People ask me why I decided to make a siyyum on Seder Nezikin for my Bat Mitzvah this past June. It all started one Monday in March when my mother took my brothers, my sister, and me to the Israel Book Shop. I looked around, found that they did indeed have the Artscroll-translated Mishnahs (Mishnayos Yad Avraham), and begged my mother to buy them for me. We’d already been considering getting me a set for a while because I really wanted to learn Mishnah on my own, so this wasn’t an unreasonable request.
“How much will you learn each day?” she asked, after looking at the price.
“An hour,” I promised.
“It’s going to come out of your reading time,” she warned. “You can’t stay up later.”
“I know,” I told her.
“I learn a lot from my Mishnah learning, and not all of it is about halakha… I learn more about the nature of human beings… about loyalty, goodness, and understanding Hashem and life in general.”
So we bought them.
I decided to study Seder Nezikin, which is the fourth of the six main divisions of the Mishnah. I chose Nezikin (literally Damages), which deals mainly with laws, testimony, oaths, and witnesses. I had wanted to learn Mo’ed but my mother thought I would be more challenged by Nezikin. Besides, I had previously learned some of Makkos (the massekhet or tractate in Nezikin dealing mainly with trials and punishments for noncapital and unusual criminal cases).
My ambitions of learning an hour each day soon turned into a perek (or chapter) a day. Naturally, I set out to discover how long it would take me to complete Nezikin at this rate. After checking and rechecking my math, I concluded that the answer was 74 days because there are 74 perakim in Nezikin.
And still I wasn’t satisfied. I learned all the time, more than my promised hour a day, and soon raced many perakim ahead.
Later, I realized that the finishing date would be near my Bat Mitzvah, and since I hate planning parties, I decided to have a siyyum for my Bat Mitzvah celebration.
Around the same time, I decided to try to learn all of Mishnah (i.e., all six sedarim, which consist of 63 massekhtot). This might seem like an unrealistic goal, but I think I will finish in about a year, even though some of the material is boring and other parts I can’t understand at the moment because the Mishnah uses measurements and currency that I know nothing about. For instance, a perutah is equal to half a barleycorn. What is a barleycorn anyway, and how small is this compared to other coins?
Sometimes I think that I’m going too fast, but I have the rest of my life to learn and I want to make this year count. Mostly before this, I read Midrash or asked my father to tell me stories from the Gemara, and this is really the first learning I’ve done entirely on my own.
When I read a mishna, 1 I read it in Hebrew, then English, and then I read the commentary, because this gives me the reasons I so badly need to understand why. Why Jews aren’t required to recompense Gentiles for the loss of their property although Gentiles are required to compensate Jews. Why we try so hard to acquit murderers. If the commentary can’t answer my questions, I try to understand the text by asking myself why I would rule this way, or if the reverence the nation shows its king is essential to its survival, or would being acquitted by the Sanhedrin change a person’s view of the mitzvot and life in general. By placing myself in the mind of one of the people involved in the case, I feel I can understand it better.
That I am the only one of my friends who learns for a hobby doesn’t bother me so much, although I have attempted on numerous occasions to involve them in my learning. When I ask other girls to learn with me, I get answers such as, “I wouldn’t be any help to you; I can’t learn” from my classmates (which is perfectly ridiculous because we learn Mishnah in school) or “No, thanks. I don’t learn Mishnah” (from people who aren’t in my school). I think I learn a lot from my Mishnah learning, and not all of it is about halakha. By attempting to understand the whys of the Mishnah and exploring questions such as “How do you know your blood is redder?” I think I learn more about the nature of human beings. I also feel I’ve learned about loyalty, goodness, and understanding Hashem and life in general. I hope my learning has made me a better person, and I intend to start a Mishnah class on Shabbat because I also feel that would be helpful in my number-one Bat Mitzvah goal: to get to know myself.
My Bat Mitzvah siyyum in June began with dinner, after which I taught some of my favorite mishnayot and the last mishna in Seder Nezikin.
Then I continued with my larger project…