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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

01:05:36

Episode 43: Black Mold

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/04/06

“ The rabbis would acknowledge that's not the reading that is closest probably to the original intent. It's nevertheless a justifiable reading because the ends is justifiable. And we're using our reading as a way of not completely breaking the chain. We still wanna have some connection to the past, even though we know this is the most strained connection possible to the past. And that actually feels like a more laudable reason to do misreadings than one in which you're trying to fool people.” - Dan

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00:56:20

The Oral Talmud Episode 42: But I Sat on His Grave!

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/03/30

“ The power of the methodology that is modeled over and over and over in the Talmud is that it makes very clear that we are not limited by the original intent or the obvious meaning of a text. So even if a text actually does mean what it looks like, it means, and we find it difficult, we are not bound to continue perpetuating that norm in the tradition.” - 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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00:59:02

Episode 41: Goldilocks and the Wayward Son

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/03/23

“The whole myth of ‘God wrote this,’ which I don't believe the rabbis bought into, is necessary in order to make these rationales convincing. It isn't so much intended to guarantee people's compliance and observance. What if that myth, ‘God wrote this’ is necessary to justify the hyper literal interpretations away from the text?” - Benay Lappe Welcome 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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01:03:58

Episode 40: Consciousness of Guilt

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/03/16

“That’s one of the reasons there's a crash because it's dealing with a new reality where everybody has the potential to know everything. And so there's no more hiding. And so what we have to do is to reinvent a Judaism that is palatable to everybody who's expected to participate.” - 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. What happens when the crowd finally

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01:03:02

Episode 39: A Glutton for Punishment

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/03/09

“ The big idea of what we're doing is to say, well, if we can see what the rabbis were doing to the Torah, then we can potentially do that to the rabbis in the next era. Then I think the question gets raised, what are the categories that Judaism over the last 2000 years, may have constructed or approved of, that we now would not approve of?” - 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

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01:03:08

Episode 38: Bad Seeds in the Capitol

The Oral Talmud ·

2026/03/02

“ Learning Talmud specifically was a spiritual practice designed to shape us into the kinds of morally sophisticated thinkers that can create a certain kind of world. So, at moments like this, it's not necessarily an odd thing to do.” - 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 when the world feels like it’s on fire? This episode was recorded the

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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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41 results

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