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

The layout of a page of Talmud is a graphic representation of the process-oriented polyvocality that characterizes traditional Jewish study. In the center of the page is a short text from the Mishnah (one of the earliest rabbinic commentaries on the Torah), followed by the Gemara (the earliest layer of commentary on the Mishnah, written in late ant

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Around 200 C.E., a Rabbinic leader known as Judah ha-Nasi sought to compile and edit a comprehensive account of the debates he and his colleagues had been having. The resulting work was called the “Mishnah.” Over the next few centuries, Rabbis proceeded to study the Mishnah and create a voluminous commentary on it called the “Gemara.” The Mishnah a

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charge: it is upon you not only to study the scholars that came before you, but also to generate your own creative interpretations of Torah (a word that can encapsulate a broad swath of Jewish sacred texts, as I’ll discuss further on). In other words, we were not only to learn from the ancient commentators — we were to become the commentators of to

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Exploring this issue really involves asking two questions: (1) Why were all of these sources retained, rather than just retaining the latest or most authoritative one? (2) Why were they combined in this odd way, rather than being left as complete documents that would be read side by side, much like the model of the four…

Some highlights have been hi

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The Mosaic books see the family as the great educational institution. The Babylonian exile added the synagogue. The period between the Maccabean uprising and the fall of Jerusalem saw the emergence of three other intellectual centers: the academy or yeshivah, the bet midrash or house of study, and the school. The school was for children, the bet mi

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