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PODCAST

The Oral Talmud

Institute for the Next Jewish Future

An exploration of the Talmud through the “traditionally radical” lens pioneered by Benay Lappe. Whether you are a beginner to Talmud study or a long-time learner, by listening in on Benay Lappe’s study partnership with Dan Libenson as they explore foundational stories and material from the Talmud, you will discover the how-to manual that the ancient Rabbis left behind for future generations to help us re-imagine a new version of Judaism after the previous version “crashes.”

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All Episodes

00:59:08

Episode 37: Wayward Sons of a Certain Age

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/02/23

“The Talmud is giving you a toolbox of methodologies and mechanisms to use to write repugnant understandings of God’s will out of existence.” - Benay LappeWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. What do you do with a sacred text that tells you to stone your own child? In this episode, Dan & Benay confront one of the Torah’s most disturbing passages: the law of the “wayward

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01:03:18

Episode 36: A One-Way Ratchet

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/02/16

“What you can't do is try to ratchet it backwards to the original law from the Torah. No, it does not have a special status because it was in the Torah. Once it's overruled, it's overruled. Period. End of story.” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. In this episode of Oral Talmud, Benay and Dan continue to discuss a text about divorce, and they uncover a

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01:05:50

Episode 35: Repairing the World Means Admitting It’s...

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/02/09

“That is a point at which they're gonna say this is such a broken world that we can't let this stand. We're gonna have to repair the whole world to prevent people from falling into this category and that's going to mean overturning a Torah law.” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. This episode is a new Talmud passage. It’s about divorce again – but not

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01:00:51

Episode 34: Our Way or the Highway

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/02/02

“What's really important is not just that they're doing it, but they're showing you that they're overturning Torah with what their own svara tells them is a better take on how to be a human being and that's why I think this entire document of the Talmud is an instruction manual for us. I think they meant to teach us how to do it so that we could do it.” - Benay LappeWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago

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01:02:45

Episode 33: It’s Svara All the Way Down

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/01/26

“It's always been that if we get to a point where svara tells us that this text is wrong, svara trumps the text.” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. When we were recording this episode in November of 2020, it was feeling very much like we were living in a time of crash in America and in the world, just like the world at the time of the Talmud. That sense

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01:04:16

Episode 32: Our Hands are Not Tied

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/01/19

“ What this text is trying to say, as is the entire Talmud, is ‘my hands are tied’ is not how we do Jewish. It's never been how we do Jewish, ever since the rabbis at least, and can never be thought of as a legitimately Jewish response to any suffering ever.” - Benay LappeWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. When this episode was recorded back in November of 2020 it was

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01:11:15

Episode 31: A Talmudic Stitch Sampler

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/01/12

“The big error is to imagine that a general principle of interpretation applies only to the case in which we learned it.” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. This week Dan & Benay work through to the end of the case of a person who is sick and needs to eat (and not fast) on Yom Kippur. We recognize this whole section of Talmud to be a sampler - a

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01:04:04

Episode 30: Magician School

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/01/05

“Talmud is showing people how you do the sleight of hand. It's like magician school! And this is the manual! A magician never reveals his tricks! But the democratization of the old tricks allows for the new tricks.” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. This week Dan & Benay continue to work through the case of a person who is sick and needs to eat on the

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01:01:04

Episode 29: The Heart Knows The Bitterness of its Soul

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/12/29

“As almost always, there's a wink in this text. And the question is: has that wink been successful? Or have we lost track of the wink and opened ourselves up to the misinterpretation of this radical approach, for an originalist approach?” - Benay LappeWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. This week Dan & Benay continue to build on the discussion of Pikuach Nefesh – how

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01:05:41

Episode 28: The Tile Contour Gauge Theory of Tradition

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/12/22

“In these moments of new foundings, I wonder the extent to which you have to make some kind of a plausible argument that your changes are actually an expansion of ancient principles. Otherwise, I wonder if they’ll be cast out by the immune system.” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. For the past few weeks, Dan & Benay have been exploring the rabbinic

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00:58:22

Episode 27: Who’s To Say Your Blood is Redder?

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/12/15

“What's inherent in racism is the idea that you are judging groups of people in terms of value one against another. And I think that's precisely what's underneath – that's the svara essentially – about why you can't murder someone else to save your own life. Because you cannot say: I know my life is more valuable than that person's.” - Benay LappeWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink

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01:00:21

Episode 26: Why We Show Our Work

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/12/08

“And since they've shown us their work, we're able to say, ‘I'm not following the substantive rule in this case! I'm following the process rule – which says: How do I think about this new case?” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. This episode is dedicated to the memory and legacies of Ruth Bader Ginsberg & Breonna Taylor.Dan & Benay pick up where we left

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00:57:23

Episode 25: Nitza’s Attic

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/12/01

“When the Rabbis start saying: Well, when does this line in the Torah apply? And when doesn't apply? – You forget that their first radical move was to imply: This doesn't always apply. That's enormous. It's that shift that makes anything possible.” - Benay LappeWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. So far, Dan & Benay have been exploring when the sages overturned Torah

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01:01:07

Episode 24: Sacred Disobedience

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/11/24

“Jewish law works like any legal system that survives for a long period of time – and it does so by the same mechanisms. And those mechanisms are the human insight that is brought to bear to modify, qualify, limit, and expand the law as one receives it.” - Benay LappeWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. Last week, Dan & Benay began to learn how the Talmud questions and

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01:00:12

Episode 23: Life Comes First

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/11/17

“How do you take what you have and analogize, and tie some new radical thing that you don't have but you want to insert into the tradition? This entire passage is part of the instruction manual! This is some new twist of creativity, a twist of imagination.” - Benay LappeWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. Benay & Dan turn to another essential Talmud text, the origins

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00:58:43

Episode 22 - Hillel & Shammai: Beyond Elu v’Elu

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/11/10

“Ultimately the only way that you actually take these lessons into your soul is through trying to implement it in your actual life. And often that's gonna be failure!“ - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. Dan & Benay return to the daf after a series of interviews, picking up where we left off in Episode 19, exploring where the editors of the Talmud went

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01:05:30

Episode 21: Dissecting Daf Yomi with Ilana Kurshan

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/11/03

“Part of what I love about Talmud is that even if you're just listening, there's so many gaps, so many rough edges, so many places that don't quite fit together. There're all these holes and you, the reader, burrow into those holes. You find your nook, your cranny, your space, your neek’rat ha’tzur. And it's the nature of the discourse that has you do that. I don't think it's possible to learn this text passively!” - Ilana KurshanWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study

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00:57:45

Episode 20: Transforming Story into Law with Jane...

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/10/27

“I want activist reads to also be responsible reads, which is why I’m so committed to people being anchored and being able to actually read these classical texts.” - Jane KanarekWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. This week Dan & Benay learn with special guest Professor Jane Kanarek of Hebrew College Rabbinical School, author of “Biblical Narrative and the Formation of

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00:54:21

Episode 19: The Elu v’Elu Episode

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/10/20

“Opinions that are contradictory to one another, the opposite of one another are both the words of God.” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. This episode is dedicated to beloved Talmud translator Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz who passed in 2020, in the days before recording this episode. After honouring his life, Dan and Benay return to learning the deeply

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00:54:47

Episode 18: What Tisha b’Av Can Learn From Yom Kippur

The Oral Talmud ·

2025/10/13

“We have to imagine that everything that we love today, or don't love, might end up in the Tisha b’Av of the future.” - Dan LibensonWelcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today. This episode was originally released for Tisha b’Av in 2020, the Jewish calendar’s most essential day of mourning and remembrance. In our new podcast re-release schedule, this episode is coming out much

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