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

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 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:

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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