Q&A: Teaching Talmud to Students
Teaching Talmud to Students
Question
Hello and blessings, Rabbi,
I am a teacher in a school for children with behavioral disorders and attention and concentration difficulties in the Haredi sector, where they insist on teaching Talmud even to these children. (Personally, I do not connect to this at all, but these are the administration’s requirements.) I would be happy to know whether the Rabbi can refer me to a book that would guide me to teach the Talmud in a more logical way, or at least with more focus on concepts, and not on endless abstract reasoning.
In short, my goal is to teach Talmud the way arithmetic is taught, and not as endless theorizing and excessive involvement in fine distinctions, etc. etc.
Thank you.
Answer
Unfortunately, I am not familiar with such a book. But that is not proof, because I am not familiar with Talmud teaching books. It may be worthwhile to speak with Rabbi Yehuda Zoldan, supervisor of Oral Torah and Talmud studies at the Ministry of Education. A good man and a Torah scholar, and he knows the materials on the market. If you want details, contact me by email.
Discussion on Answer
There is a book called “Keys to the Talmud,” a guide for independent learning for teacher and student; highly recommended.
Hello Shlomo Greinman,
I hope I understood your situation and can offer you help based on experience working in the following way:
A. Print the Talmud for the children in the form of clear text. That is, the Mishnah separately, and beneath it the Gemara, with the whole give-and-take divided into separate sentences. (A comprehension question, an answer, an objection, a resolution, a refutation, an interpretive framing, and the like.)
You can also create emphasis in places where it is needed by bolding and/or using quotation marks.
At the first stage, the children will see a clearer Talmud page before their eyes.
At the second stage, they will get used to the fact that every sentence has a definition.
At the third stage, you can give them a vocabulary bank in the Aramaic language. (Whether on a separate page or between the lines.)
And there is a fourth stage of summarizing the passage/topic / passage (tables, etc.), and a fifth stage of review questions. (And sometimes sharpening questions.)
I prepare a weekly booklet for my students with all of the above.
B. You wrote “children” — but obviously there is a difference between the level of each class. And you also wrote that there are “disabilities,” so that too is something that must be taken into account when determining the learning level. In other words, you do not have to complete all the stages at once. Rather, each week try to advance them by one more stage of learning.
C. In some of the chapters commonly studied in Haredi education (These Are Found Articles, One Who Deposits, One Who Pens In, An Ox That Gored, One Who Places, and the like), there are passages that are hard to learn and passages that are easy. It is completely acceptable, according to the level of the class, to skip passages that are not at the right level, and one does not have to learn strictly in order.
Sometimes a passage that will be easy for one age group will be hard for another, and vice versa. There are no fixed rules for this.
D. There is no need to teach the children yeshiva-style abstractions. Teach the text and the disputes in a simple way. The goal is that the student will gradually be able to understand the structure of the Talmud on his own, build up knowledge of concepts and Aramaic vocabulary, reading comprehension, and develop thinking through the review questions.
I hope I helped.