is being spoken about? And often the people who are being spoken about, but who have very little agency, it depends on the area and the topic, but they're women. Women are often discussed in the Talmud. In fact, there is a whole order of the Mishnah, we're in it right now, Seder Nashim, all about women, for better or worse. And, so sometimes we see huge debates over multiple pages or whole tractates that could've been easily resolved had they asked a woman. But they didn't, and no women were present. Well, let me rephrase that. Let me add just a little bit about that. Some women were present. I want to mention Beruriah in particular. She was a sage, I think we can fairly say that, in her own right, and she famously learned 300 Halakhot laws in one afternoon because she could, and other people did not have her aptitude for learning, for Talmud, for her knowledge is incredible, off the charts. There are only a few women named in the Talmud, fewer who are actually knowledgeable about Jewish law or Torah tradition and who are pointed out as being right in their interpretations. She is definitely one person who is, her rulings, her judgments, not her rulings, she wasn't allowed to do that, but her judgments, her suggestions, her read, her gentle nudging.

Dan McClellan Is she quoted, or is she just- She is quoted. Okay.

Miriam Anzovin She is quoted, and there's one quote, I think one thing I really appreciate about her is she weaponized the, what we would term now, sexism in the Talmud to her own benefit. Yeah. There is a story where she is walking along a road, minding her own business, doing whatever she needed to get done, and Rabbi Yosi walks up to her and says, "Which way to Lode?" Or something like that. And she turns around, and clearly she didn't want to be bothered on her walk, and she says to him, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember how it is actually said, "Use fewer words when speaking to women." Which is something that the sages are saying, "Don't talk to women. It's a bad idea. They're going to lure you into stuff. No, don't do it." And she's like, "Speak less to women. You should've just said, 'Which way to Lode?' Instead of, 'Oh, are we on the right path? Where are you going? Am I going this way?'" So she was weaponizing. She's like, "Sir, have you not heard?" "Speak less to women." But then we get also people like Yaltah who famously did not appreciate being disrespected openly by a sage, Ulla, who was visiting her own home, and she had requested to also have the Kiddush, so the wine that is used as part of Shabbat, part of a lot of Jewish rituals. And Ulla, who was not her husband, but the guy who was visiting, was like, "Don't give it to her. She's a woman." And she was like, okay, I won't say what I would usually say, it involves swears. But she goes down, and she just- She rejected the notion? She firmly rejected it. She went and smashed 300 barrels of wine. Wow. She's like, "Oh, you want it in my house, you're going to do this? Let's go." If anyone's watching on YouTube, I don't know, but this is an image I drew of her. She is holding an ax on her shoulder- Love it ... ready to smash the patriarchy. Yeah.

Dan Beecher But overall- And ruin a bunch of wine, which I think is a bit of a tragedy, but sometimes you got to.

Miriam Anzovin I understand, but sometimes you have to make a point. Yeah. It's true. I do understand.

Dan Beecher It's so true. I do. I do.

Miriam Anzovin And it was her wine.

Dan Beecher If you guys had a Jesus, he could've just turned some water back into the wine. Right. But unfortunately...

Miriam Anzovin Now, there is a story about somebody... Okay, well, I won't go into that because we're talking about the woman question. Yeah. So yes, we do hear from, we do have actual quotes from a few women in the Talmud who have significant-ish parts to play or things to convey, stories about them that are relevant and important to the topics being discussed. And I appreciate that, I do. Then there's the rest of it where not only do we usually hear about women as relation to a man, this is someone's wife or daughter, and she doesn't get a name. In my videos, I give them names, so that they can have one. But it's the discussion as a whole, depending on what we are talking about. Women did not have rights of owning things on their own when they were married. Everything she made, like if she had a job, that's really the ownership of that money or whatever went to her husband. She does not hold onto that. And actually, the same if she's younger and is working, her father gets that. If she is sexually assaulted, the fee that the rapist pays doesn't go to her. It's not about her and her embarrassment. That goes to her father.

Dan McClellan She's a commodity, and now- Right ... her commodity's been compromised. Right. Exactly.

Miriam Anzovin And her value also goes down as a non-virgin, which is also a deeply obnoxious, really difficult thing to come to terms with. The value is virginity, and your price ... lowers, depending on- Good thing nobody thinks that way anymore. Right. Thank goodness nobody has that idea.

Dan Beecher That has never been brought up since then.

Dan McClellan Yeah, I think, what was it 1973 when women could have credit cards in their own name?

Miriam Anzovin Oh, really? Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah.

Dan McClellan So we've come a long way, I think. Right.

Miriam Anzovin In some ways, we have come a long way. But the thing I will say is I do get very mad at a lot of things in the Talmud about women. And some of them I'm like, "Okay, this was 2,000-ish years ago. I can't change that." Sure, it's disturbing to come across, and to process it sometimes I will donate to a women's organization or something like I'm learning this, but I'm going to change something in the present. Mm-hmm. What really gets me is times when the Talmud is discussing an issue involving women, and the problem has trickled down to this day and affects us now. I will use- Yeah ... an example. We just got out of Tractate Gittin, which is about divorce. Right? Actually, until the 10th century, women didn't have to agree to a divorce. They just, bye. Couldn't do anything about it. At the time, marriage was the only way for economic support, status, protection, and I hate that that was the case. I hate that. But a man is the only one who can grant a divorce- Mm-hmm ... in Judaism, and still to this day, among the Orthodox community, only a man can initiate a divorce, and a man can withhold that divorce, leading the woman, the wife, even if she desperately wants to be away from him, even if he is abusive, whatever it is, she will not be free of him until he grants her that get. And women who are in that position of being chained to a dead marriage are called agunot. And there is a truly terrible crisis about that, especially I will say in the state of Israel, where there is no secular marriage or divorce. It is all through the rabbinate.

Dan Beecher So- Yeah, I have a friend who lives in Jerusalem who literally, she and her partner just very recently traveled to Cyprus to get married. Yeah. A day trip out and back- Yeah ... because they're secular, even though they are- Yep ... of Jewish origin. Right. And they had no way to do it otherwise. Yeah.

Miriam Anzovin It doesn't actually matter what I would believe. If I went there and I wanted to get married, I would have to do it through the rabbinate, and if I wanted to get a divorce, I would have to do the same thing. Right. And that plays into issues of custody and things like that as well. And that is not good. That is very bad. So I really hope that soon Israel will have civil divorce, civil marriage. But even here in America, so I am a divorced person. I was married for nine years to a fellow Jew, and we were divorced in American law, and I also made sure, even though I am not observant, I am not a believer at this time, that he went to a Beth Din, which is a Jewish court of three men if it's an Orthodox one, or three people if it's non-Orthodox. And I received my get. This is my document of freedom, which is not too dissimilar to a document freeing a slave. Wow. So you have been manumitted in- I have indeed been freed.

Dan McClellan Now, did they drop it for you to catch?

Miriam Anzovin Yes, and you catch it. Oh. So yes. So I was the only woman in the room, and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to make this funny. This is the last hoop I have to jump through before I am free of this person." And so the person who was a stand... Well, there was a stand-in for my husband there because I didn't want to be in the same room with him. Mm-hmm. But at one point, the get, the document, is actually dropped into the wife's hands. She catches it, and she brings it into her. So she's like boop. And I did a very dramatic one. People did laugh. So I win.

Dan Beecher It's so good. Yeah. When you kill at your get, that is a- I know. I just- That's a coup.

Dan McClellan That is a- Right.

Dan Beecher That's good stuff. Yeah.

Miriam Anzovin So I did receive it. I went through the whole ritual. The thing is that you don't get to keep that. You get a receipt- ... that says, "I have my get." You don't keep it. The Beth Din keeps it.