A few days after New Year’s Day 2020, hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world will meet in different places to celebrate.

They will be holding a siyum, a religious party, to mark the completion of the 13th cycle of Daf Yomi, the study of the entire Talmud over the course of seven and a half years. Every day they will have learned one of the 2,711 folios — a daf, a double page — of the Babylonian Talmud, some having risen at the crack of dawn to join their daily group.
When it was started in Poland back in 1923 by Rabbi Yehuda Meir Shapiro of Lublin, he could hardly have dreamt it would become adopted so widely. 

But it has inspired other ventures, too — among them one launched only a few years ago and potentially with an even larger reach.

Named simply 929, it refers to the number of chapters in the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, and its aim is to cover all 24 books of the Tanach, from Genesis to the Second Book of Chronicles, a chapter a day, five days a week from Sunday to Thursday, over three and a half years.

It was inaugurated at the home of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, a keen student of the Bible himself, at Chanukah 2014. Whereas Daf Yomi is primarily a product of the yeshivah world, 929 was intended to have a broader scope, attracting Israelis from across the religious and cultural spectrum.

“I want to give the Bible back to the people,” explained one of the founders of 929, Rabbi Benny Lau, one of the country’s most popular Modern Orthodox rabbis and well-known to many in the UK as a former Bnei Akiva shaliach here.

When the second cycle began in July 2018, it was extended from Israel to the diaspora with the addition of a parallel version in English. You can read the daily chapter on the project’s website, or listen to an audio recording of it. This week it has covered one of the most fateful episodes in ancient Israelite history, in the First Book of Kings — the conflict of succession after Solomon’s death which led to the splitting of the kingdom into Israel in the north and Judah in the south.

Every day there are supplementary articles or videos, which offer a commentary on the text, while participants in the programme can contribute their own thoughts. The 929 commentators include some familiar names — home-grown rabbis who have made aliyah such as Alex Israel or Yedidya Sinclair, as well as the international president of the English programme, Emeritus Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks.

What is striking is that the additional material comes from rabbis across denominational lines, emphasising the programme’s universality and its belief that the Tanach belongs to all.

While there are many people who will have made the laudable commitment to follow the whole cycle, there are other ways to use the programme. A school or a synagogue group youth could choose it just for the study of one book.

In his introduction, the director of the English programme, Rabbi Adam Mintz of New York, says that 929 wanted to “shake the dust of this amazing collective treasure of ours”. 

For it probably remains true that even among frequent shul-goers, large swathes of the Tanach remain unknown territory. Books like Jonah, Ruth or Esther may be familiar because they are parts of the liturgy, but even then they may be read rather than studied. 

Or else we encounter the Tanach in snatches. The haftarot introduce some of the prophetic highlights but that can be like knowing Shakespeare only in passages rather than experiencing a whole play. Even if you go through the commentary in the Chumash while the haftarah is being recited, there is often too little time to get to grips with the poetic language. 

When political events in recent years seem to have sharpened the sense of division in the Jewish world, the question often gets asked: what holds the Jewish people together — beyond external threat.

Culturally, the divisions are greater than ever. The Chasidic yeshivah bochur is steeped in Talmud and traditional rabbinic texts but may never pick up a modern Jewish author from a university bookshelf. The secular postgrad may consume Jewish fiction, history, politics but may never have set eyes on a daf of Talmud.

Perhaps the Bible remains the only book that can still provide some point of unity, a common vocabulary, a shared reservoir of stories that can continue to nourish our imaginations. To be Jewish is to be the heir of a civilisation that was shaped by the Tanach — and 929 is helping to remind us of it.

To access 929: www.929.org.il/lang/en