Nearly 120,000 Jews are expected to gather at sites across North America tomorrow to mark the completion of a seven-and-a-half-year cycle of studying a page a day of the Talmud. Here in the New York area, they will be at Madison Square Garden, the Continental Airlines Arena, and the Javits Center. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Rosemont Theatre in Chicago will also be used for the event. Some of the page-a-day classes meet in public places, including on a train of the Long Island Rail Road.

A few weeks ago, the completion of a 73-volume translation of the Talmud into English by Brooklyn-based Mesorah Publications was marked with a ceremony in the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington. Senators Brownback and Lieberman spoke, and 40 or 50 members of Congress attended.

There is a Jerusalem Talmud and a more widely studied Babylonian Talmud. They are named for the centers of Jewish population and learning in which they were compiled. Another printed Talmud is known as the Vilna Shas, for Vilnius, Lithuania, where it was originally published. Given the energy devoted to Talmud scholarship in America and the way in which Orthodox Judaism has flourished here despite predictions of its demise, there are those, ourselves among them, who reckon it is not premature to speak of an American Talmud.

Religious Jews are often accused of wanting to separate themselves from American culture. But the decision to bring these two separate Talmud celebrations to such central and symbolic American locations suggests that there is among the Orthodox an appreciation for the nation whose religious liberty allows their faith to flourish.

There is a political dimension to all of this: As Jay Lefkowitz reports in the February number of Commentary, President Bush did particularly well among the Orthodox in November’s election, winning 69% of their vote, according to an estimate by pollster Frank Luntz. In the heavily Orthodox Boro Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, Mr. Bush received 82% of the vote, according to Mr. Lefkowitz, a lawyer who served on Mr. Bush’s White House staff.

The new English translation of the Talmud was published by a for-profit company, and it is named the Schottenstein Talmud after a businessman benefactor who underwrote, through a foundation, some of the scholarship on which it was based. As Orthodox Jewish life has benefited from American religious freedom, it has also benefited from American economic freedom.

Thousands of Jewish New Yorkers will be participating in the event tomorrow evening, and we join in congratulating them on a milestone of learning. But one doesn’t have to be a Jew, only an American, to celebrate the fact that tomorrow night’s gathering and the Library of Congress event represent something of America at its best – the providing of a secure home to an oft-persecuted minority, a home where scholarship and religious practice can flourish in freedom.