- Have you ever heard of The Talmud?
Is it commentary from the Rabbis?
Is it a bunch of Jewish law stuff?
Tens of thousands of students
around the world study this
seemingly endless Aramaic encyclopedia, but why?
And where did it come from?
Let's say you could find all the answers
to those perplexing and confusing moral questions
in the Bible.
Virtually any question you could think of
is not only discussed,
but meticulously argued within the Talmud.
And it's essential rulings aren't considered opinion,
but the conclusions of the arguments
are binding and codified by later legal texts.
Before we go into the history of the Talmud,
let me just tell you what the Oral Law is,
as the two are very connected.
According to the traditional understanding in Judaism,
on Mount Sinai, God revealed the written Torah to Moses,
aka the five books of Moses.
But along with that, God gave a component body of knowledge
to flesh out and fully explain that written Torah.
The written Torah says to "keep Shabbat,"
but nowhere does it really say how to do that.
The component known as the Oral Torah
explains all the ins and outs
alluded to within the written Torah.
But Torah was also meant to be intimately personal,
and almost malleable for each person.
With the proper and full understanding, of course.
In that way, the Torah is thought of as a living document.
The oral component, a library of information
that was memorized by the sages of ancient Israel and taught in a one-on-one manner,
from teacher to student, or parent to child, made this possible.
This is how the Torah was taught
for over 1,500 years of faithful transmission.
But with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE,
things changed dramatically
and there came a need for writing down
some of this tradition,
starting first with a work known as Mishna
and, then centuries later, the Talmud.
(upbeat music)
When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE,
it was an unbearable disaster for every living Jew.
Think 9/11, combined with
the burning of the Library of Alexandria,
times getting your identity stolen,
while watching your childhood home
get demolished by Hitler.
I know this sounds extreme,
but it was really that bad.
Without the Temple,
everything about Jewish life was uprooted.
The central government, the court system,
and the religious authority.
Though there was a community that remained in Israel,
most had been exiled to places like Syria, Egypt,
and most notably, Babylon. Think modern day Iraq.
The point is, with all of that,
plus continued persecutions in their new homes in exile,
teaching the Oral Law in that one-on-one style
became a whole lot more difficult.
As we mentioned in our last video about the Mishna,
a rabbi named Judah Hanasi, aka Judah the Prince,
understood that policy would need to change
if Judaism was going to survive.
He made an earth shattering break with tradition and compiled the Mishna,
a collection of statements about Jewish law that detailed
the essential components of the Oral Torah over six books.
But eventually, along with further persecution of the Jewish people
when Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity
as the religion of the Roman Empire in 325 CE,
even this Mishnaic system would need some support.
Jump forward a couple hundred years, and a vast companion
document to the Mishna was created, the Talmud.
Actually, two Talmuds.
By the second half of the fourth century,
the community in Israel, now known as Palestine, started to really suffer.
The Roman Emperor Constantius' anti-Jewish edicts
impeded Jewish economic growth, authorities prevented rabbis
from meeting to carry out essential Jewish decisions,
and Christians burning down synagogues was condoned, if not common.
Clearly, if the oral tradition was to be kept intact,
another innovation would be necessary.
Multiple scholars elucidated the Mishna.
Rabbi Abba Arikha,
also known as Rav Abba bar Aybo,
but most simply known as Rav,
compiled the Sifra and the Sifri.
Rabbi Chiyya composed the Tosefta,
and Rabbi Yoshaya and Bar Kapra
composed the Baraisot.
But around 365 CE, years after the fall of the Second Temple,
Rabbi Yochanan, began to compile the Jerusalem Talmud
from the Mishniac teachings.
It wasn't really compiled in Jerusalem, but mostly in Tiberias,
which is why many scholars call it
the Palestinian Talmud instead.
It is believed that Rabbi Mannah
and Rabbi Yosse ben Rabbi Bun
wrote the final text of the work
around 100 years after Rabbi Yochanan died.
Since the Mishna had a cryptic nature
that required a teacher's guidance
for it to be fully understood,
the rabbis of Israel would write down those explanations.
But still trying to hold on to some semblance of oral quality,
the rabbis wouldn't just write down their answers,
but they also recorded meticulous discussions
that looked at each question from all possible angles.
The Talmud was compiled from these writings.
Now, the Talmud doesn't read
like the standard instruction manual,
but a lively, conversational transcript
that talks about Shabbat one minute,
then jumps to mixing milk and meat the next.
The biggest rabbis of that generation, known as the Amoraim,
would argue back and forth, citing sources;
aggadic stories, which contains folklore;
and esoteric mystical insights.
Oh, and to top it all off,
it's written in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic,
a difficult Western Aramaic dialect, as well as Hebrew,
and is actually designed as a bit of a logic puzzle
just to keep you on your toes.
This explanation of the Mishna
is referred to as Gemara, literally "completion."
The Mishna and the Gemara together are known as the Talmud.
It was a daunting effort that was never fully completed.
The major books we do have,
Zeraim, Moed, Nashim and Nezikin,
all have significant portions missing.
Two other books, Taharot and Kodashim,
have been lost completely.
However, if, at first,
your grand idea doesn't succeed,
well, maybe someone else will finish it.
Not long after, the same gargantuan task was undertaken
by the Babylonian communities.
While the conditions in Palestine became increasingly caustic
for Jews living there, Babylon's Jewish communities,
which had existed since the time of the destruction
of the First Temple in 586 BCE,
started to flourish in Sura and Pumbeditha
around the later part of the second century.
The cities of Nehardea, Nisibis, and Mahoza
were almost completely populated by Jews.
Jewish academies, or yeshivot,
as they are known today, were prominent,
especially during the off seasons
when work slowed
and thousands of Jews flocked to the academies.
In a lot of ways, the center for Jewish life and thought
had shifted out of Jerusalem,
and migrated to Babylon.
When Rav Ashi became the new president of the academy in Sura,
he began compiling what would come
to be known as the Babylonian Talmud.
Free from Roman and Christian persecution,
the creators of the Babylonian version
had time and space for more
thorough explanations and editing.
It's, therefore, more comprehensive.
By the end of its compilation in the late fifth century,
the Babylonian Talmud had accumulated
over 300 years of rabbinic opinions on Mishna
from all the prominent Jewish academies throughout Babylon,
which included 30 volumes, 5,900 pages in total.
Codifying the majority of the oral tradition
that Moses received at Sinai was no simple task.
Ironically, its completion nearly coincides
with the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 CE,
the very entity that necessitated its creation.
The following generation of rabbis and scholars
known as the Savoraim, or the "explainers,"
finally smoothed over teachings in the Babylonian Talmud,
shaping its final formulation around 550 CE.
As Jewish history progressed into even more difficult times
with the Arab conquest of Israel in 651
and the continued rise of Christianity,
the Babylonian Talmud gained authority over the Jerusalem version.
The Babylonian Talmud was widely circulated
within diaspora communities throughout the Middle Ages.
It wasn't long before it was regarded
as both the new backbone of Jewish learning and tradition,
and the essential guidepost for education
and rulings for all decisions of Jewish law.
Today, the Talmud is taught alongside the Torah in many
traditional religious schools and yeshivahs.
But because of its expansiveness and difficulty,
the Talmud takes far more work to comprehend
and, therefore, requires more time to teach.
The written Torah is considered the word of God
and so is the Oral Torah. But the compilation of the Talmud
was written by man in a specific historical period.
So controversial opinions do show up.
Remember, it's a series of arguments, not a unified manifesto.
You might come across a difficult opinion,
yet the very next sentence might be
an argument from a rabbi about why that idea is wrong.
So you can see how someone who takes an isolated opinion
out of context might present a negative view of Judaism.
And you can also see how those statements could give
the Church driven, anti-semitic cultures of France and Italy
an excuse to burn the handwritten manuscripts in the 13th and 14th centuries.
The attempt to wipe out thousands of years
of Jewish scholarship, though heart-breaking, were clearly not successful.
Eventually, parts of the Talmud
were censored to remove some touchy subjects
that Christians might find disconcerting.
Studying the Talmud is daunting,
if not impenetrable to the uninitiated.
With no vowels, no punctuation, allusions
and quotations from other sources,
and switches from Hebrew to Aramaic on a dime,
if you don't know what you're doing, it can be difficult
to get a solid understanding of the surface ideas,
let alone the deeper hidden meanings.
So it's best studied in pairs.
These learning partners are called "chevrutas",
think your workout buddy, but for religious text.
Studying with a scholar or Rabbi really helps the process, too.
The text is so deep and multi-layered that,
unlike say, an arithmetic book that is only studied by first graders
compared to a textbook on Advanced Number Theory
that would only be read by grad students,
a page of the Talmud could be studied or learned
by a 10-year-old, while the most learned rabbi
could study that same page and still uncover profound insights.
If you studied one page of the Talmud a day,
it would take you 7 and a half years to finish.
In fact, a movement called Daf Yomi
was started in 1923 to do just that!
Today, tens of thousands of Jews
from every corner of the Earth
learn the same page of Talmud on a schedule,
which culminates in a stadium-sized celebration at its completion.
Complete with a "Where's Waldo" appearance.
Feeling a void in the Israeli education system,
Israeli academic and politician Ruth Calderon
discovered a profound connection to the Talmud.
As she puts it,
"I was enamored with its humor, language, profound thinking,
"its modes of discussion and the practicality, humanity,
"and maturity that emerge from its lines.
"I sensed that I had found the love of my life."
In 1996, she founded Alma, the Home for Hebrew Culture in Tel Aviv,
and Elul, the first joint beit midrash, Jewish Study Halls,
for men and women, and for religious and secular.
This ushered in a Jewish renaissance movement,
with tens and hundreds of Israelis studying the Talmud.
The Talmud is a comprehensive document that explores
every aspect of Jewish thought and practice.
But apart from the moral and religious content,
the Talmud serves as a tremendous training tool
for abstract reasoning, applying logic, recognizing
distinctions, and viewing problems from multiple perspectives.
As much as it immerses the reader
in Jewish tenets, traditions and thought,
it also trains them to think
in new and complex ways.
The cliche of the Jewish lawyer may be a stereotype,
but the fact is, many of the approaches of Talmudic learning
are the very concepts covered in the first year of a case law class in law school.
As many religious communities begin Talmudic study at 14 years of age,
with Mishneh learning beginning at age 10,
that's quite the head start for learning foundational legal concepts.
Could Talmudic study be the secret to Jewish success?
Who knows, but the people of South Korea seem to think so,
leading a recent craze that has made Talmudic study
a popular educational tool for all ages.
South Koreans have reached out to Torah academies
inquiring about their Talmud curricula
and visiting famous yeshivot in Israel,
such as The Mir and Aish HaToraht.
Though they have little interest in following the religious
tenets, engaging strictly as an intellectual exercise,
it's pretty incredible that there are rooms
full of South Korean teenagers
learning about Shabbat and Kosher.
So that's the Talmud,
the closest thing we have to capturing the expansive breadth
of Jewish thought and identity.
Born out of the threat of increasing and heart-shattering persecution,
and heart-shattering persecution, of these transitional generations
to preserve, codify, and adapt this sacred tradition
may have been the singular reason for Jewish survival and success
during their 2,000 year exile.
It's certainly not easy to tackle.
In recent years, Jewish publishers like Artscroll and Koren
have gone through the painstaking process of translating the entire Talmud
into English and other languages, making it far more accessible.
You might be able to find translations online as well.
But even with the work of later generations and the translations,
hundreds of students in Jewish academies around the world
spend hours a day trying to crack open
and master the deepest, most profound concepts
that were given to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Thank you so much for watching this video.
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