Decoding the Talmud:
Course Overview
Inside the Story, Substance, and Significance of the Book That Defines Judaism
Enter the intricate world of the Talmud: the monumental classic that has defined Jewish learning for centuries. Join this six-week course from the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute to discover the Talmud, its history, authors, and significance - and experience it for yourself.
Lesson Outline
Lesson 1
Why is Everyone Reading Law?
The Talmud is Judaism's treasure. Jews spend hours each week reading it. But it's a book of law. Who reads law? Lawyers and law students! Why are so many businesspeople, doctors, construction workers, and artists reading law books?
Learn about the nature of Jewish law: the Oral Torah that was given by G‑d to Moses and transmitted through the centuries. We learn about its scope. It doesn't just cover crimes and contracts; it covers every facet of human life. And we will come to understand why Jews consider the study of law to be an act of religious worship.
Lesson 2
The Mishnah: Documenting Our Covenant with G‑d
The Oral Law had always been transmitted orally. But as Jewish life came under increasing pressure from the Roman occupiers of the Land of Israel, a group of remarkable rabbis made the decision to create an official text of the Oral Law and, eventually, to commit it to writing.
This lesson introduces the six orders of the Mishnah and the Tanna'im who crafted the Mishna's text. We will dive deeply into a couple of Mishnayot and learn how the sages packed a vast amount of information into very few words. And we will come to understand why the study of this text is so important for the very soul of a Jew.
Lesson 3
Decoding the Mishnah
The Mishnah's composition in the second century changed the Jewish world. For the next three hundred years, the amora'im engaged in a passionate, intense effort to decode the Mishnah and uncover the meanings hidden in each line.
Lesson 3 will focus on the major questions that the amora'im asked about each Mishnah and how they went about answering these questions. And then we will treat ourselves to the experience of a Talmudic sugya. We will see how the sages home in on a single phrase in the Mishnah we met in Lesson 2, debating its meaning, back and forth, before finally coming to a conclusion.
Lesson 4
The Amora'im and the Book They Composed
The Gemara was written by the amora’im, who lived over the course of three centuries in Israel and Babylonia. In Lesson 4, we will meet them and learn about the historic forces that shaped their lives. We will examine the structure of the book they produced: a structure that makes the Gemara one of the most unusual books in the world.
We will explore the agadeta, the Gemara’s non-legal content. We will discover that it conveys Jewish ideas about G‑d, the soul, Jewish history, and Jewish peoplehood, as well as some of the deepest questions of Jewish mysticism and spirituality.
We will revisit the sugya from Lesson 3, discovering some astounding facts about the people who engaged in the debate that we studied.
And we will come to realize that, although the Gemara seems to have a somewhat haphazard, patchwork nature, every nuance in the text has deep meaning.
Lesson 5
Talmudic Thinking
The Gemara kop - the “head of the Talmudist” is one of the most valuable assets of the Jewish people. The Gemara does not only elucidate Jewish law; it also teaches generations of Jews how to think.
We will take another look at our Lesson 3 sugya, learning how to halt kop - how to follow a Talmudic argument. And then we will do a deep dive into another sugya and learn how Talmudic arguments need to be subjected to the finest balance and how questions and objections can come from any direction. We will see the difference between the Talmud Yerushalmi’s relatively straightforward treatment of a Mishnah and the Talmud Bavli’s winding, indirect approach. We will come to understand that the Bavli’s style is not a drawback—it is what makes the Talmud the treasure of the Jewish people.
Lesson 6
The Talmud's Posterity
The Talmud’s journey over the past 1,500 years has seen it carried to all corners of the world. Lesson 6 explores the Talmud’s history from its composition to the present. We will highlight the work of the codifiers and commentators and the challenges of censorship and persecution that have plagued the Talmud over the years.
We will learn about the history of the Talmud’s printing and take a tour of the modern printed Talmud’s page. Finally, we will learn that every Jew can continue the effort of the last 1,500 years by contributing insight into the Talmud and adding to the corpus of Jewish wis.
