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

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.

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

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:

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.

Rabbi Louis Rieser.

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

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.

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.

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