okay i've only given myself a few minutes to describe what the talmud is and like that's a
crazy impossible task it is such a strange and unusual and amazing and wonderful document
that to just try to scrunch it down into a few minutes is going to be a very challenging
idea but nevertheless i think i have a couple of ideas and let me share them with you first of all
let's look at something a little more prozac what exactly is like let's say the structure of the
talmud and its purpose so probably the best way to understand is to have a look at a modern printing
of a talmudic page as you can see here and this has been helpfully color coded to give you a sense
of the kind of literary archaeology that is present on every page of talmud
the first section that you have to look at is this sort of coral color the pink color
and that is the mishna now we had a whole class several weeks ago about uh what the mishna was
and so i'm not going to summarize all of that class here but the talmud is really a commentary
on the mishnah and just like the mishnah is sort of like a law code i mean it is a
little more organized and it it has like you know general subjects like this whole order deals with
the jewish calendar and jewish holidays and this whole order deals with damages and things like
that so it has some structure to it but it really it's not the same as a law book either it has some
very wild differences the talmud is essentially a commentary on the mishna immediately following
the mishna you will have a discussion that will include literally tens maybe hundreds of speakers
primarily rabbis but also as we saw occasionally you'll see a non-jew make a statement or a woman
be involved in a story and it's this this is what makes it really strange it's like kind of like uh
it's it's highly arcane in its language it's very coded and it takes a lot of training to be able
to decipher it uh you have there's no punctuation in the standard printings and you have to break up
the sentences appropriately you have to understand whether something is a question or a statement or
a rebuttal or a sarcastic comment or a hyperbolic comment it's very hard to try and work out the
language but nevertheless it's something that would have been committed to memory that scholars
would have actually memorized page after page of talmud and it's essentially like a a long
transcript of a discussion that took its starting point in the mishnah meaning uh if the mishnah is
talking about in this particular case i have to be talking about when one recites the shema prayer
then it will start discussing you know when one recites the shema prayer but as conversations go
they tend to go from point to point to point from tangent to tangent to tangent which is something
that is delightful about conversation we we enjoy the unpredictability of communicating with our
peers in this matter and the talmud essentially follows that and enshrines a kind of literary
stream of consciousness in this document and it is amazing it requires tremendous concentration and
focus to make the leaps of logic and imagination that's required to follow the discussion but it re
you know it provides incredibly satisfying results and that that's what happens in the mishnah the
the the talmud which by the way is also known as the gemara the word gemara is aramaic and uh
it means literally like finishing completing gamar in hebrew the term talmud and gemara are sometimes
interchanged possibly because of the fear of church interference in the text which happened
in the 13th century and onward meaning referring to talmud as opposed to referring to gemara to
try and avoid the ire of the enemies of this particular text but it can go on for pages
and pages it's much much longer than the mishnah one mishna like a paragraph length of mishnah may
result in 15 20 pages of discussion that follows so that's really what's going on the conversation
discussing the mishnah by the amuraym occasionally bringing in other mishnahs other passages in
talmud other statements from people other logical arguments they'll be brought into this particular
discussion it's worthy of note by the way that the talmud even though i'm showing you the first page
it has no real beginning it's often compared to an ocean they say the sea of talmud and just like
you know you can't say the sea has a particular source that it all comes from one place it's
just there and then you have to enter the sea at some shoreline some places might be you know
nice easy places to get into the water like let's say the second chapter of bhavamitsia
which deals with lost and found that's like a nice sandy beach south florida kind of style
and other places are like these rocky fjords with you know water crashing and you know like
trying to jump into the middle of uh i don't know monaco's or something like that with sacrificial
law and things like that it's very very hard but nevertheless everyone kind of approaches it
and has to learn to swim right away it's it's brilliant and amazing i'm already talking more
than i hope to uh it embracing the text to use the uh remarkable metaphor of rabbi david
bashevkan is on the right here rashi which is a commentator from the 11th century godwin will
speak more about him as we go on in this course and his descendants and other students uh the
tosafot from the 12th to 15th century and they're essentially all concentrating on the central area
of the text and i'm not going to label it here but there are many other commentators surrounding them
on the page which is the prime real estate many many more in other books beyond this particular
page but this gives you a sense of of like what the document is all about the structure is here
the function of it is basically to explicate the mishna because the mishna itself demands further
elaboration i mentioned earlier rabbi david bashevkin and i have to give a shout out because
uh he runs an amazing website called 1840.org and they have really amazing discussions there
on all kinds of big jewish ideas and i love listening to it he recently had a podcast with uh
professor haim simon shown here who is an expert in jewish thought he wrote a great book called and
i heard on this episode something that just made so much sense i'm going to share it with you now
as sort of why the talmud is so important so kaim simon introduces the audience to the podcast to
the work of robert m cover a lawyer who published an extremely influential article in 1982 called
nomos and narrative and in this article he basically used the talmud as a starting port
now what exactly is no motion narrative no mos is the greek word meaning law
and narrative is kind of like the story behind the law and in fact that's what happens in the talmud
uh there's lots of like dense legal sometimes picayune discussion of tiny little details
sometimes theoretically details that can't possibly actually happen in real life
and then interspersed with you know a big excursis on the the meaning of life the purpose of the
world the nature of the afterlife uh the uh you know philosophy recipes uh the behavior of a cat
all kinds of things are popular sayings uh they're like they seem to be thrown in there and some
commentators have felt there's kind of random it is hardly random it's highly intentional and
what uh professor cover wants to say is that in order for a legal system to work and the talmud
is at its foundation a legal system it's called by some the constitution of judaism big constitution
you can't like fold it and carry your pocket unless it's not a phone or something like that
the the talmud mixes nomos law with narrative with the story behind the law and this is really
important because if a society argues uh mr clover professor clover if a society simply you know
lays down rules without explaining to society why those rules exist without providing the narrative
behind them then ultimately that's a type of tyranny the rules are arbitrary they could be
you know made up any way you want on the other hand when you support the rules with the narrative
as i've often found even in my administrative capacity at the college
people understand and can accept a no to their request if they understand the why behind it
that's essentially what the talmud is doing the talmud kind of like wanders between
big discussions of no most related issues to discussions of narrative related issues and it
forms a somewhat complex and sophisticated whole bringing together nomos and narrative at once
i strongly urge you have a look at that podcast on the talmud i'll put it in the source notes uh
below the video so that's really what's going on in the talmud and its content now i have
written a lot more about the talmud i have many other videos on the talmud on this site as well
um i i'm not very much involved in actually producing a daily video on the talmud it's studied
in a format called daf yomi which means a folio a day two sides of one page per day and and this is
a program used by thousands of people around the world today uh perhaps hundreds of thousands even
um called daphyomi and it takes seven and a half years to complete the entire talmud
so i'm in the middle of this big project to produce 2 711 little history videos that go
with every page of the talmud i invite you to have a look so i'm not going to say much more
about the talmud here what i will say though is that it is a document that has managed to retain
the fascination of its students for centuries it is absolutely engaging and refreshing
and sometimes frustrating and sometimes enervating but always energizing and it is the document
around much of judaism has revolved for the last 1500 years or so am i enthusiastic about it i
hope so okay i hope you found this video useful and i look forward to speaking to you and some
more you