Ask about Judaism

[agricola]

Christians often say that Jews are under the law and that Christianity is about mercy and freedom from the law. Are Jews under the law? Well, it depends on how you define law? And what exactly do you mean by under? And what would Rabbi Akiva say about that? How about Hillel? And here in Torah it says we are all free …

Pull up a chair. Have a glass of wine. This will take some time.

(found at Patheos)

'The Talmud' is often talked about as if it is one thing. But it is more like an encyclopedia than it is like a book. It is more like - say - the Congressional Record than it is a book of law. It does have laws in it. It also has recipes. It has a few ghost stories. It has recommendations to look after your health. It has arguments about whether or not a certain oven is or isn't properly kosher, together with a story of divine intervention - which is dismissed as irrelevant!

The compilation of the Talmud took several centuries, and it isn't really quite done, exactly. There are also two versions which aren't exactly the same, so which Talmud? In English print editions, it is usually at least 28 volumes, sometimes more. The Steinsalz edition runs to somewhere over 40 volumes.

It has a volume 1, but it starts in the middle of a discussion. It assumes that everybody involved in the conversation ALREADY knows most of the material and all of the Tanakh (Jewish Bible). It assumes you KNOW things - that you don't know yet. It tells you things you thought you know, and reveals that you didn't really get it AT ALL. It spends about 20 pages on what you should do if you find something that someone lost. Maybe it was 40 pages. A lot. The core of it is mostly Hebrew, but with a lot of Aramaic - and some occasional Greek.

One of the earlier commentaries which is invariably included with modern print editions was made over a thousand years ago, in what is now France: even then, some of the terminology needed to be explained to the 'modern' (eleventh century) reader.

The hand copied editions always started on page 2 in each major section (named). The first print edition began with page 2. Every edition has exactly the same material on the same 'page' - which sometimes means 'Bava Kamma page 38b' goes on for six or seven physical pages, depending on the commentaries. Every set of Talmud always begins on page 2, because knowledge is never complete, and never WILL be complete, and there really is no place to start: it is the sea of Talmud; you just start where you are.

h**p://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Metzia.2a.1?lang=b ... l&lang2=en

There's a taste. You can't immediately tell (without knowing it) but most of the people who are 'talking' and 'arguing' with each other, did not live during the same time periods. This discussion crosses time (several centuries) and space (from Israel to Babylonia and back).

[teresa]

Very interesting info, agricola.

[agricola]

What most Christians don't understand - even the ones who've heard the term 'the Talmud' before, and a lot haven't - is that as far as regular, traditional Judaism is concerned, the Talmud is JUST AS AUTHORITATIVE as the written Torah: the Bible. And you can't properly understand the written version WITHOUT the oral transmission.

In fact, most orthodox who do serious 'religious studies', stop looking at the written Torah at about age 10. After that, it is all Talmud, all the time. The 'Bible stories' are something you teach to children: serious adults grapple with the Talmud instead. There are thousands of adults who try to study one page a day - its a special program called 'Daf Yomi' (a page a day) and you can get through the Babylonian Talmud (the longer one) in roughly seven and a half years.

After all, the Torah and selected readings from the Prophets are read in portions weekly every year, and the Psalms provide large chunks of the daily prayer services. No need to spend much extra time on that.

Today's daf yomi (I get a daily email) is on the details of what exactly is included in the sale, if you buy an entire city. Yesterday is was about buying an olive press, and the day before that, buying an oven. Apparently we are in the midst of an entire section on sale contracts. Remember, this is a culture without the concept of 'separation of church (religion) and state'. All law is 'religious' law.

A while back, we were looking at discussions about determining the kosher status of bread boards.

[agricola]

And the section called 'Shabbat' includes this one (applicable for the day just ended):

The categories of work [forbidden on Shabbat] are forty less one: sowing, plowing, reaping, making sheaves, threshing, winnowing, picking the chaff from the grain, milling, sifting, kneading, baking, shearing, bleaching, hackling, dyeing, spinning, stretching the threads on the loom, making meshes, weaving, dividing, knotting, untying, sewing, tearing, trapping, slaughtering, skinning, salting hides, curing, scraping, cutting, writing, erasing, building, dismantling, extinguishing, kindling, finishing, and carrying out from one domain to another.

- Talmud, Shabbat 73a

From that, we get the rule that combing your hair is forbidden on Shabbat (a type of untying, or winnowing, I believe).

[agricola]

Shabbat is one of the six major Orders of the Talmud - it is divided into six Orders, which are made up of a total of 49 tractates - you can see that the Orders are not of equal sizes.

The Talmud proper is also in two parts - Mishna (Repetition) and Gemara (completion). The Mishna was the first part compiled and consists of concise restatements of Torah commandments. The structure of all the Orders (except in minor tractates) is: mishnaic statement (Hebrew), followed by the gemara (discussion of that statement, in Aramaic and Hebrew (typically). Then in the printed editions, surrounding the Mishnah and Gemara on the page in specific locations (and sometimes in particular fonts), certain of the earliest and major commentators.
Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki) 's commentary, for instance, is invariably included in Rashi font - from tenth century France.

Lesser commentaries are sometimes referred to by footnote entries (essentially) - those, you have to have the reference books separately. The whole thing is sort of like an internet page with hyperlinks, except nothing is digital.

The Mishnah is a compilation of legal opinions and debates. Statements in the Mishnah are typically terse, recording brief opinions of the rabbis debating a subject; or recording only an unattributed ruling, apparently representing a consensus view. The rabbis recorded in the Mishnah are known as the Tannaim.[citation needed]

Since it sequences its laws by subject matter instead of by biblical context, the Mishnah discusses individual subjects more thoroughly than the Midrash, and it includes a much broader selection of halakhic subjects than the Midrash. The Mishnah's topical organization thus became the framework of the Talmud as a whole. But not every tractate in the Mishnah has a corresponding Gemara. Also, the order of the tractates in the Talmud differs in some cases from that in the Mishnah.
[hide]

v t e

The Six Orders of the Mishnah (ששה סדרי משנה‎)
Zeraim (Seeds)
Moed (Festival)
Nashim (Women)
Nezikin (Damages)
Kodashim (Holies)
Tohorot (Purities)

in Zeraim, you find the following tractates:
Berakhot
Pe'ah
Demai
Kil'ayim
Shevi'it
Terumot
Ma'aserot
Ma'aser Sheni
Hallah
Orlah
Bikkurim

in Mo'ed:
Shabbat
Eruvin
Pesahim
Shekalim
Yoma
Sukkah
Beitza
Rosh Hashanah
Ta'anit
Megillah
Mo'ed Katan
Hagigah

in Nashim:
Yevamot
Ketubot
Nedarim
Nazir
Sotah
Gittin
Kiddushin

and so forth - each Mishnah contains set of tractates, and a reference will usually be the tractate and page number (side a or side b). Almost all the time, the specific Talmud will be the Babylonian one - when not, the ref will specify 'Yerushalmi' or the Jerusalem Talmud.

So if you were looking for material on, say, marriage agreements, you'd look in Ketubot. Except you'd also find relevant material scattered around in OTHER tractates, too, because (like most people) the discussions recorded don't always stay on topic quite as nicely as one might hope!

The first Talmud printed on a printing press came out in 1523. Did you know that printing was an occupation enthusiastically adopted by Jews, early on? Some of the oldest printing houses in the world are Jewish ones, like Soncino.

The first tractate was published earlier - by Soncino, in 1484. The Soncino publishing house is still active.

The most famous of the first Jewish printers, the Soncino family hailed from the Alsatian town of Speyer and settled in Soncino, a village in northern Italy from which they took their name. Joshua Soncino set up one of the world's first Hebrew printing presses in 1484, on which he printed Soncino's first Hebrew book, the Talmud tractate Berakoth. He also produced the first printed Hebrew Bible complete with vowels--no mean feat for the early, primitive days of printing.

Soncino is currently settled in London.

[teresa]

Let me see if I am understanding you.

Mishna + Gemara = Talmud

Mishna is a concise restatement of Torah commandments found in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, sorted topically.

Gemara is a concise record of opinions/debates that are associated with each topic and sub-topic of the Mishna.

In printed editions of the Talmud (as opposed to hand written?), the views of the earliest and major commentators' are included in full near the topic they address.

Although the Talmud is organized topically, there may be opinions/debates found in other sections, rather than under the topic itself.

Question: Does Midrash refer to the concise opinons/debates found in the Talmud, or to the full commentaries that are recorded in the printed Talmud, or both? And are there new Midrashes on these topics being recorded somewhere?

[agricola]

Midrash is a whole other 'thing'. You can find bound books full of midrash TOO.

I have a photo of a typical Talmud page someplace. Let me see if I can post it -

But, basically:
yes. the Talmud 'proper' is the Mishnah (a statement of legal principle, usually a Torah quote or partial quote) and the Gemara is the first level of commentary, mostly from the Babylonian schools but also including material from the schools in the Land of Israel. Until about the 2nd century CE, ALL of this information was entirely oral, passed from teacher to student. If you read it (if you could read it) you would think that Hillel and Akiva and Shammai and Gamaliel were discussing things in person - when actually Hillel and Shammai lived around 100 BCE and Akiva and Gamaliel lived about 300 or 400 years after.

A teacher called Judah the Prince (Yehudah ha-Nasi) was the first to collect all the mishnaic statements he knew of or could find, and write then DOWN. That was a huge decision, because it was felt that only by personal instruction from a teacher could someone truly learn this material. But the persecutions of Hadrian and other emperors, plus the disastrous loss of large numbers of teachers and students in the rebellions - especially the Bar Kochba rebellion of the middle 2nd century CE, showed that this knowledge could easily be lost if it wasn't preserved.

Rabbi Judah the Prince (in the Talmud, he's usually the voice referred to only as 'Rabbi') was a major leader, and made this executive decision to commit the basic Oral Law to writing.

Of course, as soon as it was available, the Schools started discussing that - AND adding their traditional legal interpretations of each mishna, also. So quite often, the Gemara for a Mishna includes multiple opinions and POV's. Sometimes there is a sort of 'final word', and sometimes the topic is left open with multiple possible conclusions - all of them considered valid. Sometimes there is simply no resolution possible, and the conclusion says, basically, 'this is tabled until the return of Elijah' who is expected to make the proper rulings then.

[agricola]

There.
By the time printing was invented, Talmud volumes already had marginal notes - as you can see, the marginal notes overwhelm the actual Mishna and Gemara! And surrounding the commentaries you can see the tiny references in the outer margin, right? Those are refs to OTHER commentaries that aren't 'important' enough (or old enough) to be included in the printed volumes.

Midrash though, are 'stories' - kinds of like parables. They have lessons but they aren't LAW. The Talmud is mostly legal material with included non-legal material, because hey, people drift off topic or the topic reminds them of a story....but midrash are all stories, even though some of them are commenting too.

It is all interconnected though - the Talmud is the 'sea' after all, and the sea touches all shores (metaphor here) and one 'shore' is the Written Torah and another one is 'the Midrash'. So to speak.

I just dropped over the Soncino Press webpage, and they divide their books into the following categories:

Talmud
Bible/Torah
Midrash
Mysticism/Kabbalah
Judaism

h**p://www.soncino.com/

They may be in London, but they'll gladly sell you something online!
Or you can visit the Jewish Publication Society page - they are in Philadelphia:

h**ps://jps.org/

[agricola]

Yes, it can be confusing - but do remember that this is a literary tradition that goes back NO LESS THAN 2500 years. It has had a lot of time to grow, branch, and spread.

It is still going on. The text of the Talmud may have been set in print by the sixth century CE or so, but the process of commentary continued and continues still. The Steinsalz Talmud was just completed (took over 20 years) and THAT edition contains the Mishna and Gemara, and Rashi's commentary from 11th century France, and Adin Steinsalz' commentary - from the 20th century.

There are also ongoing and active 'responsa literature': the legal decisions of prominent rabbis (in orthodox circles) or legal committees (in Reform and Conservative circles) which are collected and circulated in print, online, and in book form, continually -

these are also 'talmud' in the sense that they are continual updates and commentaries on what the Torah (Written) means by what it says - and the Talmud is also 'what the Written Torah says' (Mishnah) with 'what the Written Torah means' (Gemara).

Here's a link to an ebook from CCAR - the Reform Committee - responsa which is fairly recent (I think the 1970's):

h**p://press.ccar-ebook.com/Modern_Reform_Responsa/

and here's an online discussion of Lord Jakobovitz (a Rabbi in UK) with a decision concerning infertility research and birth control, etc -
h**p://www.medethics.org.il/website/index.php/ ... y-abortion

This is also Talmud - or at least, talmudic! And if you are someone who is part of the UK Jewish community, and you consider Jakobovitz' opinions to be authoritative, then his decisions will be your 'law' and you will consider it to be 'Torah'.

[teresa]

In the photo you posted, where is the Gemara?

I think I may have seen a copy of the Mishna once a very long-time ago at someone's house (I was tagging along with a friend). I remember opening a page at random and it had instructions about something (can't remember what), but no commentaries.