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

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.

Jews in the academies of Eretz Yisrael and Babylonia (where Jews had lived since the destruction of the First Temple and exile of 586 BCE) studied the Mishnah in depth, exploring its implications, debating the logic of its rulings, telling their own stories, providing anecdotal illustrations of principles articulated, and more. Over the next few ce

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.

Consider for a moment the following thought experiment. Let us think of the Babylonian Talmud not as we usually do—not as a vast compendium of laws, legends, debates, and interpretations, but as a massive, multivolume, postmodern, experimental volume. Wilder than Moby Dick, beyond the imagination of James Joyce, more internally self-referential tha

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

The Jerusalem Talmud, composed primarily in the academies of Tiberias and Caesarea

Some days we would look at a text and think, “It’s flat, not much here,” but then a single question would inspire three ideas and six more questions . . . and soon the “dull” or “inscrutable” text was a complex, magnificent three-dimensional palace of insights.

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

Barry Holtz,