Ruminations on Talmud

Well, we're still here, and so is the city. We thought this time we would talk about the main thing we're doing with our time: studying Talmud. Woo! Yeah!

Jeremy

Four mornings a week we are studying the eighth chapter of Pesachim ('Passover offerings'). We've done like 3 pages in the several weeks we've been here.

Yeah.

3 pages. (well actually 4 as of this morning)

 

Strangely, tractate Pesachim is not as much about Pesach (Passover) as you might think. In fact, we've barely touched on it so far.

 

Miri

Since we got here, we've realised that this actually isn't strange at all! It's totally normal for the Talmud to go off on tangents that seem unrelated to the specific legal questions at hand. In another section of Talmud I'm studying at the moment in tractate Brachot (Blessings), there's this really fascinating section about whether a good dream is better than a bad dream, on the principle that the majority of most dreams are unlikely to come true. They conclude that it might be better to wake up from a bad dream, basically because your day is going to be better than the dream, whereas the opposite is true if you wake up from a bad dream.

 

Jeremy

Right. The Talmud often gets sidetracked into other issues as linguistic or thematic parallels present themselves, for ease of memorisation.

 

The main topic under discussion so far in Pesachim has been making blessings over food, before and after. When do we need to do this? If we're in the middle of a meal and we are interrupted, do we have to make a new blessing to carry on the meal? What if we leave behind someone to save our space? Does it matter what food we're eating? And if that's true for bread, where does that leave other grain products? And what about things like wine and pomegranates, which are separate categories in themselves being produce of the Land of Israel?

 

Miri

It's amazing that the Rabbis are interested in seemingly everything from the details of the legal context required for making individual blessings to incredibly general questions about dreams!

 

Jeremy

Indeed, and these are the sorts of things the Talmud and its commentators are interested in. To take monotheism seriously, in my view and I think theirs, is to assume that it invades all parts of your life.

 

The Talmud and its commentators love discussing theoretical minutiae of marginal cases, mainly, it seems to me, to flex their intellectual and legal muscles. The outcomes might indeed have practical implications, but this doesn't seem to be the primary motivation for the discussion, nor what I have found most interesting studying it.

Miri

I really don't agree with you on this one!

 

Firstly, it's difficult to generalise about the whole of 'Talmud' as one thing—it's incredibly diverse, reflecting hundreds of years of oral tradition and written edits, and there's just so much of it covering such different areas of law and practice.

 

Jeremy

Good point!

 

Miri

Also, there are many lines of questioning that the Talmud doesn't pursue. It seems to me that the questions pursued are those that arise as a result of potential practical circumstances that would require someone to act differently, or those that demonstrate a problem of principle on which other rulings might be based. The marginal cases do precisely this—they challenge the theoretical boundaries that underpin other halachic (legal) rulings.

 

I think studying the Talmud is even more fascinating if we assume (and it is an assumption) that the rabbis are discussing something because they think the, often obscure, point in question has some sort of halachic significance. By taking them seriously, and on their own terms we might be able to understand more about why some questions are taken up and other assumptions are left standing.

Jeremy

I can certainly understand that, though I might not agree! Marginal, theoretical cases are often the ones that reveal the underlying principles best, I suppose.

Miri

That's a good point, but I think that the underlying principles (in general though not in every case) are worked out exactly THROUGH the limit cases rather than theoretical musings.

Jeremy

So why do I find studying such a mind-bogglingly complex, ancient legal text so compelling to study? There are a few great reasons for this.

One, because it's so complex, especially so historically complex. There are so many layers of text on the page, put together over a period of 700 years or more. Peeling back these layers and trying to separate ancient tradition from editorial commentary is an extremely interesting exercise for me. Also fascinating is the way later readers of the text understand the almost certainly unclear conclusions of the Talmudic authors (they're not as much interested in conclusions as they are in preserving and remembering the tradition—often the layout of the argument is mainly for ease of memorisation rather than logic of argument).

Two, because it's part of a thousand-year-old tradition of rabbinic Jews (like us) reading the Talmud and having a conversation—and this text is the classic conversation starter. The conversation itself is the embodiment of a living tradition, of the Torah she-be-al Peh (Oral Torah).

Miri

It's definitely a conversation starter—I just today had a chat with a friend of mine from home who also happens to be studying the same bit of Talmud as we are in class. We had a great chat about one of the Tosafot (Medieval commentaries) and what it might mean—how amazing is that!  

 

Jeremy

Three, and this is probably the most important reason, because it is a record of a time in Judaism when disagreement and minority opinions were honoured and remembered. I feel it is often the case now in many sectors of the Jewish community that they try and stamp out all disagreement in their race to become the single 'authentic' conveyor of the Jewish tradition. Well, the Talmud basically says that this idea is rubbish: there is no single 'authenticity' but a plethora of voices, a cacophony of argument in which a variety of views are sustained and respected.

Miri

And even more than this, the Talmud often preserves a minority opinion as still valid, but just not the way the legal ruling went historically. This implicit awareness on the part of the rabbis that Jewish law, the Oral Torah, is a product of our communal interaction with history, necessarily contingent on circumstance.

I think it's amazing that a whole legal system can be thought of as both divinely derived and also in some ways historically dependent. It seems reassuringly very sensible.