The seven-and-a-half-year cycle of Talmud study known as daf yomi (“daily page”), which concluded its thirteenth iteration last week, has grown greatly in popularity in Orthodox, and especially ultra-Orthodox, circles since it was initiated by a Polish rabbi in the 1920s. But not all who commit themselves to the regimen of studying one folio page of the Talmud every day are Orthodox. Benjamin David, the rabbi of a Reform congregation in New Jersey, reflects on successfully completing the daf yomi:

I found the end of each tractate particularly enthralling. . . . Consider the end of Tractate Sotah, for instance, which has the text recount the many iconic values that died as each sage who embodied that value died. With boldness it declares that when Yoḥanan ben Zakkai died, so did wisdom. When Abba Yosi died, so did piety. When Yehudah ha-Nasi died, humility itself died. At the final line of this 49-page tractate, Rabbi Naḥman speaks up, a still, small voice of hopefulness: “Do not fear that fear of sin died, for there is still one who fears sin: me.”

It is this kind of moment that defies all expectations and assumptions regarding Talmud study. At least it did for me. For those who want to believe that it’s a cold text of yesteryear, such moments prove endlessly heartwarming and uplifting.

As my enthusiasm for Talmud study grew, so did my enthusiasm for teaching Talmud. [Students in my] monthly Talmud classes grew in number over the years, maybe because of my own consistently raised eagerness. I was bringing them texts well beyond the obvious, overanalyzed talmudic stories so many have come to love. . . . I brought them little-known nuggets from tractates M’naḥot and Mo’ed Katan, and other less likely tractates, and we loved them together.

While all of this might sound poetic, even inspiring, much of daf yomi is not at all poetic. Pages upon pages devoted to the ancient practice of levirate marriage or entire volumes devoted to the minutiae around animal sacrifices we haven’t done for over 1,500 years. Tractate Z’vaḥim was tough. B’khorot was tougher. These sections of the Talmud begged me to quit, but I never relented. I knew that if I could press on, there would be talmudic gold.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.