Jewish Talmud Quotes

Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In The Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a "glorious" experiment - the "completing of the Creation." The burden of such a responsibility is heavy, especially on so weak and imperfect a species as ours, one with so unhappy a history. Nothing remotely like "completion" can be attempted without vastly more knowledge than we have today. But, perhaps, if our very existence is at stake, we will find ourselves able to rise to this supreme challenge.

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.

The Talmud says that “blessed is He who has created all these to serve me.” German politician Julius Streicher said, “It is an open secret that Jews do not work, but rather let others work for them.

There are two early "Holocaust" tales from the Talmud. Gittin 57b claums that four billion Jews were killed by the Romans in the city of Bethar. Gitting 58a claims that 16 million Jewish children were wrapped in scrolls and burned alive by the Romans. -- Judaism's Strange Gods. page 51

Educator Norman Lamm said, “In Judaism, there are 613 biblical commandments, and the Talmud says that the chief commandment of all is study.

He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, “mildly unbalanced.” He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious.

Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, “When a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children.” She exclaimed, “You are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars].” But Rabbi Hiyya replied, “There is a wheel which revolves in this world.” —Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b

The Talmud, the compilation of discussions of Jewish Law which I have quoted earlier in this book, gives examples of bad prayers, improper prayers, which one should not utter. If a woman is pregnant, neither she nor her husband should pray, “May God grant that this child be a boy” (nor, for that matter, may they pray that it be a girl). The sex of the child is determined at conception, and God cannot be invoked to change it. Again, if a man sees a fire engine racing toward his neighborhood, he should not pray, “Please God, don’t let the fire be in my house.” Not only is it mean-spirited to pray that someone else’s house burn instead of yours, but it is futile. A certain house is already on fire; the most sincere or articulate of prayers will not affect the question of which house it is.

Gregory IX created the Papal Inquisition to prevent local rulers or mobs taking on supposed heretics without papal supervision. He burned copies of the Jewish Talmud and ordered that all Jews should be regarded as perpetuam servitus judaeorum – in servitude until Judgement Day.

To the rabbis who taught in the Jewish parochial schools, baseball was an evil waste of time, a spawn of the potentially assimilationist English portion of the yeshiva day. But to the students of most of the parochial schools, an inter-league baseball victory had come to take on only a shade less significance than a top grade in Talmud, for it was an unquestioned mark of one's Americanism, and to be counted a loyal American had become increasingly important to us during these last years of the war.

Men can deny that poor women or working-class women or prostituted women have the capacity to read or write their own language, but some of those women will read or write their own language anyway; they will risk everything to learn it. In the slaveholding South in the United States, it was forbidden by law to teach slaves to read or write; but some slaveowners taught, some slaves learned, some slaves taught themselves, and some slaves taught other slaves. In Jewish law, it is forbidden to teach women Talmud, but some women learned Talmud anyway.

CODE: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Tanakh (JPS, Genesis 3:17) DECODED: Blessed is He that discerneth secrets. Talmud (Berakoth 58a)

The Talmud is not only an encyclopedia of law but a work of folk art, a hymn to the Lord rising out of many generations of men who spent their lives in the quest for him. This quest for God, the confident search for the holy in every busy detail of life, is its grand single theme. The Talmud recaptures a long golden age of intelligence and insight, and it is to this day the circulating heart's blood of the Jewish religion.

Time can lessen the hurt; the empty place we have can seem smaller as other things and experiences fill our life; we can forget for periods and feel as if our loved one didn't die; we can find sense in the death and understand that perhaps this death does fit into a bigger design in the world; we can learn to remember the good and hold on to that. But we cannot 'get over it,' because to get over it would mean we were not changed by the experience. It would mean we did not grow by the experience. It would mean that our loved one's death made no difference in our life. There is an interesting discussion in the Talmud, an ancient Jewish writing. Those Jews had the custom of rending their garments - literally tearing their clothes —to symbolize the ripping apart that death brings. But the question was raised, after the period of mourning, could you sew the garment up and use it again? The teachers answered yes, but when you mended it, you should not tuck the edges under so it would look as if it had never been torn. This symbolized the fact that life after grief is not the same as before. The rent will show.

In the Talmud (a record of discussions of Jewish law and ethics by ancient rabbis) it is said that charity is equal in importance to all the other commandments combined, and that Jews should give at least 10 percent of their income as tzedakah.

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 nature of the Hebrew Bible and traditional Judaism, if we insist upon using Latin terms, is orthoprax, which literally means correct practice, implying that Biblical religion and traditional Talmudic Judaism demand right behavior (ethically and ritually) but no formal theological dogma.

Did you know that abracadabra is a Jewish word? The Aramaic words Avra c’dabrah mean “It came to pass as it was spoken,” a popular talmudic dictum that expressed the widely held talmudic belief that things do indeed come to pass because they are spoken, that speech has the power to cause the world to come into being.

Many a morning the hapless Feldman would find his garbled interpretations of Jewish law amended by the pretty housewife whose sharp Talmudic corrections from behind the curtain fluttered into the air like butterflies as she piped out, “Karl, what are you talking about? There are four different versions of how Cain died!

Judaism minimizes the distinction between body and soul. ... Judaism rejects that duality. First, it does not see death as liberation from earthly bondage and a graduation to a better world. It sees death as a tragedy. Death puts an end to a person's ability to sanctify the world. The death of a good person diminishes God's presence on earth. Second, Judaism does not see the material world, the world of food and sex and sleep and other bodily needs, as being less worthy than the realm of the spirit. Nothing created by God is vile or useless. Everything can be made holy or made base by the way in which it is used. The Talmud tells of one of the sages seeing workers cleaning and decorating a statue of the emperor and musing, "If that statue, which is an image of a flesh-and-blood king, is worthy of being cared for so carefully, how much more so my body, which is an image of the King of Kinds.

And yet I feel an uncanny kinship to Moses as the Rabbis imagine him in that story, as I suppose that the Rabbis intended I should. Theirs was a system that made a virtue of ambivalence and built uncertainty into bedrock assertions of faith. No wonder fundamentalists and fascists have hated it so. And why I feel drawn towards it even now and, in the face of everything, find myself oddly determined to carry my own flawed version away from the slope of Sinai where, according to tradition, my soul stood at the time of the original revelation.

The pages of the magazine Mother Earth that Emma Goldman edited from 1906 to 1917 are filled with Yiddish stories, tales from the Talmud, and translations of Morris Rosenfeld’s poetry. Moreover, her commitment to anarchism did not divert her from speaking and writing, openly and frequently, about the particular burdens Jews faced in a world in which antisemitism was a living enemy. Apparently, Emma Goldman’s faith in anarchism, with its emphasis on universalism, did not result from and was not dependent on a casting off of Jewish identity.

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)

There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where he finds God busily adding crownlike ornaments to the letters of the Torah. Moses asks God what He is doing and God explains that in the future there will be a man named Akiva, son of Joseph, who will base a huge mountain of Jewish law on these very orthographic ornaments. Intrigued, Moses asks God to show this man to him. Moses is told to 'go back eighteen rows,' and suddenly, as in a dream, Moses is in a classroom, class is in session and the teacher is none other than Rabbi Akiva. Moses has been told to go to the back of the study house because that is where the youngest and least educated students sit. Akiva, the great first-century sage, is explaining Torah to his disciples, but Moses is completely unable to follow the lesson. It is far too complicated for him. He is filled with sadness when, suddenly, one of the disciples asks Akiva how he knows something is true and Akiva answers: 'It is derived from a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai.' Upon hearing this answer, Moses is satisfied - though he can't resist asking why, if such brilliant men as Akiva exist, Moses needs to be the one to deliver the Torah. At this point God loses patience and tells Moses, 'Silence, it's my will.

Can a Jewish vampire drink human blood? On the one hand, the Bible ordains that “ye shall eat neither fat nor blood” (Leviticus 3:17). But on the other hand, the Mishnah teaches that “no law stands in the way of saving lives” (Tosefra Shabat 9:12). However, vampires don’t have lives to save, since the Talmud states that “if one checks the nos¬trils and does not find any breath in them, he is undoubtedly dead” (Seder Moed, Yoma 85 aleph). That being said, a vampire can breathe voluntarily if it so chooses. This would suggest that it does count as a living person after all. That is just a tiny part of the many considerations that would go into a night rabbi’s psikat halacha, or religious ruling, on that particular issue.

For the Christian, the sacred doctrine is revealed theology; for the Jew and the Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily, the legal interpretation of the Divine Law (talmud or fiqh). The sacred doctrine in the latter sense has, to say the least, much less in common with philosophy than the sacred doctrine in the former sense. It is ultimately for this reason that the status of philosophy was, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in Judaism and in Islam than in Christianity: in Christianity philosophy became an integral part of the officially recognized and even required training of the student of the sacred doctrine. This difference explains partly the eventual collapse of philosophic inquiry in the Islamic and in the Jewish world, a collapse which has no parallel in the Western Christian world.

The Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world. The Talmud became essential for Jewish survival once the Temple - God's pre-Talmud home - was destroyed, and the Temple practices, those bodily rituals of blood and fire and physical atonement, could no longer be performed. When the Jewish people lost their home (the land of Israel) and God lost His (the Temple), then a new way of being was devised and Jews became the people of the book and not the people of the Temple or the land. They became the people of the book because they had no place else to live. That bodily loss is frequently overlooked, but for me it lies at the heart of the Talmud, for all its plenitude. The Internet, which we are continually told binds us together, nevertheless engenders in me a similar sense of diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a home page?

Ideas should be freely and dispassionately considered on their own merits, since after all, one generation’s heretic is another generation’s hero. Mystics like the Ramchal disagreed with rationalists like the Rambam on what exactly is the highest mode of being. The Rambam believed that the ultimate existence is purely spiritual, in Olam HaBah, while the Ramchal believed it to be corporeal resurrection in this world.1 In his time, the Ramchal was labeled a heretic and had his works burned by fellow Jews, but nevertheless lives on today as one of the most respected Jewish philosophers in history. The Rambam before him suffered the same fate, not just for his views on the afterlife, in which corporeal resurrection only played a minor role, but also for his “radical” belief that God does not have a body. It seems possible that his debate may find a sister in modern times: I would not be surprised if future generations view the figurative nature of Olam HaBah with the same certainty as modern Jews now view the Rambam’s “heresy” about the nature of God. Because frankly, these Talmudic passages make no sense unless viewed as metaphor, and the Rambam provides a kind of Rabbinic precedent to do so. It is precisely the same dialectic: as our scientific view of reality expands and sharpens, our religious teachings must evolve and conform. If the evidence confirms a literal reading, then so be it. If it refutes it, then so be it. Truth is truth, and we must cherish our integrity just as we cherish as our faith.

Monday, September 17, 1945 We all drove to the airfield in the morning to see Gay and Murnane off in the C-47 /belonging to the Army. Then General Eisenhower and I drove to Munich where we inspected in conjunction with Colonel Dalferes a Baltic displaced persons camp. The Baltic people are the best of the displaced persons and the camp was extremely clean in all respects. Many of the people were in costume and did some folk dances and athletic contest for our benefit. We were both, I think, very much pleased with conditions here. The camp was situated in an old German regular army barracks and they were using German field kitchens for cooking. From the Baltic camp, we drove for about 45 minutes to a Jewish camp in the area of the XX Corps. This camp was established in what had been a German hospital. The buildings were therefore in a good state of repair when the Jews arrived but were in a bad state of repair when we arrived, because these Jewish DP's, or at least a majority of them, have no sense of human relationships. They decline, when practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relive themselves on the floor. The hospital which we investigated was fairly good. They also had a number of sewing machines and cobbler instruments which they had collected, but since they had not collected the necessary parts, they had least fifty sewing machines they could not use, and which could not be used by anyone else because they were holding them. This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large wooden building which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about half way up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England, and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General. A copy of Talmud, I think it is called, written on a sheet and rolled around a stick, was carried by one of the attending physicians. First, a Jewish civilian made a very long speech which nobody seemed inclined to translate. Then General Eisenhower mounted the platform and I went up behind him and he made a short and excellent speech, which was translated paragraph by paragraph. The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted, and actually about three hours later, lost my lunch as the result of remembering it. From here we went to the Headquarters of the XX Corps, where General Craig gave us an excellent lunch which I, however, was unable to partake of, owing to my nausea.

hereditary and transmitted through the paternal line. Therefore, a person whose father is not a priest cannot be a priest either. * Though without being as insulting as Shammai was. * An infrequently quoted Talmudic passage teaches that Timna, a female character in the book of Genesis, came from a royal non-Israelite household. At an early age, she became interested in the Israelite faith and sought to convert. But when she approached the patriarchs—at one time or another, all three of

For many Jews during Talmudic times, conversion to Christianity prob- ably did not appear as a major change: Christianity looked like a slightly di erent version of the Jewish religion, with the same core belief in one God and the Torah but with fewer demanding requirements. For many Jewish households that earned their living from farming—and especially the poorer ones that struggled to support their families and, as illiterate, were made to feel like outcasts (ammei ha-aretz) by the local rabbis and lit- erate Jews—Christianity probably seemed a welcome change: it enabled them to believe in the same God without having to obey several costly norms, including the one that required fathers to educate their sons.

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.

I cling to this notion now because it is what allows me to feel a connection to a vast body of knowledge of which I am not master, much as I am able to live in a society bursting with information that I will never wholly comprehend. I take comfort from a lesson that seems implicit in the Talmud itself, which is that not knowing Torah is part of the lesson of Torah.

Bustanai now had two wives, one Jewish and one Persian. However, the Persian wife, as a prisoner of war, was technically a slave and the sons of his Jewish wife tried to exclude her children from inheriting their father’s title. The scholars of the Babylonian academies found in favour of the children of the Persian princess, ruling that Bustanai had liberated her from her status as a slave.

He was a key figure in what would become known as the logic-chopping, dialectical Talmudic school of the tosafists. It would seem, from the style in which the tosafists wrote, that it wasn’t just Christian scholars studying Jewish texts. The tosafists were learning new methods of analysis from their Christian counterparts.

King Ferdinand, who was himself partly descended from Jewish stock8 consulted the bishops. The bishops’ solution took even the Old Christians by surprise. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Reinterpreting sacred texts in the name of fidelity to God and kindness to neighbor is precisely what the Talmud does, and many Jewish scholars do, to this day.

Page 80: As for Gentiles, the basic Talmudic principle is that their lives must not be saved, although it is also forbidden to murder them outright. The Talmud itself expresses this in the maxim ’Gentiles are neither to be lifted [out of a well] nor hauled down [into it]‘. Maimonides explains: “As for Gentiles with whom we are not at war … their death must not be caused, but it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death; if, for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued, for it is written: ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’ – but [a Gentile] is not thy fellow.” In particular, a Jewish doctor must not treat a Gentile patient. Maimonides – himself an illustrious physician – is quite explicit on this; in another passage he repeats the distinction between ‘thy fellow’ and a Gentile, and concludes: ‘and from this learn ye, that it is forbidden to heal a Gentile even for payment …’ However, the refusal of a Jew – particularly a Jewish doctor – to save the life of a Gentile may, if it becomes known, antagonize powerful Gentiles and so put Jews in danger. Where such danger exists, the obligation to avert it supersedes the ban on helping the Gentile.

Page 36-38: Many, perhaps most, biblical verses prescribing religious acts and obligations are ‘understood’ by classical Judaism, and by present-day Orthodoxy, in a sense which is quite distinct from, or even contrary to, their literal meaning as understood by Christian or other readers of the Old Testament, who only see the plain text. … Apologetics of Judaism claim that the interpretation of the Bible, originated by the Pharisees and fixed in the Talmud, is always more liberal than the literal sense. But some of the examples below show that this is far from being the case. … In numerous cases general terms such as ‘thy fellow’, ‘stranger’, or even ‘man’ are taken to have an exclusivist chauvinistic meaning. The famous verse ‘thou shalt love thy fellow as thyself’ (Leviticus, 19:18) is understood by classical (and present-day Orthodox) Judaism as an injunction to love one’s fellow Jew, not any fellow human. Similarly, the verse ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’ (ibid., 16) is supposed to mean that one must not stand idly by when the life (‘blood’) of a fellow Jew is in danger; but, as will be seen in Chapter 5, a Jew is in general forbidden to save the life of a Gentile, because ‘he is not thy fellow’. The generous injunction to leave the gleanings of one’s field and vineyard ‘for the poor and the stranger’ (ibid., 9-10) is interpreted as referring exclusively to the Jewish poor and to converts to Judaism. … It is quite clear even from these examples that when Orthodox Jews today (or all Jews before about 1780) read the Bible, they are reading a very different book, with a totally different meaning, from the Bible as read by non-Jews or non-Orthodox Jews. … If such a communication gap exists in Israel, where people read Hebrew and can readily obtain correct information if they wish, one can imagine how deep is the misconception abroad, say among people educated in the Christian tradition. In fact, the more such a person reads the Bible, the less he or she knows about Orthodox Judaism.

But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt. What keeps the vehicle moving isn’t the belief that it will but the heat generated from a thousand simultaneous disagreements. This might sound glib or pedantic but it’s evident in one of Judaism’s most foundational facts. Our most sacred text isn’t the Torah, the purported word of Hashem, but the Talmud, a multi-volume companion text that interprets, expands and comments. Essentially the Talmud is marginalia, a conversation. A beneath-the-line comments section. What Judaism essentially amounts to is a four-thousand-year-old argument.

Thus Moses emphasizes the need to learn, to keep, and to do the Laws of the Torah, but he never promoted studying it only for the sake of studying, as the Sages teach. Moreover, rabbinic tradition has turned the act of learning Talmud into work itself (תורתו אמנותו)—a never-ending occupation which bestows merit, both in this world and in the world to come.[147] Of course, this “work” took place in the yeshiva, which (as shown above) was a duplication of the Greek academy

Any illusion of papal objectivity must have been dispelled by the pope’s opening statement: “You, the Jewish sages, ought to bear in mind that I am not here, nor have I sent for you to come to this place, in order to discuss which of the two religions is true. For I know that my faith is the only true one; yours had once been true but it has since been superseded. You have come here only on account of Geronimo who has promised to prove, through the very Talmud of your masters who are wiser than yourselves, that the Messiah has already come. You shall debate before me this topic exclusively.

The Torah, like other ancient law codes, assigns the death penalty to many proscribed behaviors besides murder—including adultery, rape of a betrothed woman, giving insult or injury to one’s parents, witchcraft, male homosexuality, and public profanation of the Sabbath. By the second century C.E., however, the Talmudic rabbis, whose debates and rulings constitute the main body of Halakha, had virtually nullified the death penalty. The Mishnah (the codification of law that forms the core text of the Talmud) states, “A Sanhedrin [governing council] that puts a man to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: even once in seventy years. Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon say: had we been in the Sanhedrin none would ever have been put to death” (Makkot 7A). Even in murder cases, the Torah’s requirement of two eyewitnesses for a sentence of death was interpreted by the Talmudic rabbis to make capital punishment highly unlikely: the murderer’s own confession could not be accepted as evidence, and the two eyewitnesses were required also to have warned the criminal beforehand that he would be executed! Justice tempered by mercy thus became the Jewish ideal.

As Nachmanides championed the cause of Maimonides against his enemies, so he took up the cause of Alfazi, against Sarachya Halevi and Abraham Ben David, who attacked Alfazi's Talmudic productions.

Pope Gregory IX endorsed the accusations of Nicolas Donin: If what is said about the Jews of France and of the other lands is true, no punishment would be sufficiently great or sufficiently worthy of their crime. For they, so we have heard, are not content with the Old Law which God gave to Moses in writing; they even ignore it completely, and affirm that God gave another Law which is called “Talmud.” . . . In this is contained matter so abusive and so unspeakable that it arouses shame in those who mention it and horror in those who hear it. Wherefore . . . this is said to be the chief cause that holds the Jews obstinate in their perfidy.24 Several decades later his words

used the interpretation of ancient Jewish texts and legends as my paradigm to place Abraham back during the time of the Tower of Babel, an event that would be considered about a thousand years before Abraham under the conventional chronology. While this supposition is largely rejected now, it has a long venerable tradition in 2nd Temple Jewish literature and Talmudic interpretation and shows up in Ginzberg’s famous Legends of the Jews.[5] It is that interpretation that I found interesting enough to present within the pages of the novel because I have used these ancient Jewish sources throughout the entire series

The Binding of Isaac and the Binding of You and Me With Rosh Hashanah coming in a few weeks, it is a good time to think about some of its important lessons. The High Holy Days are a time to evaluate our relationship with important people in our lives. We ask their forgiveness, they ask ours, and if there is regret for past faults and insensitive acts (Tradition calls them “sins”), we lend forgiveness to others, and they to us. Rosh Hashanah is also a time to think about our relation with our Tradition, with Judaism. It is the Jewish New Year, and a time to reexamine where we stand with regard to the faith/culture/civilization we call Judaism. Those hearing these words have already taken significant steps toward solidifying their Jewish connections by joining a synagogue, coming to religious worship, and doing many other Jewish things in our lives. Take a few moments—even a few hours—to think about and discuss your Jewish values and priorities with your loved ones and intellectual sparring partners. How can you deepen and strengthen your Jewish ties and commitments in the coming year? Perhaps that is why we are bidden to hear the sound of the Shofar each morning for thirty days during the month of Elul, before Rosh Hashanah, as well as on the New Year itself. The Talmud, in tractate “Rosh Hashanah” (16a), tells us: “Rabbi Abahu said: Why do we use the horn of a ram on Rosh Hashanah? Because the Blessed Holy One is saying to us: If you blow a horn from a ram before Me on Rosh Hashanah, I will be reminded of the act of ultimate faith performed by Avraham when he was ready to carry out my demand, even though a ram was eventually sacrificed in place of Yitzhak. The merit of Avraham will reflect merit on you, his descendants. In fact, when you blow the Shofar, and I remember the Binding (Hebrew: Akedah) of Yitzhak I will attribute to you the merit of having bound (Hebrew: akad-tem) yourselves to me. As we begin to blow the Shofar each morning, from the first day of the Hebrew month of Elul, let’s begin to think about how we bind ourselves to God. About our Jewish boundaries, the ties that bind us to our Jewish past. Let’s think of how our ritual lives can be enriched and enhanced with more song, custom, prayer and ceremony. Let’s think of how we can give ourselves to more Jewish causes (Israel, Jewish education, the synagogue), and how being Jewish can help bind and tie us to the needs of humanity (the environment, the needs of our community, the eradication of poverty and injustice). Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins

The most influential of all early modern pantheists was the philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). Born into a family of Jewish refugees from Portugal, Spinoza was trained in Talmudic scholarship but soon developed an unconventional theology of his own. When this became known, he was summoned before a rabbinical court and even offered money to recant. When he refused, he was excommunicated. He earned a humble living as a lens-grinder, and died of consumption in 1677.

Rashi was one of the champions of the theory, which sought to bring about a compromise between the Peshat and the Derash. He interspersed the Aggadic and Midrashic with the philological, a circumstance, which, in all likelihood, accounted for the popularity of his commentary. One can readily detect Rashi's indebtedness to the Targumim, the Talmud and the Masorah.

A younger brother of Samuel, Jacob ben Meir, known as Rabbenu Tam was also a Tosafist of marked scholarship and pronounced mental analysis. He was born in 1100 and died 1171. While an exegete of the Bible, he did not come up to his brother Samuel in this particular, but far surpassed him in Talmudic interpretation. Grammatical studies engaged his attention to such an extent that he entered the breach between Menahem ben Saruk and Dunash with a work called, Hakhraot (decisions) in which he protected Menahem against the onslaughts of his critic.

as one utilizes the findings of modern scholarship, one renews an essential characteristic of Jewish learning. Biblical exegesis in rabbinic and medieval Judaism has always focused on debate and variety….[T]he post-modern Jew revels in the diverse voices and counter-voices [discovered by critical Bible scholarship] so reminiscent of Talmudic and contemporary dialectic. (from "The Scroll of Isaiah as Jewish Scripture, Or Why Jews Don't Read Books," in Society of Biblical Literature 1996 Seminar Papers)

Flavius Josephus, the well-known historian of the Jewish people, was born in A. D. 37, only two years after the death of Jesus; but though his work is of inestimable value as our chief authority for the circumstances of the times in which Jesus and his Apostles came forward, yet he does not seem to have ever mentioned Jesus himself. At any rate, the passage in his 'Jewish Antiquities' that refers to him is certainly spurious, and was inserted by a later and a Christian hand. The Talmud compresses the history of Jesus into a single sentence, and later Jewish writers concoct mere slanderous anecdotes.

The Talmud was compiled from the oral teachings handed down generation after generation by rabbis who claimed that Moses received not one, but two revelations on Mt Sinai, one to be written down and another to be passed along by word of mouth.  You can see how problematic this is, because even if it were true (and it is written that Moses wrote all the words that God gave him[77]), people over the 1400 years between Sinai and Jesus’ ministry could have added to and subtracted from them – and we see from the very writings of the Talmud (compiled between 200 and 600 AD) that the legal orthodox Jewish requirements have gone through alterations.  The Talmud is largely a book of Jewish laws and commentary, in essence, no different than we find in books on Catholicism and Protestant Christianity, except that the writings of the sages have been combined into one large text to be compared side by side so it can easily be seen what many ancient sages said about a given topic or dispute.

Therefore, one should rather fling himself into a fiery furnace than humiliate someone in public,” declares the Talmud.12 While Christians know intuitively that humiliating others is wrong, it is good to remind ourselves of the severity of its effects, especially on our spouses and children. Jews

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.

The Jewish Talmud is right in saying that the prayer in which there is no mention of the kingdom of God is not a prayer at all (Berakoth 21a).

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:

The Talmud teaches that the early saints would wait an hour before praying in order to concentrate their thoughts upon God. The commentaries explain that this means that they would empty their minds of all mundane thoughts, and would bind their consciousness to the Master of all, with fear and love. [These saints would then pray for an hour, and finally wait another hour after their prayers, so that they would spend a total of three hours on each of the three daily services.] It thus came out that they would take off a total of nine hours each day from their sacred studies in order to engage in meditation (hitbodedut), binding themselves [to God]. The Light of the Divine Presence would appear over their heads as if it were spread around them, with them sitting in the midst of the Light. I found this in an old manuscript from the early mystics.

three volumes Rubenstein examines Torah as the primary value of the Talmudic academy and discusses the means by which one gains stature in the academy: by engaging in argumentation, through one’s lineage, or as a result of the breadth of one’s knowledge.

Among his most interesting conclusions are the following: courtroom scenes focus on matters of status and hierarchy, which are paralleled in noncourtroom encounters between sages,62 and although we often view the rabbis as superior moral beings, the Talmud within the context of its legal narratives shows that they act as human beings concerned with their own best self-interests.63 To summarize, Kalmin and Hayes argue that the final editors of the Babylonian Talmud did not homogenize what they received in such a way as to make it impossible to discover the various streams of earlier thinking within the Talmud.

Segundo o Talmude "o homem rico é aquele que está satisfeito com o que possui".

The old Talmudic Jewish philosophers may have come a bit closer to quantifying risk. But here, too, we find no indication that they followed up on their reasoning by developing a methodical approach to risk. Sambursky cites a passage in the Talmud, Kethuboth 9q, where the philosopher explains that a man may divorce his wife for adultery without any penalty, but not if he claims that the adultery occurred before marriage.13 “It is a double doubt,” declares the Talmud. If it is established (method unspecified) that the bride came to the marriage bed no longer a virgin, one side of the double doubt is whether the man responsible was the prospective groom himself—whether the event occurred “under him . . . or not under him.” As to the second side of the doubt, the argument continues: “And if you say that it was under him, there is doubt whether it was by violence or by her free will.” Each side of the double doubt is given a 50–50 chance. With impressive statistical sophistication, the philosophers conclude that there is only one chance in four (1/2 × 1/2) that the woman committed adultery before marriage. Therefore, the husband cannot divorce her on those grounds.

TEACH YOUR TONGUE to say, “I do not know,” lest you invent something and be trapped. —TALMUD, BERACHOT 4A

Talmudic study with its focus on textual analysis and the transferable skills it fosters; some cultural emphasis on argumentation

For women were dangerous in every part of their anatomy, from top to toe. Luxuriant hair could excite lust accordingly the Jewish Talmud from A.D. 600 onward allowed a man to divorce a wife who appeared in public with her hair uncovered. While St Paul went so far as to instruct Christians that a woman who came bare headed to church had better have her head shaved. The female face was another Venus's flytrap for helpless males - in a bizarre piece of theology dated from the 3rd Century A.D., the early Christian father Tertullian held that "the blume of virgins" was responsible for the fall of the angels: "so perilous a face, then, ought to be kept shaded when it has cast stumbling stones even so far as heaven.

The rabbinical form of Judaism that emerged from this movement emphasized literacy and the skills to read and interpret the Torah. Even before the destruction of the temple, the Pharisee high priest Joshua ben Gamla issued a requirement in 63 or 65 AD that every Jewish father should send his sons to school at age six or seven. The goal of the Pharisees was universal male literacy so that everyone could understand and obey Jewish laws. Between 200 and 600 AD, this goal was largely attained, as Judaism became transformed into a religion based on study of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Talmud (a compendium of rabbinic commentaries). This remarkable educational reform was not accomplished without difficulty. Most Jews at the time earned their living by farming, as did everyone else. It was expensive for farmers to educate their sons and the education had no practical value. Many seem to have been unwilling to do so because the Talmud is full of imprecations against the ammei ha-aretz, which in Talmudic usage means boorish country folk who refuse to educate their children. Fathers are advised on no account to let their daughters marry the untutored sons of the ammei ha-aretz. The scorned country folk could escape this hectoring without totally abandoning Judaism. They could switch to a form of Judaism Lite developed by a diaspora Jew, one that did not require literacy or study of the Torah and was growing in popularity throughout this period. The diaspora Jew was Paul of Tarsus, and Christianity, the religion he developed, seamlessly wraps Judaism around the mystery cult creed of an agricultural vegetation god who dies in the fall and is resurrected in the spring.

As pointed out several times already, the Levitical priests were the ones to whom the mandate to uphold the Torah was given. In fact, in a discussion about the Sabbath law, the Babylonian Talmud itself admits that the priests were quick and cautious in regard to keeping the commandments.[239] Hence, if there were any questions in regard to keeping the Sabbath laws, the people of Israel knew they could trust the priests and count on them to give the right instructions.

In a story from the Jewish Talmud, a man is asked why he is planting a carob tree that will not produce fruit within his lifetime and replies, “Just as my ancestors planted for me, I too am planting for my descendants.

I attended a bat mitzvah during which the presiding rabbi had the unenviable task of leading what should be a joyous event during a time of deep mourning. During the ceremony, she described a Jewish teaching that explains if a funeral procession and a wedding procession meet at an intersection and one has to go first, the wedding takes the lead. This Talmudic lesson is meant to demonstrate that even in times of extreme sadness and mourning, we need to make room for life and joy.

The first, Ben Azzai, looked at the divine presence and immediately perished. The second, Ben Zoma, lost his mind. The third, Elisha ben Abuyah, became a heretic and was, from that moment on, known simply as Acher, or “the Other.” Only Akiva, we’re told, entered in peace and left in peace. Why? Jewish scholars have spent centuries offering various intricate explanations, but Akiva’s is best. “It is not because I am greater than my colleagues,” he is quoted as saying in a midrash, “but because of the teaching in the Mishnah, ‘Your deeds will bring you near and your deeds will keep you far.’ ”25 Just as his status as a self-made man of low lineage kept him from receiving the highest honor on earth, so did his deeds enable him to receive the highest honor in higher, celestial spheres. In Yavneh, the kid from nowhere could never be appointed Nasi; in paradise, he and only he is welcomed and protected. Even the angels themselves, the Talmud tells us, resented Akiva this privilege and sought to push him out, but “the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to them: Leave this Elder, for he is fit to serve My glory.”26

If the Bible wasn’t corrupted in a massive and conspiratorial fashion, Islam can’t be trusted. Correcting the Torah and Gospels, setting the record straight, returning to the true religion, were central to Muhammad’s mission. If the scripture wasn’t garbled, Islam loses its justification. If the Bible wasn’t massively degraded—to the point that it would be unrecognizable—the cornerstone of Islam is a lie. To believe that Team Islam was right, and the Hebrew prophets were wrong, one has to dismiss the fact that most of the Qur’an’s stories and characters were lifted from Jewish oral traditions in the Talmud.

For me it's hard to know where to begin some days. I become overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of needs that flood my inbox and mailbox, my texts and social media feeds. In search of how to find a way forward, I once stumbled on wisdom tucked into some ancient Jewish writings known as the Talmud. There it says that if someone is suffering and in need, and you can take away 1/60 of their pain, then that is goodness, and the call to help is from God. This is a powerful expression of our being the salt - the preservers, the flavorers, the fertilizers - of the earth.

The concept of Bar Mitzvah finds its roots in the Talmud, a central text of Jewish law and tradition. It notes that at age thirteen for boys and twelve for girls, an individual becomes “obligated in commandments.” This signifies their newfound spiritual maturity and accountability for their actions.

In the form in which it issued from the Jewish academies of Babylonia and Palestine, it is a great national work, a scientific document of first importance, the archives of ten centuries, in which are preserved the thoughts and opinions, the views and verdicts, the errors, transgressions, hopes, disappointments, customs, ideals, convictions, and sorrows of Israel--a work produced by the zeal and patience of thirty generations, laboring with a self-denial unparalleled in the history of literature.

Many of the demons of Babylon are shared with the Jewish faith. A good example of this cultural influence is the Talmudic privy demon known as Shed Bet ha-Kise. It is a new iteration of the well-known Akkadian demon, Šulak.

As much as I admire the brilliance of the Jewish Talmud—especially the way it hallows sacred debate across the centuries—I cannot have it. It belongs to those in whose lifeblood it was written. As much as my soul leans toward the whirling of the Sufis who bring heaven to earth with their ethereal spinning, I cannot have that either. It belongs to those who have devoted their lives to the love of Allah.

because Judaism required the reading of the Torah and promoted literacy in Talmudic academies, the Jewish community’s human capital increased

The Babylonian Jews in the Sasanian Empire, living in a non-Christian and even progressively anti-Christian environment, could easily take up, and continue, the discourse of their brethren in Asia Minor; and it seems as if they were no less timid in their response to the New Testament’s message and in particular to the anti-Jewish bias that is so prominent in the Gospel of John.

It has been argued that the hostility of the Arabian Jewish tribes to Mohammed was due to his alliances with dissenting Jewish sects.8 Our modern conception of religion prevents us from appreciating just how fluid the ancient faiths were.

Far from it; the Talmudic centres were so distant from Arabia, and the prevailing lifestyles so different that we can imagine a local, exotic Jewish culture which would have been virtually unrecognizable to a Jew from Babylon.

The Jewish system of law is called halacha, the Islamic system is called shar’ia.

In fact the two religions are so close in terms of their structure that the tenth-century rabbinic leader Saadia Gaon would unselfconsciously refer to Jewish law as shar’ia, to the prayer leader in a synagogue as an imam and the direction in which Jews faced when praying as qibla.

Why is God called “the Place” (hamaqom)? Because the universe is located in Him, not He in the universe.

Modern Western thought is characterized by an extensive use of abstract concepts that exist and operate within a more general abstract system. Jewish thought, on the other hand, has, with very few exceptions, done without them. Abstract concepts are not to be found in the Bible, the Talmud, or even in relatively modern Hasidic texts.

For example, when we see how frequently the concept regel (foot) is used in Talmudic discussions of the laws of torts (regel is the damage caused by a domestic animal while walking, during its customary activities), it is plain that the Jewish thinkers of the past simply had a strong reluctance to coin obvious abstract concepts. Imagery concepts were used, then, as a matter of deliberate and conscious choice. They do not reflect a weak or primitive mode of thought. They are rather a special form of expression, marked by its own advantages and disadvantages. This Jewish conceptual structure is neither better nor worse, neither more advanced nor more backward than Western abstract conceptual thinking: it is a parallel development.

Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Catholic religions all traditionally believed it was within a husband’s purview to discipline his wife in more or less the same manner as he might discipline and control any other of his properties, including servants, slaves, and animals; of course, the holy texts—Koran, Bible, and Talmud—from which such beliefs stem were simply interpretations by (of course) men of the time. Some of these interpretations even gave instruction on the manner of wife beating, such as avoiding direct blows to the face, or making sure not to cause lasting injury.

During the more than half a millennium when Catholics were using the university to develop theology, metaphysics, physics and eventually the sciences that led to the industrial revolution, scholarship for Jews meant studying the Talmud, which meant among other things, learning how to cheat the goyim in business transactions and then justify those practices with a veneer of pious rationalization. This is not my opinion; it is the verdict of Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish historiography,

The Jewish Talmud pro pounds this question, Why God made man vesperâ Sabbathi?—on the evening before the Sabbath? and gives this as one reason, ut protinus intraret in præ ceptum—that is, God made man on the evening just before the Sabbath, that he might forthwith enter upon the observation of the command to sanctify the Sabbath, and begin his life as it were with the worship of God,

the role of Assyrian merchants in assisting the development of the Anatolian economy is strikingly reminiscent of that played by the Jews in opening up the interior of Europe during the Middle Ages. Perhaps that is unsurprising: Jewish culture and tradition, as minutely prescribed in the Babylonian Talmud, was itself largely forged in Mesopotamia.

Gehinom, or Gehenna, passed into use as a metaphoric designation for the place of punishment in the hereafter. According to a Talmudic view, the doors of Gehenna close behind apostates, informers, promoters of sin, and tyrants for many generations. According to the mystical holy book, the Zohar, sinners are punished for twelve months, half of the time in fire and half in snow. Among those who do not face Gehenna, a Talmudic passage includes the very poor and diseased. Despite the many differences of opinion as to the meaning of Gehenna, it is nowhere considered to be a dogma or a doctrine of faith that Jews are required to profess. Even those rabbinic sages who delighted in describing the torments of Gehenna and other shadowy places were usually aware that they were permitting their imagination to roam freely.

JHVH is no longer the national God of Israel. The Talmud guards against the very suspicion of a “Judaized God” by insisting that every benediction to Him as “God the Lord” must add “King of the Universe” rather than the formula of the Psalms, “God of Israel.

His accountant, Itzhak Stern, who Schindler protected, consoled him by quoting the Jewish Talmud: ‘He who saves one life, saves the World entire.’ It said to me then, and still says to me today, that even when we can’t do everything, we can still do something.