Today, I fell in love with the Talmud.
By: Michael Lewis
Tags: Talmud, Halacha, Judaism

Today, I fell in love with the Talmud.

Throughout my life, I have had teachers, students, friends, colleagues, or really anyone throw around different sugiyot (a section of Talmud) with the purpose of teaching a specific lesson.

If someone comes to teach about civil discourse, they might bring up Masechet Eruvin 13b, when the text explains why halacha follows the ruling of Beit Hillel over Beit Shammai. “[Beit Hillel] was agreeable and forbearing, and would teach both their own statements and the statements of Beit Shammai. Moreover, they prioritized the statements of Beit Shammai to their own statements [in deference to Beit Shammai!].”

Or maybe a more machmir (strict) individual wants to discuss obligation and draws from the story in Masechet Shabbat 88a, where Rav Avdimi says that God held Mt. Sinai over the Israelites, forcing them to accept the covenant, and thus we are all obligated to follow the mitzvot (commandments) as our ancestors did.

Or maybe a liberal advocacy group bases its work on the ideas taught in Pirkei Avot, “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?”

For years, this all felt like individuals and groups were just dipping into the Talmud to pluck out the stories that provided meaning for a certain, predisposed political or ethical position that they held. The Talmud is huge — and I have not even addressed the fact that we are often only talking about the Bavli, or Babylonian Talmud, and ignoring the text that was redacted in Judea, known as the Talmud Yerushalmi. Surely inside this massive corpus anyone can find any story or law or debate that gives credence to their predisposed point. (Similarly, many would argue the Torah can have the same effect, although it is much easier to access because of language, size, and its place in the broader, non-Jewish society.)

As someone who grew up as a liberal Jew, who spent nine years at a non-denominational but essentially Conservative Jewish Day School and showed up at weekly adult Torah study at my synagogue in High School, my perception of the Talmud up until today could be characterized by two main ideas. First, I felt that the text was so large, daunting and foreign. Because of that, I believed, as noted above, that anyone could pull any story to make any point. And quite frankly, I wonder how many people do just pull texts to prove a point and ignore the rest of the document. Second, the part that I would surely want to skip were all of the details about Jewish Law, or halacha. What was the point for me? I don’t feel commanded by God to follow the halachot — why should I care that a Mikveh is a certain size or that a specific blessing should be read at the conclusion of reading the Megillah on Purim or that a Sukkah needs to have these specific dimensions?

Yet today, I fell in love with the Talmud. Why?

Today, the characters and their debates came alive! As I am reading, I have a chance to get to know the carriers of the tradition, those who redacted it, and the thousands of people who have asked countless questions about the text over the generations. We have access to this incredible text in which human beings practiced healthy debate and democracy. Minority opinions are recorded and enshrined so that future groups might utilize its ideas. The text disagrees with itself on a regular basis, presenting alternative opinions, disputing obvious straw-men, and dallying into minutia before providing the average Jew with an idea of what to do in a specific circumstance. It values questions more than anything else! Rabbis regularly present challenges to their teachers, and speak about their teachers’ teachers with reverence and delicacy before prodding into the details and finding holes in their arguments. Sometimes the arguments are mundane and can teach us the rules of argumentation itself, while at other times it deals with real world issues like what to do about people who enter and leave in the middle of the Torah service! (If you’ve ever been to synagogue, you understand that Jews do not just sit patiently in the pews for three straight hours, but schmooze with their friends, drink coffee, go to the bathroom, and sometimes even meet their spouse.)

While medieval legal codes like the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides and the Shulkhan Arukh of Joseph Karo present the average Jew with a boiled down version of all of the laws that one needs to know, the Talmud has remained the quintessential text because it teaches one how to ask the questions that need to be asked. Judaism is not and has never been about the answers — rather it is about the path to get there and the questions asked along the way.

The word for Jewish Law in Hebrew is halacha. Halacha literally means “walking” or “pathway”. There are two ways to interpret this. The modern orthodox interpretation says that there is one way — one path for Jews to take. One can read the Talmud and the various law codes and determine how to live on this path, and one can either be on the path or “off the derech”.

Yet the other interpretation of the word halacha is the interpretation that the pathway, the process of grappling with the mitzvot, is the most important part. Rather than finding the path, halacha is about the journey itself, learning how to ask the right questions to guide one toward a meaningful and Jewish life, doing so with great respect to those on the path with you and with deference to those who have walked the path before you.

And for this reason, I have fallen in love with the Talmud. The characters involved are walking on the path of Judaism.

Today, I see Judaism moving in two directions — one toward a specific path and the other away from the path entirely. Yet it is time for liberal Jews to return to the path of halacha, to explore the mitzvot and ask questions about the world using Jewish language rather than the language of the secular, Greco-Christian society around us.

While I have a lot of text left to study in my life, I’ll do what so many have done before and share an inspiring text that helps lend credence to my predisposed view about the Talmud. (Translation is my own.)

“Rabbi Elazar said that Rabbi Hanina said, ‘Scholars increase peace in the world, for [the Torah] says: ‘All of your children shall be taught of the Eternal, and peace will be great for your children.’ Don’t read here Banayikh [your children] but rather Bonayikh [your builders]. Peace will abound for the lovers of your Torah, and they will not stumble,’” (Berachot 64a).

My challenge for 21st century American Jews is to remember: we are builders of halacha, a 3,000 year old path of how to live an ethical, moral life aligned with the wisdom of our ancestors. It is not one specific path that we can be on or off, yet it is also not something we can simply run away from.

If the Talmud teaches us anything, it is how to walk on this path with respect for others and how to learn the values of healthy debate — the key principles of any flourishing democracy. It teaches us how a text that is 1,500 years old can still jump out as a living, breathing document, shaping the way we walk today.