I have a dream of knowing an entire masechta by heart, backward and forward. If someone were to ask me questions on this masechta, I would not stutter or mumble but rather would answer immediately. I am a melamed in a cheder in Teveria, and this is my aspiration, which I hope my talmidim have caught on to as well. But practically speaking, it’s not so simple.
I chose Maseches Shavuos. And how symbolic that precisely this Maseches begins on daf beis, which tells you that if you don’t succeed in learning the first page, learn the second page.... And I learn. I open the Gemara and begin. I always begin. I go through daf beis from beginning to end...and that’s it. That’s where it ends.
The second time I sat down to learn, once more I opened to daf beis, and once again my strength waned very quickly.
I think that is how I got to starting Maseches Shavuos thirty times. It’s frustrating to see that I am still only at the beginning of it. I thought to myself, How important, truly, is my daf? Who sees it? How is it that I am only beginning and not ending? And why does daf beis not bring in its wake daf gimmel?
Can you understand the feeling of a person who set a goal for himself, and discovers how far away he is from achieving it? I was frustrated. But then I received a special he’arah from Shamayim, and Hashem showed me, in a way that could not be denied, that this daf was very valuable in His Eyes:
On the Shabbos when they started Maseches Shavuos in Daf Yomi, I was in a shul where about thirty Yidden were waiting to start the shiur. They waited for the maggid shiur, waited and waited, and he didn’t come. Then, the moment I entered the room, someone said, “Here’s the maggid shiur!”
“You thought I was the maggid shiur?!” I laughed.
He explained, “We learn the Daf Yomi every day with Rav Ze’ev Diner shlit”a, and today he didn’t come. We thought perhaps he sent you to fill his place.”
“What are you learning?” I asked them.
“We’re starting Maseches Shavuos,” said another participant in the shiur. “Daf beis.”
“Daf beis?! Excellent!” I said, and I started telling them the mishnah by heart. From that point on, the path was open for me. The daf, that same daf that I’ve repeated and reviewed thirty times already, is fluent on my lips. I stood before the crowd and delivered the shiur fluently and beautifully, with Hashem’s great chassadim. When the shiur ended, it seemed the group had derived much pleasure from my words. “We didn’t know! We had no idea what a talmid chacham is in our midst! Is this how you know the entire Shas by heart?!”
I told them that I was the same simple Reb Shlomo from the cheder; they hadn’t gotten confused...and I aspired to learn all of Shas, and had even started learning Maseches Shavuos in order to know it by heart. But in the meantime, this was the only daf I knew. The only daf in the entire Shas!
Rav Ze’ev Dinner had been at a family simchah in a another city and had asked an avreich in the neighborhood to fill in for him. This avreich had prepared the shiur, but when the time came to give it, he completely forgot that he was supposed to be there, and he didn’t come.
The maggid shiur and the group were excited by this revelation of special hashgachah pratis, which caused them not to miss out on even one day of learning Daf Yomi. But I felt that there was something else here. The avreich who was supposed to deliver the shiur had prepared it. Why did Hashem cause him to forget about it?
Hashem had organized an entire group of Yidden to wait for me to deliver the shiur on the one and only daf that I know by heart. It felt to me like Hakadosh Baruch Hu was sending me a message: My son, your learning is very dear to Me!
