While not doubting the importance of Bible study, he would prefer that the Talmud, or Gemara, stand at the center of the Israeli school system. The Jewish people created it. But on the other hand, it created the Jewish people. Does one have to believe in God to appreciate Talmud study? No other book has shaped the Jewish people as much as the Babylonian Talmud, asserts Steinsaltz, He should know. The Talmud records the legal and religious discussions thousands of rabbis had over centuries until it was compiled in about CE.
It constitutes the foundation of Jewish law, practice and customs to this very day and forms the core curriculum of Orthodox yeshivas. But Talmud study would be helpful even outside the yeshiva world, Steinsaltz believes.
After all, the Gemara consists mainly of logical and rational back-and-forth discussions about legal issues, aimed at arriving at a factual truth, he points out. What could be more sane than that? If you read the Bible, you somehow become in your mind a little prophet. Learning Talmud would bring a big change to the Israeli mind, because it deals with and is connected to dialectic. Talmudic discussions are indeed often methodological attempts to arrive at a just conclusion on the basis of scrutinizing a legal problem.
Certain segments speak, quite literally, of the power of demons or magic amulets. One particularly baffling segment describes how several sages created vegetables and other food items for their own consumption pretty much ex nihilo, by merely uttering some magical formulas. Steinsaltz, a white-bearded all-round scholar who has published more than 60 books on subjects ranging from Jewish mysticism to zoology, has many responses to such challenges.
Outside, over bulgogi, Park Hyunjun laid out the goals behind his curriculum. Before I left, the dean pulled out a crate of Talmud books in Korean that the school used.
There were forty-page books with more cartoons than words and two-hundred-and-fifty-page books that included lesson plans and study questions. Korean mothers want to know how so many Jewish people became geniuses. Korean women want to know the secret. They found the secret in this book. His comments were widely shared online. A few smaller outlets were skeptical. The Jewish Talmud is a dense compilation of oral laws annotated with rabbinical discussions, consisting of about two and a half million words.
The legend is that God recited the Talmud, the oral law, to Moses on Mount Sinai, while simultaneously giving him the Torah, the written law. Many Jews believe that one cannot study the Talmud without a solid foundation of Torah study. Even for those well versed in the Torah, the Talmud is a challenging read.
I studied the Talmud in seventh grade at a Jewish day school, in Atlanta. In one semester, my class covered two chapters that comprised less than a quarter of a per cent of the Talmud. One of the chapters dealt with lost items, and I was struck by the specificity of the scenarios.
If you find a cake with a pottery shard in it, can you keep it? Do you have to report the discovery of a pile of fruit? What do you do if you find an item built into the wall of your house? It was hard to imagine South Koreans halfway around the world deriving any value from this book without a guide like the rabbi at my Jewish day school. But, as it happens, they do have a guide: a seventy-eight-year-old rabbi named Marvin Tokayer, who lives in Great Neck. On his quiet street, there were mezuzahs as far as the eye could see.
He wore a button-down shirt with a dark sweater and dark dress pants; atop his thick white hair sat a black yarmulke. His living room was decorated with Asian art: the carpet from China, the woodblock prints and vase from Japan, the wooden rice chest from Korea. Tokayer told me that he did not plan on becoming a rabbi.
When he was younger, he wanted to be a comedian—he even performed amateur standup shows in the Catskills, and he still frequently slips into Borscht Belt patter. Outlaws are wanted. Air Force. He had been dodging military service and was on a circuitous path to becoming a doctor: college, rabbinical school, then medical school. But, after graduating from rabbinical school, he joined the Air Force, where he was given the option to serve as a private or volunteer as a chaplain.
After his service, he became the rabbi of a congregation in Queens, and got engaged. At the urging of a friend, he sent a wedding invitation to the famed Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the head of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement.
The rebbe declined, but invited Tokayer and his new wife to visit for a blessing. I just came to say hello. In , Tokayer and his wife made their way to Tokyo. She was profoundly disappointed. Unlike the lofty, magisterial prose of the Torah, she found the Talmud to have "all the imperfections, the trivialities, the multiplicity of voices, the wild associations - everything that characterises human conversation.
But Fine eventually fell in love with the book and is now overseeing the publication of a new edition. She relates in particular to the Aggadah, the folkloric stories in the Talmud, which rub shoulders with the dense, legalistic Halakha text, and seem sometimes to subvert it.
It was just such a story that was read out in the Israeli parliament in February this year. Knesset member Ruth Calderon's minute long maiden speech began with autobiography, as she described her Zionist upbringing and the "void" she had felt at not being able to read the Talmud as a girl.
Then came a gesture which Fine describes as marking a profound cultural shift in Israel - Calderon opened a volume of Talmud. After reading the Aramaic, she embarked on a word-by-word textual analysis of a story about a rabbi who became immersed in his studies, and his wife who waited for him to return home.
As a tear falls from the wife's eye, the roof that the rabbi is sitting on to study collapses underneath him and he falls to his death. Calderon says the story was a comment on the rifts in Israeli society, and that the self-righteousness demonstrated by the rabbi in the story was something everyone could fall into. The key thing was the ability to see another's point of view - an ability central to being able to read the Talmud. Judaism does not belong to any one side.
But the speech went viral and prompted frenzied editorials in the Jewish press - some of them critical. This is partly because Calderon is a figurehead for secular Judaism, and sharply at odds with Israel's ultra-Orthodox community. In the ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, scholars receive a stipend to study the Talmud, and are exempt from paying taxes and performing military service. Calderon opposes this - she came to the Knesset as a member of the Yesh Atid party, which polled unexpectedly well this year on a policy of "sharing the burden" the burden of tax and military service.
Equally unpalatable to some ultra-Orthodox, Calderon opened the first liberal yeshiva, where women and non-believers are welcomed to study texts deemed important to Hebrew identity. It is said that about liberal study halls now operate in Israel. The Talmud is also making its mark in wider Israeli society in other ways. It increasingly appears in leadership courses, in newspaper columns and TV shows.
A recent series of talks at the National Library, where Calderon used to be head of Culture and Education, asked a series of well-known personalities to discuss Talmudic passages. Calderon points out that the increased popularity in Israel of Aramaic-sounding names like Alma is a testament to the resurgent popularity of the ancient text.
While the Torah is more about wars and kings, the Talmud is domestic. I want the best people - the writers, the poets, the scriptwriters for TV - the people who are making Jewish culture [to read it]. Gila Fine says that she wants the Talmud to be in every Jewish home and to be read by every Jew - male and female - but adds that there will always be a role for the Talmudic scholar who devotes a lifetime's study to the most complex and intricate tractates.
It's like saying: 'Do you want everyone to be dabbling in theoretical mathematics? Video by Anna Bressanin. Listen back to the two-part series The Talmud via iplayer or browse the Heart and Soul podcast archive. Clarification: An earlier version of this story did not make clear that the story about Einstein's regret at having failed to study the Talmud was drawn from a book by Rabbi Aaron Parry.
Yeshivat Chovevei Torah School. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. At the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem, scholars may spend years or decades in Talmudic study. Anatomy of a Talmudic page. Mishnah 2. The Gemara 3.
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