Try asking these at your table:
What do you know about the Talmud?
Have you ever learned any amount of Talmud?
How many people do you know who have learned a minimum of 1 page of Talmud?
Can you guess how many pages are in the Talmud? [2,711 double-sided pages]
Do you know when the Talmud was written? [completed ca. 500 CE]
Can you guess what proportion of the Talmud is legalistic? [about ⅔; the other ⅓ is philosophical/moral stories]
A sugiya is a Talmudic topic. Can you guess how many sugiyot are in the Talmud? [about 10,000]
What does the Talmud say about airplanes?
Why do some Jews consider the Talmud authoritative, while others don't?
Why do Jew-haters like to attack it?
To answer these questions and more, I'm pleased to announce the newest book in our Restoring Judaism series (please click the pic).
Since its completion around 500 CE, the Talmud has traveled with Jews wherever we have wandered in the Diaspora. It is like a suitcase of Jewish wisdom—a didactic mixture of law and lore. Yet modernity has brought divergent views on how to frame this uniquely Jewish text.
Restoring the Talmud will give you a clear understanding of what the Talmud is, what it does, and why it matters.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Please use the link in the image above for hardcover/paperback/Kindle.
There is also an iBooks version.
"The Talmud is one of the most remarkable literary productions of antiquity... It embodies the mental labors of ancient Jewish teachers during a period of about eight hundred years... The pages of this great work are replete with wise observations, ethical maxims, beautiful legends and parables, and exegetical explanations." – Hermann L. Strack (1848–1922), German Protestant Professor of Theology at the University of Berlin
"Wherever Jews have won influence they have taught men to make finer distinctions, more rigorous inferences, and to write in a more luminous and cleanly fashion; their task was ever to bring a people 'to listen to reason'... Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making people think more logically, and for establishing cleanlier intellectual habits" – Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Talmud is a colossal collection of human wisdom and human ingenuity... a vast sea of discussions where the mind is sharpened to a needle’s point by endless debate over duty and righteousness." – G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
"Priestley knew no more of the Talmud or Cabala than I do, and that is just nothing at all.... The Talmud is a collection of Jewish traditions, explanations, and commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures. It contains a vast mass of matter, much of it curious, much of it absurd, much of it profound, and much of it nonsense. It is the work of many ages and many hands. To understand it thoroughly would require the labor of a long life, dedicated to that single object." – John Adams (in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 14, 1813)
Final question for your table: If not now, when?
Shabbat Shalom
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