Maria Montessori. Booker T. Washington. Horace Mann. These are some of the names that come to mind when we think of famous educators. According to today’s daf, we should add Yehoshua ben Gamla to this list.
Rav Yehuda, speaking in the name of Rav, makes this extraordinary claim about Yehoshua ben Gamla:
If not for him the Torah would have been forgotten from the Jewish people.
What exactly did Yehoshua ben Gamla do? The Gemara continues:
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Initially, whoever had a father (would have his father) teach him Torah, and whoever did not have a father would not learn Torah. What (verse) did they interpret homiletically? “And you shall teach them to your sons” (Deuteronomy 11:19): And you yourselves shall teach.
The Gemara is playing with words a bit here. The verse from Deuteronomy reads, “And you should teach them to your sons” — “them” being God’s words and Torah. But vowels can be a tricky thing in Hebrew. The Hebrew word for them, otam, can also be read as atem, meaning “you” (plural). The rabbis thus read the verse as requiring fathers to teach their sons Torah. But as the Gemara notes, this created a problem. Some fathers are incapable of teaching their sons Torah, and some sons don’t have fathers at all.
The Gemara goes on to describe how the rabbis addressed this problem by establishing teachers for children in Jerusalem. But this was still a problem, as those with fathers were brought to Jerusalem to learn, but boys without fathers had no one to accompany them and therefore didn’t study Torah. To rectify this situation, the rabbis set up regional schools where boys would start learning at 16 or 17. But this too presented a problem.
Someone whose teacher grew angry at him would rebel against him and leave.
Even though we know about plenty of learners who came to Torah study later in life (Rabbi Akiva famously didn’t learn to read and study until he was 40), the teenage years are an angsty time to try to get someone started with Torah study. If a rabbi grew angry at his student, that student might simply up and leave. So what do we do?
Yehoshua ben Gamla came and instituted that teachers of children should be established in each and every province and in each and every town, and they would bring (the children) in at the age of six and at the age of seven.
Rashi tells us that there are many provinces in a region, so a provincial or municipal school is likely to increase accessibility. This also allowed schools to take students as young as six. Children could get an earlier start on their learning and fathers could share the burden of educating their sons with a local teacher.
Implicit in all of this are two things. First, the rabbis seek to make learning available to as wide a group as possible and are willing to take creative steps to do so. Second, no one father alone is responsible for educating his sons; instead, the rabbis embrace a collective responsibility for educating children, ensuring that even children with neglectful, absent or deceased fathers won’t be at a disadvantage.
So let’s give a shout out to Yehoshua ben Gamla. The fact that he took concrete steps to open learning to a broad range of students, regardless of their background, was a significant contribution to Torah study. And it imparts valuable lessons about how we can improve educational systems to this day.
Read all of Bava Batra 21 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on July 16, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
