In just over six weeks from now Chanukah will be arriving in mid-summer.

The great celebration of Torah known as the Siyum HaShas of Daf HaYomi will take place b’ezras Hashem on August 1 at the very same time that the quintessential manifestation of Yavan the Olympic Games reach their midpoint in London. It’s hard to imagine a clearer better-timed contrast than this between the radically divergent worldviews of Yerushalayim and Athens or a more bracing expression than this of an epic kulturkampf that first flared two millennia ago yet continues in full strength to this day.

And we need to be prepared both to give the media an understanding of what the Siyum is really about and even more importantly to use this opportunity to draw our estranged brethren nearer to Hashem. With this in mind I reprint here an updated version of a column I published in the Forward in 2005 just prior to the last Siyum HaShas written with a secular yet sincere audience in mind:

On August 1 large numbers of Jews will join together at locations across the country and around the world including 90000 strong at Met Life Stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands to celebrate an event called the Siyum HaShas. This celebration marks the completion of the entire Babylonian Talmud a culmination of seven-and-one-half years of study at an inexorable page-a-day pace known in Hebrew as Daf Yomi.

One might well expect those hearing of the Siyum for the first time to regard it as a largely internal Orthodox affair with little relevance to those in the broader Jewish world. But that would be unfortunate because the Siyum and its accompanying celebratory goings-on ought to be viewed by thoughtful Jews of every stripe as a deeply meaningful source of Jewish pride.

Consider: Tens of thousands of men women and children from grade-schoolers to senior citizens will converge on these venues to celebrate … the study of a book. Actually many very large books with very small print indeed (and virtually no pictures either). If ever there was an event that honors those quintessentially Jewish values of study intellectual inquiry and the marketplace of ideas that exalts the life of the mind as preeminent it is this Siyum.

It is not only intellectualism that will be paid homage that evening but also the value of individual achievement of setting and attaining hugely ambitious long-term goals. The phrase “seven-year page-a-day cycle” is easy enough to say but try living it for even one month. Those assembled will be paying tribute to the thousands of individual Jews the vast majority of them working folk of collars both white and blue who day in and day out use either the early morning the evening after a long workday or their precious lunch break to study their daily quota.

And that’s study not read. One cannot “read” the Talmud any more than one can kick back beer in hand to peruse the Internal Revenue Code. The vast majority of the Talmud’s thousands of pages constitute what one great scholar termed a “brain-grinding tool ” involving the very highest levels of intellectual abstraction and requiring one to marshal laser-focused concentration and fierce determination.

We speak here of course of Talmud study at its most basic with only the great commentator Rashi as our guide; it gets far more complex as one wades into the multiple levels of commentary on every line of the text — appearing in even smaller print … And all this is written in a maddeningly abstruse mix of Hebrew and Aramaic that contains not a trace of punctuation or vowel marks to boot. Are we having fun yet?

In truth however studying Talmud intense as it can often be is great fun. There’s something exhilarating about challenging yourself on a daily basis — not just your brawn at the local gym nor just your fund of trivia by doing the Times crossword puzzle (conspicuously in pen of course …) — but all of you: your brain your memory your preconceptions your stamina your commitment. Especially your commitment because the pace is inexorable at times even grueling and taking even a week’s break means you’re now seven long intricate pages behind which in Daf Yomi terms is an eternity.

But there’s more. The Siyum is not only a massive ode to achievement but in the main to other people’s achievements and that in our self-centered society is a refreshing rarity. Although many hundreds likely even thousands of individuals will indeed be completing the entire Talmud they will be vastly outnumbered by the tens of thousands more who will be there because as one participant at the last such celebration put it “When your brother makes a wedding you dance as if it’s your own.” In its broader sense the Siyum is a salute to every Jew of any age walk of life or religious background who is embarked on the journey to knowledge of Torah and ultimately of self that our tradition regards as among the greatest of mitzvos.

And that brings us back to why this milestone ought to spark the interest of Jews of every persuasion. In our increasingly fragmented Jewish world whose diverse camps can’t even agree on the definition of basic Judaic concepts we need all the unifying opportunities we can find and this surely ranks among the best of those. That’s because beyond its religious significance as a structured program of Torah study a core idea underlying the Daf Yomi is that of Torah as a unifying force.

Some years back there were initiatives in various American locales to get residents city-wide reading the same book at the same time thereby fostering an intellectual conversation across societal divides such as class and race. The Daf Yomi program is that and so much more. Not a place — it spans the globe; not a time — one can study the Talmud ’round the clock in person via phone computer even short-wave radio; but a vehicle for bankers and bakers athletes and aesthetes and all the rest to come together to explore the riches of four millennia of Jewish intellectual and moral splendor.

Our Jewish problem these days isn’t that we don’t listen to each other talking; it’s that we don’t even speak the same language anymore. Torah which gets its gala on August 1 can be that lingua franca.

If you’ve been looking for some way to strike up a Jewishly related conversation with a relative neighbor coworker or client the occasion of the Siyum HaShas might just be an ideal opportunity. So feel free to contact me at Mishpacha for a version of this column that you can e-mail or better yet clip it and hand it to them and ask them to share their thoughts about it after they’ve read it.

It’ll be the best albeit early Chanukah present you can give them.