Jerusalem Talmud Quotes

In my tradition, God revealed Himself in words and lives in stories and, no, you cannot touch or even see Him. The Word, in Judaism, was never made flesh. The closest God came to embodiment was in the Temple in Jerusalem...But the Temple was destroyed. In Judaism, the flesh became words. Words were the traditional refuge of the Jewish people - Yochanan ben Zakkai led a yeshiva, my father became a professor. And little boys, in the Middle Ages, ate cakes with verses inscribed on them, an image I find deeply moving and, somehow, deeply depressing. This might help explain a certain melancholy quality books in general, for all their bright allure, have always had for me. As many times as I went down to my parents' library for comfort, I would find myself standing in front of the books and could almost feel them turning back into trees, failing me somehow.

The average Christian is not supposed to know that Jesus’ home town of Nazareth did not actually exist, or that key places mentioned in the Bible did not physically exist in the so-called “Holy Land.” He is not meant to know that scholars have had greater success matching Biblical events and places with events and places in Britain rather than in Palestine. It is a point of contention whether the settlement of Nazareth existed at all during Jesus' lifetime. It does not appear on contemporary maps, neither in any books, documents, chronicles or military records of the period, whether of Roman or Jewish compilation. The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies that Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, neither in the works of Josephus, nor in the Hebrew Talmud – Laurence Gardner (The Grail Enigma) As far back as 1640, the German traveller Korte, after a complete topographical examination of the present Jerusalem, decided that it failed to coincide in any way with the city described by Josephus and the Scriptures. Claims that the tombs of patriarchs Ab’Ram, Isaac, and Jacob are buried under a mosque in Hebron possess no shred of evidence. The rock-cut sepulchres in the valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom are of Roman period with late Greek inscriptions, and there exists nothing in groups of ruins at Petra, Sebaste, Baalbec, Palmyra or Damascus, or among the stone cities of the Haran, that are pre-Roman. Nothing in Jerusalem itself can be related to the Jews – Comyns Beaumont (Britain: Key to World’s History) The Jerusalem of modern times is not the city of the Scriptures. Mt. Calvary, now nearly in the centre of the city, was without walls at the time of the Crucifixion, and the greater part of Mt. Zion, which is not without, was within the ancient city. The holy places are for the most part the fanciful dreams of monkish enthusiasts to increase the veneration of the pilgrims – Rev. J. P. Lawson (quoted in Beaumont’s Britain: Key to World’s History)

Therefore, if we restrict our studies of apocalyptic to the canon of Scripture (Daniel, Zechariah, the Gospels, 22 and Revelation), we can make a case for drawing a sharp distinction between apocalyptic (symbolic imagery for this-worldly events 23 ) and eschatology (theology of last things, the parousia , and heaven and hell 24 ). We run into difficulty when we conflate and literalize the two, which is precisely what happened as the apocalyptic-Talmudic-infernalist stream developed. Their authors progressively converted imagery of God’s furnace from a metaphor for historic destruction, which acts to judge and refine his people, into actual ovens of material flames into which damned souls are tossed in the afterlife or on Judgment Day.

the Temple was rebuilt, but by then the religion of Israel had been marked forever by the piety of the exile. Alongside the single Temple, where blood sacrifice was celebrated, arose numerous synagogues, places for meeting and for prayer, and the dominium of the priests yielded to the growing influence of the Pharisees and Scribes, men of the book and of study. In 70 A.D., the Roman legions again destroyed the Temple. But the learned rabbi Joahannah ben-Zakkaj, slipped covertly out of Jerusalem through the siege and obtained permission from Vespasian to continue the teaching of the Torah in the city of Jamnia. The temple has never been rebuilt since, and study, the Talmud, has become the real temple of Israel.24 This complex relationship to the Talmud is in fact a key to understanding the life and work of Mark Rothko.

Ten are designated by the term Life or Living:—God, the law, Israel, the righteous, the garden of Eden, the tree of life, the land of Israel, Jerusalem, benevolence, the sages; and water also is described as life, as it is said (Zech. xiv. 8), "And it shall be in that day that living water shall go out from Jerusalem.

The description of Jerusalem as a terrestrial center point, “situated in the center of the world,” is found in Philo’s Legatio ad Gaium.[100] The Babylonian Talmud states,

The Talmud relates how Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai was smuggled out of Jerusalem during its siege, gained the favor of Vespasian, and was given permission to establish an academy for learning at Jamnia (Jabneh or Yavneh).[47] Here he and Rabban Gamaliel II established a new center for Jewish life which continued, with adaptations and additions, the traditions of the Pharisees, and nothing but those traditions. Thus began Rabbinic Judaism.

today’s Jews, Armenians and Georgians claim with some measure of justice that they are the offspring of ancient Middle Eastern peoples. Yet these are only exceptions that prove the rule, and even these claims are somewhat exaggerated. It goes without saying that the political, economic and social practices of modern Jews, for example, owe far more to the empires under which they lived during the past two millennia than to the traditions of the ancient kingdom of Judaea. If King David were to show up in an ultra-Orthodox synagogue in present-day Jerusalem, he would be utterly bewildered to find people dressed in East European clothes, speaking in a German dialect (Yiddish) and having endless arguments about the meaning of a Babylonian text (the Talmud). There were neither synagogues, volumes of Talmud, nor even Torah scrolls in ancient Judaea.

It is interesting to note that on June 19, 1967, the Israeli government passed a resolution offering a return of the captured territories to the Arabs in exchange for peace. The response came three months later, when the Khartoum Arab Summit issued its famous three No’s: “No peace, no recognition, and no negotiation with Israel.” The closure of that small window of opportunity seems tragic in retrospect. My

Would Abraham’s son recognize the car as the one that had delivered

Why one of the later, lesser-known Jewish prophets over the front door of the Sistine? Michelangelo must have selected Zechariah for a variety of reasons—again, there are multiple layers of meaning, so integral to Talmudic and Kabbalistic thought, and so dear to Michelangelo. First of all, Zechariah warned the corrupt priesthood of the Second Holy Temple: “Open your doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour your cedars” (Zechariah 11:1). This was a prophecy that if the priesthood did not cease its corrupt, unspiritual behavior, the doors of the sanctuary would be broken open by attacking foes and the Temple, built partly of cedarwood from Lebanon, would be burned down. And here is the author of that warning, right over the doors of Pope Julius’s sanctuary. Zechariah is also the prophet of consolation and redemption. He is the one who urges the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem and the Holy Temple: “Thus says the Lord of hosts; My cities shall again overflow with prosperity; and the Lord shall yet comfort Zion, and shall yet choose Jerusalem” (Zechariah 1:

Samaritan Targum ... maybe compared with the Aramaic of the Jerusalem Talmud and with the Palestinian Syriac. On the whole it was more akin to Galilaean than to Judaean, but was closer to Hebrew than either.

5. The kezazah ceremony. In the Jerusalem Talmud and elsewhere in the writings of the sages, we are told that at the time of Jesus the Jews had a method of punishing any Jewish boy who lost his family inheritance to Gentiles. Such a loss was considered particularly shameful, and the horror of that shame is reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Talmud recounts that King David’s harp would play itself at midnight. And the Jerusalem Talmud comments that in the verse, “When the musician would play music, the hand of God would be upon him,” the word for “musician” should be read as “musical instrument” instead: the instrument would play by itself. Why do our sages insist on conflating musician and musical instrument? The answer is that when a person attains the perfect level of prayer, he himself is an instrument playing music spontaneously; he has become the instrument of song, of prophecy, of prayer. The melody is his, and his entire being is none other than an instrument expressing that prayer.