This letter is a followup to the article “Highland Park’s Max Wisotsky Completes Shas With Accelerated Daf Yomi” by Michal Rosenberg, printed in The Jewish Link on September 20, 2022. Rosenberg described how I started to learn Shas at age 87, with no previous Talmud training, and completed it in an accelerated online learning program at age 90. She concluded as follows, “Wisotsky plans to keep learning and growing in his Torah knowledge, and who knows? Maybe he’ll share his next project in our letters section soon.”
Apropo to her request, I am privileged to report that I have now also completed an online Mishnayos project and made a siyum on September 7, 2024.
This whole effort started with the Siyum HaShas in MetLife Stadium on New Year’s Day in 2020, when my children and grandchildren persuaded me to go, promising it would be a life-changing experience. And they were right, in more ways than one.
At the end of that Siyum, my kids persuaded me to begin the Daf Yomi program. Initially I was not very enthusiastic about it since, as I said, I was 87 years old, and the Daf Yomi program was 7 1/2 years long. I didn’t relish starting a long program without having a clear idea of what the end would be. I therefore knew that if I was going to start the program, I would have to somehow compress the cycle. So instead of learning one daf a day for seven and a half years, I learned three daf a day and finished in only two and a half years.
However, that was a big load to pile onto an already busy schedule, and it generally consumed about two to three hours a day, seven days a week. So in order to do that, I devised a method that I coined “Chap-a-Daf” where, instead of tackling the whole daily lesson at one time, I “chapped a daf “ any time during the day or night, whenever I could find suitable breaks in my schedule. I was able to do that thanks to an outstanding on-line program taught by R’ Shloime Schwartzberg.
After finishing the Daf Yomi program, I decided to undertake a Mishna Yomi program, to learn Mishnayos. Fortunately, there was also a popular on-line Mishna Yomi program, the OU’s “Time 4 Mishnah,” which was offered as a six-year program. But here again, I was faced with the time element. By now I was 91 years old, and a six-year program again seemed very daunting, so I knew I had to somehow accelerate this timetable also.
The basic “Time 4 Mishna” program consists of learning two Mishnas a day, every day for about six years. I decided that instead I would learn 12 mishnas a day and finish in one year, which I did. And instead of “Mishna Yomi,” I coined my effort “Mishna Shana” (or “The Daily Dozen”), which I have just completed.
In the course of these programs, I was covering a lot of very detailed material at a very rapid pace. So it must be said—since I don’t want to deceive myself or anyone else into thinking that I was actually mastering much of the material—that I certainly was not. At best, I may have absorbed only a small fraction of the whole Talmud, maybe only a few percent. So the question is whether it was all worth a large part of about four years of my life for this seemingly very small gain.
To answer that question, I would like to borrow one of Rabbi Yishmael’s 13 Rules of Torah, which we recite every morning. And that is Klal-Ufrat-UKlal. The first Klal is the overall generalization, the vast font of knowledge in the Talmud. The Frat, or limitation, is the small amount that I may have actually learned. And the second large Klal is that the small amount that I may have learned is still infinitely more than what I knew before I started Klal-Ufrat-UKlal.
So the answer to the question of whether this effort was all worth it is absolutely yes! This experience has already impacted my lifestyle and learning habits.
Now I would like to reflect on my overall experience and what we can take away from my learning programs. The most obvious takeaway is that you’re never too old to start learning Torah, especially with the tools available today. In my case, for example, I started with essentially no Talmud background at age 87.
And there was also another unforeseen but extraordinary benefit, which turned out to be not just a life-changing experience, but literally, a lifesaving experience. Going to the Siyum Hashas in 2020 initiated a sequence of medically related developments that can only be called nissim (miracles). Very simply, if I had not gone to the Siyum HaShas that day, I would not be here to write this today.
And with that, I’ll end my letter here. As for the future, I will close with the thought that there is still so much more to learn.
L’Chaim … biz a hundert und zwanzig.
