About
I wanted a page that shows me the day’s daf in English, tells me where it sits in the Talmud, and gives me one thing to think about. Everything I found was either Hebrew-first or an email longer than the daf.
What you get
- The whole daf, in English. The translation is by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz (1937 to 2020), a Jerusalem rabbi who spent most of his working life turning the Talmud into modern Hebrew and English so that anyone could read it. In his edition the bold words are the Talmud’s own and the regular text is his explanation woven through. The Hebrew and Aramaic are one tap away. So is a “Talmud only” view that hides the explanation.
- Where you are. The Seder, the tractate, the chapter, the daf, and the day of the 2,711-day cycle.
- A short note, written by an AI. Two or three sentences on what the page argues about, and one question with no settled answer. It is labelled as an AI note every single time, because that is what it is.
- The shape of the page, drawn by the same AI. A page of Talmud does not mark its own joints: a question, a proof, an objection and a story run on without headings. The map cuts the page into its moves, points each at the lines it covers, and says in one sentence how the whole page runs. It is labelled as AI, it can be folded away, and as you read, a line at the top says where you are.
- A permalink for every daf, so yesterday is one tap back and any page can be shared.
How Daf Yomi works
Daf Yomi (“a page a day”) is a shared reading schedule: one leaf of the Babylonian Talmud every day, in print order, until you have read all of it. Then you start again. It was proposed by Rabbi Meir Shapiro in 1923 and has run continuously since.
A daf is one leaf, both sides. Side a, then side b. The Talmud’s pages have been numbered the same way since the first printed editions five hundred years ago, so “Berakhot 2a” means the same page in every edition and every language. Numbering starts at 2 because the title page is 1; each tractate starts fresh.
The six Orders of the Talmud, sized by how many days each takes
The 40 tractates inside them (hover or tap one to see which)
Cycle 14: Sunday, 5 January 2020 to Monday, 7 June 2027. The cycle has run without a break since 1923; everyone learning Daf Yomi anywhere in the world is on the same page today.
- Zeraim זרעים Seeds: blessings and prayer (the farming laws have no Babylonian Gemara). 1 tractate, 63 days.
- Moed מועד Appointed times: Shabbat and the festivals. 12 tractates, 731 days.
- Nashim נשים Women: marriage, divorce, vows. 7 tractates, 605 days.
- Nezikin נזיקין Damages: civil law, courts, idolatry, ethics. 8 tractates, 682 days.
- Kodashim קדשים Holy things: the Temple and its offerings. 11 tractates, 558 days.
- Tahorot טהרות Purities: only Niddah has a Babylonian Gemara. 1 tractate, 72 days.
Shekalim is read from the Jerusalem Talmud and three short tractates near the end of Kodashim (Kinnim, Tamid, Middot) are mostly Mishnah, which is why the count is 40 blocks and not the 37 tractates with a Babylonian Gemara. First and last: Berakhot 2 on 5 Jan 2020, Niddah 73 on 7 Jun 2027.
About the AI note
The note is written each night by Claude, a large language model made by Anthropic, from the English text of that day’s daf and nothing else. It is not a rabbi. It is not a scholar. It has not read Rashi. It is asked to summarize and to raise a question, not to tell you what the page means or what you should do. It has, of course, read the entire Talmud before it got here, likely in several translations. Claude was trained on an extraordinary amount of text, and that almost certainly included more than one complete Talmud. The rule is about what it may use, not what it knows.
I have hardcoded a few core principles into how Claude interprets Talmud. AI-generated notes may quote only phrases that appear word for word in the text; they may not cite later authorities; they may not state a halachic ruling as practice. If, in the process of constructing an AI note, Claude fails those checks twice, the page shows no note that day. The style the AI notes are written in is a house style that will keep changing. If a note is off, tell me.
The map is made the same way, from the same text, under the same checks, and one more: wherever the editors of the translation begin a new passage or a new mishna, the map must begin a section there too. Cutting a page into moves is an editorial decision, and nobody, least of all a language model, has established that this is the shape of the daf; every map says so above its first line, and the page’s own marks are the only joints it is not allowed to move. The kinds it sorts the moves into (a question, an answer, an objection, a proof, a dispute, a case, a story, a ruling, a question left open) are a fixed list of twelve, plain words for what the page is doing. Pages do not all have the same shape, and that is the point: after a few weeks of maps you start to see the shapes yourself.
If you want real teaching, every daf page links to Hadran, My Jewish Learning, Kollel Iyun Hadaf, and the Steinsaltz Center. They are the scholars. This is a door.
Where the text comes from
Every word of Talmud on this site is served live from Sefaria’s open API. The Babylonian Talmud is The William Davidson Talmud (Koren Noé edition), released by Koren Publishers under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license. The 21 days of Shekalim use the Jerusalem Talmud in Heinrich Guggenheimer’s translation (CC BY), and the Kinnim and Middot days use the Mishnah, as the Daf Yomi calendar does; those pages credit their own versions. Nothing on this site is sold and nothing is behind a login.
Which day is it
The daf follows the civil date where you are, the same convention Sefaria, Hebcal, and the printed calendars use. If you learn after nightfall and want to be a day ahead, the next daf is one tap away at the bottom of every page. If you would rather have it come to you, the daf by email arrives once a day at the hour you choose.
Who
Joe Eichenbaum. I’m a partner at a consulting firm that works with state and local governments, and I build things on the side (the rest of them live at gizmowarehouse.org). This site is daf-yomi.dev; the code is open on GitHub; the site costs almost nothing to run, so it will stay free. Corrections, complaints, and ideas: joe@group17a.com.