Watching Joseph Cedar's award-winning film "Footnote" was a nearly autobiographical experience for me. I recognized myself in the characters, like it was a scene out my own life. I am the Talmud student sitting alone in the classroom opposite Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (one of the main characters, a Talmud scholar), I am the doctorate student who receives reading assignments from Uriel Shkolnik (Eliezer's son and professional rival in the film), and my head, obviously, is one of the dozens of heads poring over manuscripts in the national library. It is no coincidence that the scene that resonated most with me was the opening scene in which Uriel, in his speech upon being accepted into the national academy for science, chooses to praise his philologist father who, as he tells it, would present himself out of modesty as a mere "teacher" a completely fabricated story, to which the father takes offense. This tension between scholar and teacher has accompanied my own experience throughout my years in the Talmud department and outside it, both as a student and as a teacher. As a graduate of Israel's religious education system, I took delight in the freedom from religious and educational assumptions that university afforded. A certain distance from the material (text, as it is called in the university) is required, and in the Talmud department, one must also distance oneself from Jewish law and religious rulings. When you listen to the words of our sages you hear fascinating things. You quickly discover that they are not speaking a singular language, that the Mishnah (the first major written redaction of Jewish oral law) and the Tosefta (a supplementary compilation of Jewish oral law from the period of the Mishnah) are completely different from one another. You discover that the Gemara (the component of the Talmud comprising rabbinical analysis of and commentary on the Mishnah) sometimes completely distorts the Mishnah in order to make a ruling. You find influences of other cultures and religions Greek, Roman, Persian. For me, studying the Talmud was a truly intoxicating experience. In my years in the education system I have seen students search desperately for meaning. During my time as a "teaching rabbi" at a yeshiva for young girls, one of the students approached me once and asked: "Will the way I pray change after I study the Talmud's Tractate Brachot-" I found the question to be juvenile. What about intellectual space? What is wrong with studying for the sake of learning- There is something unique and extreme in Talmud departments, especially the one at Hebrew University, still haunted by the spirit of Eliezer Shkolnik. Perhaps it is the need to radically differ from the yeshiva world and create a unique niche, or perhaps it is something else, that has preserved the philological ideology of the 19th century in the Talmud department. Most of the academic revolutions since then have skipped over the study of the Talmud. Literature, feminism, post-modernism, all are forgotten when you enter the Talmud department, rendering it irrelevant for many students. Israeli society has witnessed a renaissance of religious studies in recent years. As an observer from both outside the phenomenon and from within it, I can attest to the fact that this is a real cultural revolution. And how does the Talmud department fit into all this? It does not, unfortunately. Eliezer Shkolnik would probably answer me with the story about how archeologists can uncover potsherds, clean them and sort them, but it would be irresponsible for them to assemble a pot out of them for the benefit of the eager crowd. But since we are dealing with literature stemming from the human experience and not with archeology, it is our duty to put the shards together, infuse them with life and present the outside world with the finished product, so it can live.