Inside The Daf Academy - A Conversation With Rabbi Ari Taback

[Music] in south africa johannesburg to be precise and i've gotten to know rabari a little bit um and we're fortunate to be able for at least for your vomits to be able to share his beautiful sheer he has a project or a program called daf academy which he'll talk about a little bit where he's been saying wonderful shiurim with different ideas and sharing different visuals as he says this year and we're happy to be able to share that with the old off audience as we move into yavamas so shalom rabari how are you hello i'm doing great hashem okay so maybe before we begin give the audience a little bit about your background are you born and bred south africa and you're a recent importer yeah i'm born and bred in south africa um i grew up here and um i learned in yeshiva inaudible i also was in coilo in saint louis missouri my wife comes from st louis um we then went back to artistro where i learned in koilel where arya zilberstein the grandson of ravi yashev we had a koilo and then also known by berkovis for a period of time so done the rounds but uh essentially south africa yes as you can probably hear from the accent beautiful okay so why don't you quickly fill in some of the blanks i guess some of the things that people may be wondering about what is daf academy how that academy begin and what are you doing currently great so um i gave da fiomi for the previous cycle seven years uh barak hashem we have in johannesburg about 10 15 people who joined us you know in the previous cycle about nine years ago and we went through the entire cycle together at that stage the cutting edge technology was dropbox so i would recall record my sharim in audio and then share them with people and that was very exciting for people that they could pick it up anywhere in the world coming to the end of that cycle i was looking at other tools and ways to get the daffo me out and simultaneously and it was really a hashtag was obviously the arrival of covert and there was a big ashkah for me in that and that i established myself and set myself up with an online platform um just at the end of 2019 going to 2020 for the new cycle um the way my shirin work actually is i do have a live audience um i have a zoom connection that's like that's active while i'm recording the actual share in the studio and we do have questions although sometimes they're trimmed out but for the most part we have a live audience and simultaneously we're recording uh the sheer i think the novelties of the sheer are that it's multifaceted there's myself but we're putting me in the corner of the screen which kind of is symbolic of the fact that i feel like the maggot sure can stay out the way a little bit and let the gomorrah speak for itself and let the illustrations speak for themselves and so simultaneously i'm sharing my screen both with the zoom audience as well as with the um with the recording with people that are watching online and uh that screen has a lot going on there's a lot of dynamic content which i think makes the the da fumi experience just that much more rich and accessible um i feel that you know da fiomi is i called up yo me the triumph of realism over idealism in a sense you know the amount of material on a single death of of gemara everybody knows you know i have sons in your shiva they can spend a week on a duff or even more and yet we've got this one hour or in modern times it's becoming smaller and smaller we have to try and find a way in that hour to to maximize and get the most value now i call it the triumph of realism of idealism because often people say it's not the best way to learn and and then six months later when they've been busy with some other program and i asked them how's it going and they said no that program ended and he hasn't quite found something else so daffy me is really the most realistic way of people engaging and learning consistently every single day and embracing and soaking up the terror that's available excellent so the bark hashem there are many many taffyemi shiurim daffy me maggi deshire online offline many of them have unique talents many of them have unique ways of sharing their talents um their educational talents with their audience what would you say if you had to highlight one two or three points of what you bring from daf academy to the world i think some of the things that we're aspiring to achieve in this program is firstly i think that it is an english based sheer so i really believe that the language is so critical because um you know as bobby used to say that so a person should master at least one language whatever language it is because language is the tool that allows you to communicate the most subtle things so i think one of the features of our sheer has been expressing things in a very clear english and not using necessarily the sprak the yeshivis terminology which may be foreign to some people but at the same time not compromising at all on the depths of the learning um using the subtleties of the english language to express the subtleties of the lundis i believe that the definition really of lumdus is clarity it's just about defining things with the right level of accuracy and precision and if one has the right words for that so that's i think one feature and our our oil on the people that have joined our program come from a very broad range ranging from people learning in kayla and your shalom all the way through to people who are complete beginners or people have no background whatsoever and i believe that if a concept is explained clearly enough then it should be accessible almost almost to everybody without alienating anybody i think that's point number one point number two is a philosophy i have that words are the enemy of ideas which means our brains work with ideas and words tend to overwhelm our brain especially the side of our brain that's able to really think deeply and laterally so if it's just a mass of words which you have to get through in daffy so then it's a great challenge to really not get bogged down in the words um for that end i i tend to use um slides on the screen and they're dynamic slides which means that we're changing them all the time as i'm speaking and what that really does is it tries to avoid using words so whenever there's a concept i'd rather use an icon or a picture for that particular concept you know even if it's in the tillage adam and the gomorrah and just to put hands there because it's fascinating that if you write the word nutella saddam in english or in hebrew those are another two words that your brain has to get stuck on whereas an image our brain is just so much more comfortable with so try and use as few words as possible was the you know wrote the mishna in that way rashi the greatest teacher ever you know certainly of the restoring him who was so marketed on his words and speak so often about keeping one's words sharp and tight and crisp so that the ideas come across but i think perhaps coming into your vomit the third point i'll make and that's perhaps the most important is because we have such limited time in that one hour we're going to cram in an entire duff in your vomit there is so much information on that page we try and distill it and crystallize it into simple slides which are progressive which means one of the challenges of pictures of for example in your vomits is you know i can show you a family tree of someone's great uncle's aunt's nephew something else and if i show you the whole thing at once then your brain just goes into overload what we try and do is as the sugiya is developing actually let the picture develop and my experience is that people are incredibly bright even someone is not so familiar with the language or hasn't got so much gamora experience if the information is presented to them sequentially with the right background so people can follow so i'm very excited about your vomit we have some great resources and diagrams and progressive slides and notation i feel notation is very important to create symbols for certain things but that are easy for people to follow and really i'm excited to be learning your bummers together okay excellent i don't want to keep you too much longer what would you say in closing is what gives you the excitement to be able to share your share on a large platform um with a large audience unlike olda i'm excited to uh to meet new people as funny as that is because you know these platforms tend to be a one-way one-way relationships but at the same time i really enjoyed engaging with the people that contact us that email us there's all kinds of you know formats that we can engage with people but to to connect with people to connect over the holy torah i think that's the uh the highest form of connection so i'm very excited to to meet new people and to learn with your people so uh i'm looking forward