Quotes About Talmud

It's the side-by-side culture of the Talmud I like so much. 'On the one hand' and 'on the other hand' is frustrating for people seeking absolute faith, but for me it gives religion an ambidextrous quality that suits my temperament.

The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a goses , but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the Rabbi is dying and hurls a clay vessel to the ground. The sound diverts the students, who stop praying. In that moment, the Rabbi dies and his soul goes to heaven. The servant, too, the Talmud says, is guaranteed her place in the world to come.

If it be true that our people represent a high percentage of mental vigor, the distinction is probably due, in some measure, to the extremely important part which Talmud studies have played in the spiritual life of the race.

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.

Thus it is written in the Talmud: "He who translates a passage as it seems to be, is a deceiver.

However, in contrast to the consistency of meaning of imagery concepts used in the Kabbala, which, as we have seen, resemble symbols, the situation in the Bible and the Talmud is quite different. There, the significance of any given concept is not uniform, and even in those cases where there is no doubt that such a covert meaning is intended, no standard key exists for its interpretation. Furthermore, there may well be more than one key for different aspects of its meaning.

Our sages have said, "Sleep is one sixtieth of death" (Talmud, Berachot 57b). If sleep is a form of death, then death is a form of sleep -- but a temporary withdrawal of vitality for the sake of reawakening to a higher quality of life

In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.

Yeshivas barely teach any Bible, only Talmud.

The Talmud is a book of exegesis of the Old Testament, codified in the fourteenth century and containing the basis of all the archaic rules and laws of Judaism:

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,

I'm a Larry David fan, right? And it seems to me that Jewish history from the Talmud on has been a self-deprecating, self-critical kind of humor.

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.

It is said that God left the northernmost point of the earth unfinished; for, He said, "Whosoever professes he is equal to Me, let him come and complete this land, which I have left unfinished; thus will all know he is My equal." —The Talmud I POSTWAR

As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model for the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job.

For me, study is a divine and daily imperative, and I study a page of Talmud daily so that I am not only teaching. My teaching is constantly being fed by my learning.

The soul is frail, but God is full of compassion for the distress of the soul, for the failure of the heart. It is said in the Talmud: "There are some who desire [to help others] but have not the means; whilst others have the means [and help] but have not the desire [to help]." Yet both kinds of people are holy in the eyes of God.4

The Rabba bar Bar-Cganah stories and the Savvei DeVei Atuna riddles (Bava Basra 733a-74b and Bechoros 8b) consist of fantastic stories and cryptic debates which constitute what are probably the most enigmatic parts of the entire Talmud.

Welcome Good! Welcome Evil!" a German poet once wrote, and ever since I was a boy I had revolved an apophthegm from the Talmud in my mind. Of evil it said: "Gam su letovo" ("That too is all for the best").

My mother, whose family was heavily rabbinic, said she wanted me to continue the family tradition in the rabbinate. My father said he wanted me to be a scholar of the Talmud, but he wanted me to make my living in science.

The theory of price in the Talmud and the Codes in so far as it affected trade between Jew and Jew, is exactly parallel to the scholastic doctrine of justum pretium which was prevalent in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. But as between Jew and non-Jew, there was no just price. Price was formed, as it is today, by the "higgling of the market.

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 history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story.

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.