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Shimon Hatzaddik In the Beginning here is no intellectual work known to the human world that is even similar to the Mishnah and its companion work, the Talmud. The Talmud is a law book, a faithful transmission of the Oral Law of Sinai to all later generations of Jews. It is a book of ethical principles and moral values. It is a book of legends and stories, and also of psychological and histor- ical observations. It discusses medicine, pharmacology, dreams, botany, astronomy and mathematics, as well as human and animal biology. It is a detailed, painstaking commentary to the Written Law of the Torah, based on rigorous logic, scrupulous scrutiny of the biblical texts, and an unremitting search for truth. It does not debate matters of faith—it is faith itself. It discov- ers God and His Torah in every nook and cranny of human exis- tence and there is nothing about life, humans, nature, spirituality or physicality that is a taboo subject. All is Torah; all is holiness. Replete with humor,COPYRIGHTED irony, pathos, soaring optimism MATERIAL and cold- hearted realism, its mode—and drama—emerge from the give and take of intensive scholarly debate and unending questioning, prob- ing and hypothesizing. It is a joy to study, but it is not entertaining. The Talmud is mad- deningly difficult and sometimes determinedly abstruse. It makes no concessions, not in language nor intellect, to its students. Its reasoning and methods are rigorous. Every word, every sentence and phrase is a new challenge. The text has very little punctuation, THE ORAL LAW OF SINAI and its long and complicated run-on sentences can go for pages on end. It demands a seriousness of purpose, a willingness to commit time and sweat to its study, before it will give up its secrets and insights. In reality, the Talmud is two separate books comprising the Oral Law. The first is the Mishnah, the subject of this book. Written circa third century BCE, its language is classical, post-biblical He- brew. It is studied as a subject in and of itself. However, the Talmud, also known as Gemara, is written in the Aramaic of third to fifth century Babylonian Jewry. Every page of the Talmud includes the passage of Mishnah upon which its dis- cussion is based, as well as later teach- ings and commentary. A key feature of both the Mishnah and the Talmud is that they can never be understood from the outside. As a unique work with its own method of reasoning, it can be known only from the inside— from the Talmud itself! So, the obvious question is, where does one begin? One must struggle to get into the heart of the Talmud, for only by reaching its heart can one hope to penetrate the intricacies of its mental processes and appreciate the magic of its logic. Since the Talmud can only be known from inside, intellect alone (though certainly necessary) is in- sufficient to master it. Minds can speak Page from Talmud Bavli, to minds, but only hearts can speak to hearts. Masechet Megila, Venice, 1523 (Jewish National & The Talmud is a book of godly personalities and deep insight University Library) into the human condition and the world. It is a book of love, of compassion, of striving spirituality and also of withering candor. It is a book for the masses, but it is again a book only for the few. It has simple wisdom on its surface and majestic mystery in its depth. 2 IN THE BEGINNING It is the book of love between Jews and Jews, between generations and generations, between the people and the God of Israel. There- fore, one who measures the Talmud by the yardstick of facts, laws, and discussions alone makes a fundamental error, for that is a very narrow, and even unjust, view of this monumental work. For the triumph of the Talmud and its personalities against its enemies, both within and without the Jewish people, was based upon its hidden greatness and human warmth, not only on its soar- ing intellect and wise interpretations of Jewish law. The creators of the Mishnah and Talmud are the worthy successors to the prophets of Israel in their vision, their fire and passion, their unsparing hon- esty, their love for the people and God of Israel; and most of all, in their almost unrealistic yet unquenchable optimism. Theirs is the unshakable faith in the Torah and mission of Israel that sustained generations of Jews for centuries. But perhaps the greatest contribution of the Oral Law—and of the Mishnah and Talmud that now represents that Oral Law—is found in the words of Midrash itself: “I [the Lord] do not wish to grant them the Oral Law in writing because I know that the nations of the world will rule over the Jews and take it away from them. Thus, the written Bible I give them [now] in writing, while the Mishnah, Talmud and Aggadah I grant to them orally, for when the nations of the world will in the future subjugate Israel, the Jews will still be able to be separate from them … for they [the words of the Oral Law] are what will separate the Jewish people from being assimilated and lost into the general society” (Midrash Rabah Shmos, chapter 47, section one). Thus, even though the entire Torah, both Written and Oral, is from Sinai, the portion of Torah that is the Oral Law remains solely in Jewish possession, unlike the written Bible that has been co- opted by other faiths. In this way, the Oral Law has contributed sig- nificantly to the survival of the Jews as a unique and vital people. The Oral Law can be seen as the dividing line between Israel and the nations of the world. The Written Law, the Bible, can be char- THE ORAL Law OF SINAI acterized as universal: the Oral Law, as represented in the Mish- nah and Talmud, as particular. The genius of incorporating both of these ideas and balancing them harmoniously within Judaism is testimony to the strength and truth of the Jewish faith. The Oral Law is built upon the Written Torah. Though it was a product of centuries of study, writing, editing and endless review, Judaism posits that the Oral Law—its structure, mechanisms, and its interpretations of the Written Torah—stems from the Divinity of the Revelation at Sinai. Every subject in the Talmud begins with the question: “Where in the Written Torah [in the text itself] do we find the basis for this discussion?” However, the development, scholarship and popularization of the Oral Law were accomplished by people. And it is these people who lie at the heart of the Mishnah and Talmud. These great hu- man beings accelerated this process of developing the Oral Law after the end of the period of prophecy in Jewish history, during the era of Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly (approximately 50-00 BCE). In fact, the development of the Oral Law as the main spiritual and intellectual basis of Judaism from the time of Ezra onwards should be seen as the replacement for the now ab- sent gift of prophecy which had previously sustained the nation of Israel from the time of Moses till Ezra. Until the final redaction of the Babylonian Talmud (approximately 50 CE), this process of interpretation and decision-making, stretching over almost a mil- lennia in time, continued unabated. Neither the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) nor the failure of the later Bar Kochba rebellion (c. 2 CE) stopped the process of refining and studying the Oral Law. Through Greek and Roman persecution and the challenges of pagan culture, even through the later rise of Christianity and its open hostility towards Jews and Judaism, the work of the noble scholars of the Mishnah and Talmud continued. Their academies of learning flourished, first in the Land of Israel and then in Babylonia. Who were these great men? What do we know of their lives and fortunes? How were they able to ignore the damaging winds that swirled around them and remain focused on the development iN the BegiNNiNg of the Oral Law? Like the Talmud itself, their life stories are not found in outside sources. They are found only in the Mishnah, the Talmud and in attendant works of Torah scholarship—Midrash, Tosefta, Targum, etc. As stated above, the only way to understand the Talmud is through its heart, and these transcendent individuals are its very heart. It is therefore through the lives of these people that the story of the development of the Mishnah and Talmud will be told. That is why I believe that this book can be a boon to all students of the Mishnah and Talmud, veteran and novice, skilled and struggling. The study of Mishnah and Talmud has been enhanced and popularized by its relatively recent availability in English. Special commendation is due to the Mesorah Heritage Foundation that has sup- ported the publication of the monumental Artscroll edition of the Talmud with its English eluci- dation. However, to the best of my knowledge, a popular review of the lives and personalities of the creators of the Mishnah and Talmud has not yet been made available to the wider Eng- Cylinder by Cyrus documenting his capture lish-speaking public. There are some wonderful works on this sub- of Babylon and the return of captured people ject in Hebrew. Chief among them are those of Eliezer Shteinman, in Babylon to their Avraham Naftal, Aharon Heiman, Yisrael Konovitz, Chaim Koolitz, homelands, Babylon, circa 539-530 BCE (The British Yitzchak Isaac Halevi, Reuven Margoliyus and Zev Yavetz.
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