When Ilana Kurshan’s running partner told her she was doing Daf Yomi — the seven-and-a-half year project of studying a page of Talmud daily —Kurshan was going through a painful divorce. Feeling alone and depressed, living in Jerusalem, she wondered if she could ever overcome her pain and shame.
Subsequently, as she explains in her memoir If All the Seas Were Ink, she accepted that moving on was about putting one foot in front of the other, or turning page after page. “If every day I turned a page,” she states, “then eventually a new chapter would have to begin.” And so, inspired by her friend, she took on the commitment of studying the entire Babylonian Talmud, consisting of 2,711 double-sided pages of rich dialogue of “the rabbis’ conversations”.
As an editor preoccupied with questions of structure and literary coherence, she was fascinated by how the stream of rabbinic consciousness proceeds. “I followed along as the text meandered from the topic of how cheese is curdled to why Torah scholars resemble fragrant perfume to an anecdote about a town that had a scarcity of bakers — all that from a daf in Avodah Zara (a tractate on idolatory).”
Her award-winning memoir — it gained the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in the States last year — integrates the daily study with the narrative of her personal life, past and present. Indeed, just as the Talmud is a commentary on life, so her life became a commentary on the Talmud. Essentially a very private person, Kurshan has bared much of her soul in this book, which highlights her anorexia, her failed marriage, ensuing depression, and efforts to pick up the pieces and risk finding love again.
Kurshan, 40, the daughter of a rabbi, had grown up in Long Island, where she went to a Solomon Schechter (Conservative) school up until eighth grade. She later went on to receive an undergraduate degree in English literature from Harvard and worked as a book editor, literary agent and translator in New York and Jerusalem.
The titles of the book’s chapters correspond to the tractates of the Talmud. “I was continually fascinated by all the overlaps between the pages I was learning and whatever was happening in my life,” she explains. One of the first masechtot (tractates) she learned, Succah, is about the temporary huts built during the festival to remember the children of Israel’s desert wanderings.
“I learned that tractate shortly after my divorce, during a time when I moved around from one rental apartment to another, afraid to commit to signing any long-term contract. As I learned Succah, I thought about what it meant to live in a temporary home and to struggle to find meaning amid transience. The project of building a temporary home, which is the subject of much of this masechet, became a way for me to reflect on the meaning of home at a time when so much in life seems uncertain and unstable.”
As a lover of literature, Kurshan seamlessly refers to quotations from endless known and lesser known writers, enriching her personal story profoundly. She even set herself the challenge of writing a limerick or sonnet for each page she learned. Her theory on romantic love becomes apparent in the chapter of Kiddushin (betrothal). Each time a friend gushed about a new relationship, she thought about Wendy Cope’s poem The Orange, which describes those first moments of romantic love whereby the most ordinary pleasures like sharing an orange among friends makes them smile and laugh.
Following her divorce Kurshan gradually adopted a more sober view of romantic love, in line with her reality of loving and losing. Here she identified with Jack Gilbert’s poem Waiting and Finding, where, she explains,“we wait and wait and perhaps we find”.
Raised with a strong feminist sensibility, she believes there is something exciting about women engaging with the Talmud, since the text was traditionally studied only by men, not to mention men who, she says, considered themselves experts in women’s anatomy, physiology and psychology. “Now more and more women are encountering this text that for fifteen hundred years has been regarded primarily as the province of only the male half of the population, and they are discovering that the Talmud — though ploughed through by generations of male scholars — remains fertile ground for gleaning new insights.”
At the outset, when she wondered if she could ever commit to Daf Yomi, she thought about a sonnet she often quoted to herself: “‘Time does not bring relief/ you all have lied’,” wrote Edna St Vincent Millay. “I couldn’t bear the thought that in seven and a half years I might still be grieving.”
However, the Talmud soon became her anchor, her life raft, following her through the twists and turns of her life. As it happened, she needn’t have worried about grieving. By the end of it she had found love again, remarried and had a family.
“T S Eliot famously wrote in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ‘I have measured out my life in coffee spoons’,” notes the mother of four, who teaches at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem. “Well, I like to think that I have measured out my life in talmudic masechtot.”
Ilana Kurshan explores her memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink, with Yoel Finkelman of the National Library of Israel at Jewish Book Week in London, March 4 at 8.30pm
