The Talmud of Relationships, Volume 1: God, Self, and Family

The first printed edition of the Talmud—Daniel Bomberg’s in Italy between 1520 and 1523—established the general formatting used to this day. A section of Mishnah is followed by the Gemara that discusses it. The commentary of the great French commentator Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki) is printed on the inner margin near the binding. The commentary of

On top of this foundation—and what now constitutes the bulk of the Babylonian Talmud—is Gemara.

Some modern scholars have speculated that the Mishnah was originally a set of lecture notes (which helps explain the tight and terse style of Mishnah) that came, in time, to be viewed as a sacred religious text.

Mishnah is the substrata, or foundation, of the Talmud. Specifically it is a collection of tannaitic oral teachings and descriptions of Second Temple practices from the first two centuries of the Common Era.

Without an altar on which to offer sacrifices to God, the Rabbis developed an order of daily prayers for worship and composed specific prayers to be used for all occasions. They put liturgical “flesh on the bones” of life-cycle passages mentioned in Torah, such as marriage and death, creating a rich tradition that taps into the sacred stories of th

R. Akiva is attributed with systematizing halakhah (Jewish law) by developing hermeneutics (methods of biblical interpretation) to interpret the Bible in the realms of both halakhah and midrash.

Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua [transmitted it] to the elders, and the elders [transmitted it] to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the members of the Great Assembly. They said three things, “Be deliberate in judgment, raise up many students, and make a fence around the Torah.” (Pirkei Av

The first chapter and verse of Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Ancestors)—arguably serving as the introduction to Talmud—begins with a beautiful image of shalshelet ha-kabbalah (the chain of tradition). Here is how Talmud explains its origin, which it locates in the same experience of revelation that gave the People of Israel the Torah:

When people say “the Talmud,” they are referring to the twenty-volume-long Babylonian Talmud, composed and redacted primarily in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita and completed around 600 CE, which has long enjoyed precedence. Thus far, the Bavli enjoys far more influence and attention than the Yerushalmi.