The Talmud: A Biography

The Talmud - A Biography by Barry Scott Wimpfheimmer

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This book exposes my Dunning-Kruger knowledge of Judaism. Obviously, I've heard of the Talmud. I've used the expression “Talmudic” to express a complicated and deep way of reasoning about complex problems. I had an understanding of the Talmud as commentary around - literally surrounding - scripture. But, in point of fact, I really never thought to question the superficial picture I had.

This book - The Talmud - A Biography - is part of a series that looks at the origin, reception and life within the community of religious texts ranging from Augustine's “The Confessions” to the Tibetan “Book of the Dead.” A reader might think that this is a dry topic area, but it is surprisingly lively.

In this case, my reading brought back memories of law school. The Talmud appears as something akin to a case book, where various cases and excerpts from cases, are apparently tossed in more or less randomly with the organization limited to an opaque topic, e.g., “Consideration.” The law student is supposed to tease out a thread that connects the texts provided into something approaching a coherent schema, usually aided by a sage law professor and dialectical interrogation of the text. It is an often sterile and frustrating project, but it does serve the goal of teaching law students “to think like a lawyer.”

Law school as yeshiva.

The Talmud is a commentary on Mishnah that uses an intellectual process called “Midrash.” Mishnah was a commentary that extracted or collected legal precepts from the Torah, according to the author:

“The Talmud is a commentary on an earlier law code, the Mishnah, which was published orally by the rabbis around the year 200 CE.”

Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. The Talmud: 57 (Lives of Great Religious Books) (p. 9). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

“The early rabbis engaged in scholastic activity in small ad hoc disciple circles; each consisted of a charismatic rabbi surrounded by a handful of students.66 In the period immediately surrounding the destruction of the Second Temple and for the next hundred years, the rabbis engaged in two pedagogical practices—one primarily interpretive and the other primarily a mode of organizing the interpreted material. The interpretive method of study was called midrash while the organizational articulation was called mishnah.”

Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. The Talmud: 57 (Lives of Great Religious Books) (pp. 32-33). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Although I think the author does a great job of explaining the development of the Talmud, I think he skips over the connection of the Talmud to the Torah by way of the Mishnah. For example, he mentions the concept of the “Oral Torah” a handful of times in this book, and, then, mostly as a synonym for the Talmud:

//The theology of the rabbis is often characterized as a doctrine of two Torahs: a written Torah produced with ink on parchment, and an oral Torah produced in an unwritten ether of transmission from teacher to student, that encapsulates ideas of Judaism not contained within the verses of the written Torah's text. This helpful characterization of rabbinic theology ends up producing the oral Torah as an analog to the written—one could imagine the oral Torah as a virtual text containing all the traditions missing from the written Torah. In the opening to Ethics of the Fathers, in contrast, Torah is not a text but an abstract concept. Moses is not receiving a second (oral) book.64 Moses receives an idea of Torah more powerful than any tangible book.

Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. The Talmud: 57 (Lives of Great Religious Books) (p. 29). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

I'm not sure that is entirely right. I think that the Mishnah is the “oral Torah,” allegedly passed down from Sinai, until reduced to writing in the second century. The Talmud is therefore a commentary on the Oral Torah, not the written Torah, albeit there may be some cross-over between oral and written Torah. In short, I don't think we get a feel for the uniqueness of the Talmud in the life of Judaism, but, then, this is a book on the life of the Talmud, not Judaism as such, so that may be expected.

Wimpfheimer uses a real-world example to give a feeling for the Talmud. The example - like a good law school hypothetical - involves the improbable story of a dog who steals some bread, which, because it has a coal on it, starts a fire in a haystack. The issue is who is responsible for how much of what? In this case, it seems that someone is liable for the entire price of the bread - the dog owner? - but someone is only liable for one-half of the hay - the fire owner? The hypothetical - or “law” - is found in a Mishneh, which forms the basis of a centuries long dispute in the Talmud about who is responsible for what and why. Different legal theories are trotted out - property liability v. personal liability - to explain the result. No answer is definitively arrived at, but the discussion and its discursions are cryptic and interesting.

Like I said, law school.

There were two Talmuds - Palestinian and Babylonian - prepared by various schools of rabbis in the two locations. The two Talmuds contain much overlapping material, with the Palestinian Talmud being closed earlier and the Babylonian Talmud containing more material. The author treats the Babylonian Talmud as normative.

Over time, the Talmud became more or less “canonized” throughout the Jewish world. “Canonized” here does not mean “added to the Tanakh.” Rather it means something like a text that defined normative Judaism:

“By the early modern period, the Talmud was entrenched as a canonical work whose authority was essential to the traditional community and its ritual, family, and commercial life. In different ways, Sabbateanism, Hasidism, Frankism, Reform, and Zionism all established themselves by separating from the traditional community. The Talmud served as a finite stand-in for that community.

Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. The Talmud: 57 (Lives of Great Religious Books) (p. 188). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Wimpfheimer makes the interesting point that there were three regions in Europe that took different approaches to Talmud, which, in turn defined their respective communities:

“The southernmost Jewish community, the Spanish/North African community, is referred to as Sefarad in Jewish medieval sources. While North Africa remained under majority Muslim control for the entire five-hundred-year period, Spain was a region perpetually contested by warring Muslim and Christian armies. During this period, Spain begins as a Muslim region and becomes a Christian one; even as a majority Christian region, though, Spain remained deeply affected by Muslim aesthetics and traditions. Spain's majority culture was philosophically and scientifically advanced, and Jews were schooled in both philosophy and science. Between Ashkenaz to the North and Sefarad to the South was Provence. This region includes the Northeast region of Spain (including Barcelona and Girona) and the Southern cities of France (including Marseilles, Toulouse, and Montpellier). As the buffer between the traditional Jews of Ashkenaz and the intellectual Jews of Sefarad, the Provençal Jewish intellectuals were mediators. Out of this mediation emerged the reinvigorated Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah.

Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. The Talmud: 57 (Lives of Great Religious Books) (pp. 101-102). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

According to Wimpfeimer, Talmudic writings are broadly divided into two:

“Another nascent distinction within the content of the curriculum also began to develop in which there was a compartmentalization of rabbinic ideas into buckets that would eventually, in the post-Talmudic era, come to have fixed identities as halakhah [law] and aggadah [non-law].1 This dichotomy has been central to the study of the Talmud because it is useful for picking up on inherent variations within and among different Talmudic passages.

Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. The Talmud: 57 (Lives of Great Religious Books) (p. 41). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Halakhah is the boring, legalistic stuff; Aggadah is the fun myth, tradition, wisdom, story-telling stuff. My understanding, though, is that this distinction is not a matter of how the material is organized, the same portion of the Talmud might contain both.

Wimpfheimer gives an example of aggadah:

“By the rules of midrashic interpretation, an unnecessary feature in the text marks this feature as extraneous and open to interpretation. R' Dimi accepts the invitation of the marked text and imagines that the preposition teaches that the Israelites did not stand at the base of the mountain but literally underneath it. God severed the mountain, lifted it and held it above them like a barrel. God threatened the Israelites with the mountain until they accepted the Torah. God's bullying Israel into accepting the Torah is significantly at odds with a basic contextual reading of the biblical story. In the biblical account, the Israelites are so eager to accept the Torah that they commit to following the strictures even before they know the particulars. Elsewhere in the Bible, Israel's enthusiasm is a motif that explains God's singular love for the people, their specific chosen-ness.55 Not only is the midrash at odds with the basic biblical account, there is good evidence that the Talmudic midrash attributed to Rav Dimi is based on an earlier midrash that was specifically designed to highlight Israel's strength of commitment.

Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. The Talmud: 57 (Lives of Great Religious Books) (pp. 86-87). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

God threatening Israel with a floating mountain is unexpected, but it is colorful.

There have been Jewish movements that did not accept the Talmud. The Qaraites were one such Jewish group. I was surprised to learn that Reformed Jews do not accept the Talmud, which may explain why I know so little about the Talmud, i.e., not only am I not Jewish, but the Jews I know don't know the Talmud.

In any event, I thought this was an excellent introduction to a subject which, frankly, plays a substantial - not large, perhaps, but substantive - to Western civilization.

Impenetrable! Despite multiple efforts, I was only able to read 30 pages of this book because the author's writing style was extremely difficult for me to read. I had really looked forward to this book as our December selection because I wanted to learn more about the Talmud. I did learn quite a bit during the discussion, but frankly could not learn anything from the book.