The Talmud is one of the richest and most complicated works of literature the world has ever known. Since being composed around 1500 years ago it has inspired not only religious reverence but significant intellectual engagement. In this course learners will be introduced to the unique characteristics of this text and the challenges that inhere in studying it while studying a chapter of the Talmud. Students of the course can expect to develop an appreciation for how the Talmud works and why it continues to inspire religious and intellectual devotion. They will be challenged to employ critical reading skills and to analyze legal and historical concepts.
The Talmud MOOC - Live!
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Del curso dictado por Northwestern University
The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction
134 calificaciones
De la lección
Conclusion
While some of the material we have studied is unsettling, we need to bear in mind that much of it is rabbinic idealization or fantasy. This module goes through both the fantasy of rabbinic power and the realities of the importance of the Talmud in the post-Talmudic age.
Conoce a los instructores
Barry Scott WimpfheimerAssociate Professor
Religious Studies
We're coming to you live from Northwestern University's Evanston Campus.
For those of you who are in the MOOC which I assume is most of the people watching,
you will already know that I am Barry Winprimer and
seated all the way to my left is Sarah Wolfe.
Sarah and I have been involved visually in the MOOC for
a while, so you'll be familiar with us already.
But to my left here is my colleague Mira Bulber again.
I have to say that she was the original intended partner for the MOOC production.
Mira is my colleague here in religious studies and
a world-renowned scholar of rabbinic literature herself.
And unfortunately didn't work out for
her to be one of the co-teachers of the MOOC, but I'm delighted that for
this Google Hangout, we have the opportunity to talk to Mira.
And I'm going to start by actually asking Mira if she can introduce herself by way
of talking about her own biography as a scholar,
as a student and a scholar of Rabbinic literature.
>> So first of all, thank you so much for inviting me.
It's a pleasure to be here, and
it was a pleasure to look from the side how amazingly popular this class has been.
And it was very encouraging for me personally to see this immense
interest in rabbinic literature and the Talmud.
So I am I suppose a very generational phenomenon in a sense.
I am Israeli in origin.
I grew up in Israel and I grew up in Israeli secular family.
Very Zionist but there Zionism was their main Jewish identity.
So the first time I actually ever saw a page of Talmud
was when I was 20 years old.
And I went to Hebrew University and
because of certain ideas that prevailed in the Hebrew University at the time
sort of services do but what it means to be an educated person,
we were all required to take up preparatory introductory class in Talmud.
>> Pre-requisite all undergraduates.
>> Not all undergraduate.
All undergraduates whose major,
and the Israeli model is one which you decide before you even go in.
Anyone whose major had anything to do with Judaism or Hebrew culture.
So whether it was Hebrew literature, or Hebrew language, or Jewish history or
anything like that.
In my was it was the Hebrew Bible, which was a major.
And I took this class which was obligatory and
fell in love I would say.
And actually I think it had to do autobiographically speaking,
I think, I grew up speaking Hebrew.
Hebrew is my first language, reading Hebrew literature and
feeling like there was a depth to the culture that I was missing.
Like there was a certain sort of, there were layers of meaning,
layers of profundity and layers of allusion and
connotations that I was missing because I didn't have access to those texts.
And so by starting to study Talmud kind of just because it was a required class.
I was like wow this is, this thing that lies underneath
my contemporary modern culture and it became my pursuit.
And in my second year of undergrad I joined the Department of
Talmud at Hebrew University.
That was an undertaking.
>> So for some of our viewers,
I think the idea of the Department of Talmuds might be surprising.
You want to say a little bit about the Israeli education and
the Department of Talmud at the Hebrew University specifically?
>> So the Hebrew University, which was founded in 1925 in Jerusalem,
was really built on the idea of being a university for the Jewish people as such.
And therefore, I think a critical dimension was that education in various
dimension of Jewish creation is not sort of one thing that you can do but is
the main responsibility of this university distinguishes it from other universities.
So our joke used to be that every book has a department.
Have a department of Bible and we have a department of Talmud.
Jewish philosophy is under what is known as Jewish thought.
There's general philosophy that's something different then there's
Jewish philosophy.
And Talmud, which was really I think the jewel in the crown for
has his own department.
Very renowned department with a lot of history.
A lot of sort of local patriotism.
>> In all three of us actually.
Sara, Mira and I have spent a lot of time in the department of Talmud in
the Hebrew University.
>> That's actually where we met first.
>> Yeah, Mira and I met in 2001 I think at Hebrew University Talmud's department.
And the thing is that for our audience it's important to point out that
the Talmud Department doesn't just cover the Talmud.
It covers all rabbinic literature,
so the term Talmud is used as a catch all phrase for all rabbinic literature.
>> That's right. Including neevil commentary, culture and
so So I spent, this is where I did my undergraduate degree.
I was part of a new phenomenon,
as I said in the sense that I was one of very few women to pursue this
and perhaps, more exceptionally,
I think I was the only person who did not have an orthodox background.
So I was quite a curiosity for a while.
And I think the field has evolved significantly in the last decade and
a half and this is not as unusual as it used to be.
But after pursuing a masters, also at the Hebrew University, I realized that I
needed to get some different perspectives, be introduced to some different methods,
have more interdisciplinary exposure, and decided that my
PhD would be pursued at an American university, specifically at Stanford.
>> So, you did a Master's at Hebrew University?
>> That's right. >> In the Talmud department.
And then you came to Stanford, and what department was your doctorate?
>> Religious studies.
>> So, that's already a difference between the two countries and how the Talmud or
Arabic literature is studied.
Then in Israel you have a dedicated Talmud department.
In the United States,
I mean here at Northwestern we had a religious studies department.
So we have different definitions.
Can you characterize the difference?
That's one difference, but there are lots of differences between how the Talmud is
studied critically in the United States and how it's studied critically in Israel.
And obviously, these are generalizations that are not true of everyone.
They are different scholars who do different things in both countries.
>> So I think that, say 10 years ago, the differences were very,
very notable, very noticeable.
And it was really seen as those an ocean separates them but
literally and figuratively as well.
Today, some of those differences have been minimized to some extent, but I will say,
I can maybe a tell a little anecdote that would exemplify this.
When I wrote my first paper at Stanford,
at the Department of Religious Studies with my advisor, shoutout to Claud Robert.
Still at Stanford.
I wrote about a chapter of [INAUDIBLE] in kind of not often looked at
[INAUDIBLE] which is a [INAUDIBLE] the last order of the mission they
order the authorities to have a look that deals with the impurity of spaces.
I wrote my paper about this and my advisor read it and
said, why should anybody be interested in this text?
Said what do you mean?
Because it's there.
I said okay so this doesn't work anymore.
You have to now create the case.
Or your leaders or for anyone else why this is interesting.
Why they can gain something from looking at this text that they wouldn't be able to
find otherwise.
So that sort of I think approach that says we are now trying to communicate
with people who perhaps are interested in philosophy or interested in anthropology
or interested in ancient cultures and we're trying to create a bridge that would
make our very unique texts comprehensible and compelling to them.
Creating those conversations across boundaries was a notable difference.
>> So what were some of the ways that for your own work personally,
being in this more interdisciplinary American model affected the way you
approached your work and the sorts of questions you asked?
>> So I think that one of the biggest things was
really moving from texts to themes.
And trying to understand that my basic point of reference in my work is not,
okay I'm going to be working on this one text and
I'm now committed to every aspect of this text which you've talked about in
this class includes the reduction history and layers and all those aspects.
The textual variance and all those things and when I am working on a text,
I am basically committed to parsing any aspect of it.
If there is some time left in the end maybe I'll say something
about the content.
But rather understanding that this text is interesting for me because I think it's
exploring a question that I find intellectually gripping or
important, or that is approaching a topic
that other people in other settings and other genres have grappled with as well.
So then I tend to find the questions, which find the deep,
intellectual interests.
And using the text as bridges to do that,
I think, has been the major transformation.
>> So we're going to come back to that in a minute,
but we have a question from someone who's watching.
Michelle Johnston wants to know can you say more about
the thing that lies underneath?
Contemporary modern culture.
Are you speaking about Israeli culture or Jewish culture?
What does that look like, can you share some examples of?
>> Interesting, so I was thinking primarily about Israeli culture and
specifically Hebrew speaking culture.
Hebrew is kind of an amazing phenomenon.
The fact that as I said earlier, my first language is Hebrew.
This is sort of, I don't like to use the word miracle,
but I think it perhaps is appropriate to use it here.
So Hebrew was a textural language for centuries and centuries, and
sort of revived as an every day language in the late 19th, early 20th century
but it really sort of absorbed all those years of textual production.
It still evolved when it was in texts.
And so there's so many words and so many sentence structures.
So many expressions in Hebrew that are only
comprehensible if you have that sort of facility with
Rabbinic text and which modern Hebrew literature that builds on those things and
assumes that you have those associations that I think are very prominent.
But also, I grew up Jewish and Israel or Jewish [INAUDIBLE] in the public culture.
And we celebrate the holidays and we had little
in school we were introduced to those aspects of the tradition.
And I didn't understand most of it.
And I think for me the most common example was the [FOREIGN].
So me and my family has a Passover Seder every year and they read the [FOREIGN].
And most of us didn't really understand much of what was going on there.
And just read it because it was what you do.
You wait for the food and in the meantime you kind of keep yourself busy by reading
this thing that you don't quite understand.
And only when I started reading, it was like, this is how [FOREIGN].
And now what it means.
And now I know what it's doing here and
various small traditions or customs or
even the aesthetics of certain things came to be more understandable.
>> I think you were recently working on something
related to [INAUDIBLE] regarding Passover, right?
>> Yes.
Yes, I'm currently completing a book on sacrifice in Rabbinic literature.
And one of the topics that was interesting for me is the Passover sacrifice,
which is this, not many people know the name of the festival, comes
from the name of a particular sacrifice that was offered during the festival.
This is the sacrifice, and I was curious to see what the Rabbi's do with it.
So yes, I did some elaborate work on how the Rabbi's use the Passover
sacrifice in their construction of the sacrifice in general, the Passover.
>> So you went to graduate school at Stanford and after Stanford you,
we had to luxury of being able to make you an appointment here at Northwestern.
>> Yeah, the luxuries of [CROSSTALK] >> The great merit of being able to
appoint you here at Northwestern, you were able to publish a monograph.
I think it's behind me somewhere over there.
Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature.
So the book's been out, probably about 18 months now, or two years?
>> Two years, 2014.
>> So can you provide our viewers and
listeners with some idea of what the book's about, and also tell us something
about how the book's been received, or strangest responses you've gotten so far.
>> All right.
So the book is a book on primarily.
So my area is more early Rabbinic literature [FOREIGN]
and so on.
There's not much earlier.
One is the six order, the last one is called the [FOREIGN] or purities.
And it has got to do with all the aspects that pertain to ritual purity and
impurity.
Ritual purity and impurity, basically Biblically identifies
approximately seven or eight sources, substances that
require a person to perform some ritual washing.
So if they want to approach the Holy Precinct it's
pretty contained in the Hebrew Bible, the rabbis and the [FOREIGN], following,
actually, much what happened for them were very interested in this topic.
Purity, for Jill purity in general as a way to sort of mark boundaries between
members, between individuals, so it was the topic of much interest,
especially during the second [INAUDIBLE] period,
where people were concerned with those topics.
[INAUDIBLE] have 12 tactics about purity and
impurity, and my attempt in my book was to figure out
what we can understand about, first of all, the body.
How does thinking about the body as subject to purity,
as managing itself when it's confronting impurity,
what does it tell us about the rabbi's understanding of the body?
Also in relation to how, say, Greek and Roman medicine at the time
understands the body and its boundaries and what happens to it.
And not less pertinently, the issue of the self.
The body and self are kind of intertwined.
You don't really have a self if you don't have a body.
Contrary to what 16th century philosophers think, for the rabbis,
the self and the body are very closely tied together.
The interesting thing about purity is that it requires constant attention.
Because impurity is everywhere.
You walk in the street,
somebody left something that touched something that touched something.
And there you have it, you have now contracted ritual impurity in some way.
So the whole question of like, how do I manage myself?
How do I walk in the street?
Which people do I touch?
What do I eat?
Whom do I interact with?
All of those things, they're kind of encapsulated in this topic of purity.
So, my attempt in the book was to understand how body and
self are kind of worked out as issues of concern up through these tactics.
>> So not to give away too many spoilers for
any watchers- >> [CROSSTALK] Spoiler alert.
>> Who might want to read this book.
What were some of the conclusions you came to about rabbinic
attitudes towards body and self?
>> Okay, you have to restrict me.
I could talk about this for an hour.
>> [LAUGH] >> We'll cut you off.
>> Thank you.
So I would say that there were three main conclusions.
One was that, primarily about the difference
between the biblical approach to purity and impurity, and the rabbinic approach.
The Bible is very, very concerned with the sources of purity.
Which are things like skin diseases,
various discharges, corpses, things like that.
But the Bible doesn't really go beyond the people who constitute the sources of
impurity.
Those are not very interesting for the rabbis.
What the rabbis are interested in are the people who contract impurity,
the people I call the innocent bystanders.
So for them, the main issue is not what happens to you when you're impure, but
how you manage yourself when you're kind of in a sphere that is full of impurity.
Which I think is a reflection on the way they see themselves.
Not specifically as rabbis, but as Torah-observing individuals
who are trying to maintain a certain set of obedience to the Torah and
a certain way of living in a world that is generally hostile to that attempt.
>> Right. >> So
it's sort of about an attempt to be okay that is constantly frustrated.
So I think that was a difference that I identified.
The second theme I think, was the overwhelming emphasis
on subjectivity, intention, will, and thought.
So perhaps the most notable innovation of the rabbis, in respect to purity and
impurity, is that the mind has a really remarkable impact on that.
Not like you can say, I don't want to be impure, so you don't become impure.
It's not as easy as that, but basically you can only become impure
by objects if you identify them as significant enough to do that.
You can only cause impurity to things if what has happened to them that caused them
to become impure is something that you were in some way interested in.
There are aspects in which- >> Yeah, the reason why that's surprising
is because if you read the Mishnah about purities and impurities,
you get the sense that for the rabbis, these are metaphysical realities.
These are things that, they're kind of like scientific givens-
>> Right, right.
>> In the world.
So it's strange to then discover that they have a whole way of thinking about it,
where intention, and thought, and will, matter so much.
>> And I think some of the previous thinking on this topic was misguided.
And again, I mentioned sixth century philosophy.
Because the notion was like, okay, either something is a physical reality and
then my mind has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Or it is something that my mind does have control over, and then it's not real.
And I think what's interesting about the rabbis is something can be extremely real,
physically real, and nonetheless governed to a certain extent, that consciousness.
They were not that exceptional in this regard I think,
in the greater sort of landscape of the ancient world.
The Stoics, who were kind of interlocutors for
this project, talk about a thing called assent.
In which they state, okay, your mind encounters a certain impression, and
then it will have a certain impact.
But you have to assent to it, you have to agree to have that thing internalized.
So ideas of the connection between mind and reality were much more flexible
in antiquity than they are now, and I think that plays into that.
And the third aspect, I think, that I tried to present in the book is
the importance of what I call attention to attention.
So I think the rabbis create a mode of being in the world which is
defined primarily by your state of mind,
rather than by the consequences of what happens.
In certain cases, what is being valued is the willingness and
the effort to observe the law and to conduct yourself in a certain way,
rather than have you actually physically succeeded to do it.
I think that is one of the key issues about the rabbinic understanding of
Jewish law.
>> So here's a completely out of left field question.
Our students in the MOOC have been studying the laws of false testimony.
>> Mm-hm.
>> In Makkot.
>> Yeah.
>> Does it have anything to do with purities law?
>> [LAUGH] Interestingly, no,
but the very fact that there isn't a connection is notable.
Because if you've read the biblical passages pertaining to murder and
the unintentional murder, one of the key issues that repeats in the Book
of Numbers and other places, is that murder causes impurity to the land.
>> Right.
>> And that if you will not deal with this murder in the appropriate way,
then the land will, the word is, to put it quite colorfully, will vomit you out.
So biblical text actually used the term impurity also when they talk
about in the moral atrocities.
Murder causes impurity in the biblical framework.
The rabbis do something interesting with it, insofar as morality and
impurity are completely separated.
Moral atrocities are moral atrocities, they're judged on their own level.
But impurity is now completely limited to a physical, natural situation.
And that distinction in itself is very important,
because I think the rabbis are the first one to do it.
>> Why would they want to make that distinction between?
I could see them wanting to do it, because when you see the land's going to spit out.
>> Mm-hm. >> You're imputing a certain agency to
the land.
Which is an almost pagan kind of religious energy that the land would have,
independent of a deity or independent of human law.
Do you have theories as to why are the rabbis,
especially if they're the only ones doing it, why are they making this split?
>> And actually, just to add to that question.
Is it that the rabbis are removing the moral valence from impurity?
Or is it that they're removing impurity language from discussion of moral topics?
>> You put it wonderfully, and I think it is the former.
I think that one of the problems with identifying the language of morality with
the language of purity is that what happens then is,
when people actually suffer from the bodily conditions that cause it,
if you're associating those two languages, necessarily you're suggesting that people
who are ritually impure because of their bodily conditions have done something
wrong, or are in some ways to blame, in a certain way.
So I think that is one of the reasons why they prefer to disconnect those things,
especially because for them, purity is so prevalent.
Sorry, impurity, because for them, it's in the street, and it's everywhere,
and all of that.
They don't want to have that sort of weight.
I think they're trying to make impurity like we think of the common cold.
Sure, it's not pleasant when it happens.
It's likely to happen to all of us at some point, and
there's ways to do deal with it, and it's okay.
And I don't think they want to associate morality with that.
>> And just so our viewers have a sense of just how common a dream might be,
can you explain briefly, basically what ways people might become impure?
>> So I think the most common, two most common source of impurity,
as they're put forth by the Bible, one is dead creatures.
So that would be animals, dead animals, carrion,
and also corpses of human beings, which, I mean, it's a pretty serious kind of
impurity that lasts a long time and needs special cleansing rituals.
And the other source of impurity, again, this is not the nicest thing about it,
but it's prevalent in ancient cultures, is menstruating women.
So these are two things that happen all the time.
Everyone is exposed to them and find ways to dilute them.
And then there's some additional sources of impurity like skin disease or
some kind of discharges that are more rare.
But these two aspects are all of them.
>> So I have an opportunity to ask something of a more biographical question.
But it's posed, Phillip Myman,
our viewer has posed this as a question to all three of us.
So I don't know what order we want to take this question in.
But how has studying the Talmud in depth changed your beliefs or
understanding about God and reality?
Or has it mainly been a legal and literary pursuit rather than a spiritual one?
>> You decide the order.
>> Sarah, you want to go first?
>> No. [LAUGH]
>> Okay, I'm willing to go first.
>> Okay.
>> I can say, biographically speaking, that I think my interest in
Rabbinic literature started off from a certain spiritual quest, and
from an attempt to understand my Judaism that was sort of, it was a given.
It was given like the color of my eyes, and I just assumed that it's there,
there's nothing I can change about that.
But I certainly was at a time in which I wanted it to mean more.
And I think that studying Rabbinic literature is,
the cradle of Jewish culture came from this attempt.
I will certainly say that
Rabbinic literature had not fulfilled this quest for me.
Other things have, but not Rabbinic literature,
because it is, you open the text and okay,
something's really exciting is going to happen to me spiritually right now.
And I'm going to climb up the ladder of sanctity as I read this.
And then you read a discussion about an ox that kicked some dust as it was
walking along the road, and what happens, and is the ox owner liable.
And so I cannot say that it created an understanding,
a deeper understanding of God, or something like that.
Because this is fundamentally, for me, not what this literature is about.
I think what it is about is, and
this is the spiritual, I say, value that I find in it, it's about the everyday.
And it's about the significance of the everyday.
So what's delightful to me about, or, say, religiously speaking, what's delightful to
me about Rabbinic literature is that it is the opposite of transcendental.
It is entirely, entirely imminent.
And this is where its spiritual power lies.
So I have come to appreciate and respect the,
I will say, sanctity of everyday life and banality.
But I wouldn't say that it is an understanding about God, necessarily.
>> Sarah, you want to add to that?
>> Sure, yeah, so I think for me what's been most significant for
me about studying Talmud is feeling like I'm part of the textual conversation.
And it's especially important for me as a woman.
Women didn't study Talmud until really relatively recently.
Certainly they weren't considered to be part of this world that was
incredibly valorized in Jewish culture for hundreds of hundreds of years.
And so I think both being able to take part
in what's been historically an incredibly important enterprise for
Jews, and also being part of communities.
I was very lucky to spend time studying at a co-educational yeshiva,
a center of Talmud study in New York City, Mechon Hadar,
which was really quite inclusive, men and women studying together,
and genderqueer people, and people from all different backgrounds.
And to be part of this new kind of community built around taking
the study of text, and people's responses to text, and
academic inquiry of the text all together in a very seriously, and
doing that in a Jewish context, was incredibly powerful for me.
>> So I'll add that I come from a traditional background.
And I think that what the Talmud has meant for me, and why I've spent so
much time studying it is,
it has been incredibly satisfying for me, intellectually quite satisfying.
Now at times in my life, I think I interpreted that intellectual satisfaction
in particularly religious ways,
and it had a certain kind of religious meaning for me.
And at times it has been more of a literary or legal project.
I think it's very hard to answer definitively by separating those
things out.
Because I think we're all, as human beings,
complicated mixtures of all these kinds of things.
But I would tend to agree with Mira, particularly because my
interests in the Talmud have really gravitated towards the legal materials,
like materials you saw in the,
like the materials you've been studying in the MOOC, which are about false testimony,
which isn't always the most spiritually uplifting kind of talk.
It's not inspirational.
Occasionally, the Talmud would go somewhere about, is punishment atonement?
And then you kind of get excited briefly, because there's a moment of philosophical
speculation about something that would be more spiritual.
But for the most part, you are studying close legal analysis of the every day.
But it does give you an appreciation for
the attempt to make the everyday meaningful.
So in addition to your monograph that you wrote, you've
also written a textbook that unfortunately for our viewers is in Hebrew.
>> Yeah.
>> Though we have some viewers who can read modern Hebrew, I remember you telling
me at some point that this textbook was the book you wished you could've read.
>> Yeah.
>> When you came to Talmud at a relatively older age.
Some traditional people are learning Talmud already at eight or
nine years old, and you started when you were 20.
So this is the book that you needed to read that didn't exist?
>> Yes, I attempted to write the book that I wished had existed when I started.
So this book started off as sort of an internal project.
Israel has an institution called the Open University, which is basically
an institution that allows people to pursue degrees or
just classes, if they wish to, I would say essentially to correspondence in a way.
>> It's a precursor to MOOC.
>> It is kind of a thing.
>> It is a form of distance learning.
>> It is a form of distance learning.
>> And I think nowadays, most of their stuff is online.
>> I would think so, yeah.
So there was a class taught there for awhile, which was called, I believe,
time society and family in the Talmud, and they needed an introductory unit.
They just needed somebody to explain the basics of what is the Talmud and
I was approached to do this.
It was back in 2010.
So I tried to write the book that I wish had existed and
then it was well received, so it grew into its own
independent book which came out in 2013.
>> What's the book called?
What's the English title of the book?
>> Gateway to.
>> Gateway to.
And in Hebrew?
[FOREIGN] >> Okay.
>> Yes, what the book really tries to do is,
I think to go into, say, try to assume
absolutely no prior knowledge of any sort and
to start off with what the Israeli reader for
whom this is intended probably knows, which is the Torah.
The Torah as in the written Bible and
particularly the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses or whatever.
Okay, this is what it is and how do we get
from that to Rabbinic literature, which is often called oral Torah and so on.
So it really tries to take a shared point of departure.
And they say, okay, this is how we got here, and this is how this thing stands in
respect to the Torah, and this is how this text in respect to this text.
And it's trying to do both a little bit of historical
background with the difference between Palestine and Babylonia.
What's the difference between early generations, later generations?
But also try to do a little bit of a, how does this text work?
What are the main things that you can expect?
And if you see this line, what can you pretty certainly assume would come next?
So it's been,
I think my understanding of
rabbinic literature was significantly enhanced by this exercise.
Because it's, sometimes it has this dimension of a mystery cult to it.
One day you're just supposed to know how to read it.
>> Right. >> And I was trying to do, okay,
this is how you actually hear all the tricks that you learn that actually help
you navigate through those texts that can seem very difficult.
>> Yeah, I remember when I was in college and I got to an advanced math class and
the homework required that you write some kind of inductive proof.
But there was never any class that taught you how to write an inductive proof, and
I remember asking the department which is the class that I'm supposed to go to,
and there was no such class.
You just kind of learned by doing.
It's a model that I think would never fly in humanities and certainly not-
>> [LAUGH] That's right.
In today's university.
If we taught that way in Northwestern, people would give us very bad reviews and
would be in big trouble with enrollments.
But I think the Talmud kind of had that kind of immersion
was the only way to learn.
But immersion can be a pretty big barrier against newcomers.
>> One of the most challenging things about rabbinic literature in general,
and everything else, is that it starts from the middle.
It always starts in the medial stress.
There isn't any background, so I always give the example of the first
passage of the Mishnah, and the first tractate of the Mishnah,
[FOREIGN] which asks from which time at night do you recite
the Shema, the Shema, prayers of the evening?
Like wait, nobody told me that I should recite the Shema.
Nobody told me what is the Shema.
Nobody told me what recitation means.
So is the thing that's most important right now is
how those three different rabbis define the span of time in the evenings.
Why didn't I get any background on this?
But that's the magic.
>> And that's the Mishna, which is the best organized of the rabbinic works.
>> [LAUGH] Yes, right, now.
>> The one that actually has multiple levels of organization and
it's laid out roughly in order, and still it's starting in the middle.
>> So that is one of the biggest challenges, and there's no introduction.
When I started kind of expanding and
studying some early Christian text that has become interesting.
Dialogue members.
There are some amazing things about early Christian texts.
They usually have an author who says okay, this is who I am.
And I wrote this particular composition because I thought it's very,
very important to convey to my readers points one, two, three.
And I would like you when you read it to think of those things and
to remember those things.
And then there's little conclusions.
It says here am what I attempted to tell you.
I hope you remember this and now you go tell someone else.
Where is this has no introduction?
It has no one that tells you this is what we intended to do here.
So, yeah.
>> So since many of our viewers probably would have a tough time reading
a whole book in academic Hebrew, are there books that you would recommend for
people who are taking this course, but maybe haven't read any
academic works or other works that are sort of introductions or
give that a sense of what rabbinic literature is about?
>> Well, it's an interesting question.
So one book that I think I would recommend strongly is the book
reconstructing the Talmud, which actually came up with a in two years ago.
Jason Rogoff and Joshua Kulp.
Yeah, I think the disadvantage of this book is that it is only about
the Babylonian Talmud and I want to remind everyone that rabbinic
literature is not just the Babylonian Talmud, despite the fact that
it's probably the most famous and the most prominent of them.
But I think this is one of the more sort of accessible and generous introductions.
And it does a nice combination of showing people how to read text, but
also exposing some cultural questions.
So that is a really nice recent development in this field.
>> A movie came out a few years ago.
I think the three of us are all fans of the movie.
>> Yes. >> A movie called Footnote,
in Hebrew [FOREIGN].
The movie was done by director, Joseph Cedar.
And I actually had the privilege of interviewing Joseph Cedar
about the movie a year after it was released, or
shortly after it was released in the United States.
Some of you may have seen this movie.
It was nominated as one of the Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Film that year.
It didn't win, but just the fact that it was nominated, and
was one of the finalists that was considered is a big deal.
And one of the things that I know makes me a big fan of the movie is that
the director took the time to get details about the critical study of Talmud.
And particularly the brand of critical study of
Talmud that goes on in Jerusalem correct.
There are all kinds of inside baseball aspects of the movie that we could talk
about.
But it might be helpful to use the movie as a way of reflecting further
on the way Talmud is studied critically in different ways.
We presented, in the MOOC, a certain model of critical scholarship.
But that model might not be the same as critical scholars in Israel.
So do either of you want to begin talking about Footnote?
>> So- >> You know I should interrupt you.
>> Yeah, sure. >> For
those of our viewers who haven't yet watched Footnote,
the structure of the movie is that the movie is about a father and son.
Both named Skolnick, Skolnick is their last name.
The name Skolnick incidentally has some inside baseball associations, but
I'm not going to go there.
>> It also can mean scholar.
>> Scholar okay.
Father and son are both professors in the same department,
the Hebrew University's Talmud department.
And the plot, the premise of the movie is that the son
wins the Israel Prize, a special cultural prize.
Which will be the equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize or
something like that in the United States.
The son wins the prize in Talmud for that year, but
the committee mistakenly calls the father instead.
Because they have the same name, and
informs the father that he has won this prize.
And then there's a whole fallout that ensues from this initial mistake
as the son tries to protect the father from learning the reality of the mistake.
And the father uses his new found confidence from winning the prize to
take things out on his son.
So there's a lot of father, son conflict in this film.
And that's why the film was so well received and so widely received,
was because you don't actually have to know much about the Talmud to get
the major plot dynamics about the drama between the father and the son.
But that being said, for the three of us here who work in this field,
it's kind of exciting that they've taken a section of our lives, these small
corners of university libraries in Jerusalem, and shown a spotlight on that.
So what reflections do you have?
>> Right, and also, I'm just going to, for the sake of those who, well,
those who have and those who haven't seen the film.
To get back to what we were talking about earlier,
in terms of the difference between reality and American fellowship,
the father Skolnick in the movie is sort of the paradigm of the Israeli scholar.
And the title of the film, Footnote, is a reference to the fact
that his great life accomplishment is the fact that he was mentioned in a footnote.
That his work was considered enough to be cited in a footnote.
I don't remember. >> Of one of the founders of the field,
which sort of corresponds with a mythical founding figure of
the Talmud department in Jerusalem, too.
>> So the tension between the father and the son kind of represents also this
tension between the two paradigms of scholarship and
the kind of difficulty that the Israeli traditional old guard might have with
this sort of emerging American paradigm.
>> Yes, I think the movie is extraordinary and I think has brought
many Talmud scholars to movie theaters that they wouldn't have visited otherwise.
For me, I think, the ultimate scene in the movie, and it's not spoiling anything so
I'll share it because I think it is one of those insightful,
capturing those different approaches to critical scholarship as you described it.
The father, after his mistaken awarding of
the prize is declared, is interviewed by a young journalist
who asks to learn about his work and he kind of begrudgingly is interviewed.
And at some point she sort of asks him about the difference between
what he does and what his son does which, as Sarah was saying,
is in a way akin to the Israeli American difference.
Although, as I said,
I think those differences are kind of becoming more of a thing of the past now.
And he gives the following metaphor and he says, imagine that somebody finds
separate pieces of clay, shards of clay and
he spends years and years measuring those pieces of clay.
And trying to figure out from which place each one of those pieces came and
what is it they were used for and to which time we can date them and
all of those things, and years and years of effort about those pieces of clay.
And then somebody else comes, and just like that,
without giving any attention to all those different provenances and times and
places of the pieces of clay, builds a jug from them.
And the journalist is, so you don't like the jug?
And he says, there is no jug, that's what I'm trying to tell you,
that there is no jug.
And I think this is the critical difference.
We all amusingly find this relatable because I think that one of the most
dominant aspects of the Israeli Classical approach
to literature in general was to
basically try and take a text that seems like it's one and
say, well, actually this, it's, this piece comes from this time.
And this was integrated at a later period.
And this is actually the result of a mistake that somehow got copied from
another text.
And it was all of those attempts to figure out why something that,
perhaps, looks like one, is actually lots of different shards,
different pieces, that are not necessarily coming into something together.
Whereas what has been done, again, this is just a generalization.
But the more American approach, we're like okay, but now we have a text,
now we want to say something about it without necessarily wanting to be held
accountable for all those different pieces and how they come together.
So it's always a balance to strike.
I think in addition to that scene, another thing I would say,
it's one thing to do some background research and
get context in order to make a movie about an interesting field.
You see this all the time with architecture seems to be a popular career
for movies.
So I'm sure they do research into architecture.
But what I found in watching the movie was that there are places
where the movie has the character go down a road.
And you can see the character's mind working and
correcting what would have been a mistake.
It was something too far.
So there's at one point, the son
is writing a description of his father's scholarship for the prize committee.
And he's typing it out, and he types out, and
I remember watching this the first time, and he writes something.
And I say, that's not exactly right.
And sure enough, he erases it and goes back and
rewrites it in a more conservative way.
So, that's a level of that appreciation.
And similarly, when the father's being prepped for an interview on TV,
which I won't ruin for you.
[LAUGH] But when the father's being prepped for a TV interview and
he sees the interviewer's teleprompter being prepared with text describing him.
He's bothered with one of the sentences, because it's too much,
it's too much about his contribution.
So to get that level of understanding of the field,
where you're actually creating characters who are living this tension.
Both the father and the son are caught trying to figure out where
they situate and position themselves vis a vis the other in such fascinating ways.
And that I think is one of the things that makes the movie so remarkable.
>> But I think there's a, this actually touches on, I think,
a bigger issue that pertains to Talmud and critical scholarship.
So as you all know at this point,
that one of the modes of being of the Talmud, which is divisive.
Is that It presents itself as incredibly indebted to previous generations.
And as the traditional mode Jewish learning is to say I am nothing.
My predecessors are the ones that created everything,
I am just a footnote, as it were.
I am just commenting on something that the great ones have done.
And in a sense, I revere previous generations.
Now of course, in American academia, the things we're being rewarded for is say,
I'm groundbreaking, nobody said that before me, I'm amazing.
I'm incredible, everyone is wrong, or no one's smart but me.
So when it comes to critical scholarship in Talmud there is a fundamental
tension especially if we grow up in this world.
Between that dimension of saying, well I am just building on the foundation.
>> Filial piety.
>> Okay.
[INAUDIBLE] I think an interesting dimension of that
is that the Talmud Park in Jerusalem, which I attended for
a while was very, very filial in this respect.
It was strongly committed to saying we have those amazing ancestors here,
the Footnote componant to that.
And we are, one of my teachers, they just said,
well, we basically are going through what this important scholar said, and
we're just checking, we're just intervening.
But if we were important,
our greater teachers would have said that, which is a very Talmudic way of thinking.
>> Right. >> Of course-
>> It's funny,
because the flip side of that is, in addition to there being this reverence for
the ancestral Talmud scholar past.
>> At least my sort of impression of Israeli scholarship is there's also
a tendency to view scholarship as really just as paving a way for the future.
>> Yeah that's very true.
>> So a you can't really do anything rash against the past.
But b, you can't say anything until you've prepared
a full critical addition of whatever a text anyone's going to talk about.
But that's going to take you an entire lifetime, so
it'll be up to the next generation of scholars to say anything at all about
the text that you've gone through every manuscript of.
>> There's something both traditional, but also there's something
quite nice about that in terms of the legacy of Jewish learning.
And there is a long term legacy of thinking about Talmud study as
a communal project.
So we know that the Jewish community in 19th century,
Eastern Europe for example, valued Talmud as a form of capital.
And if you were a scholar of Talmud, you've got various advantages in society,
including marriage opportunities.
So we know that it was a form of capital that would
allow individuals to rise up and gain a reputation.
And so it was competitive in that sense.
But it also has been very collaborative.
And so the model that Talmud study is always social,
you're always doing it with study partners or in institutions with lots of people.
And when you're envisioning that you're paving the way for someone else,
you're imagining that there's going to be lots of people after you who are going to
continue and be further links in this chain.
And they're going to follow up on what you're doing.
So there's something kind of romantic about it.
At the same time that it is also a form of piety and
maybe a form of humility that sometimes feels false in terms of
the kind of ego that's involved, in terms of the scholars and their productivity.
But I think it's true that the United States has created a different
paradigm tor what scholars of Rabbinics are doing, and it's changing
the way people study the Talmud critically in Israel and the United States.
>> Absolutely. >> Yeah,
and it's also interesting to think, especially now in the United States,
there are Talmud scholars at all of the top universities in the country.
But they tend to be much more isolated.
I think Northwestern is really one of maybe a handful of universities in
the United States that has more than one scholar of Rabbinic literature on faculty.
And I think that that also has something to do maybe with
the different approach towards scholarship.
There's a sense in which spending time at the Hebrew University
is a little bit like being in a traditional Talmud study hall.
Where you're surrounded by other people who are also doing it and
your teachers and young students who are just coming in.
So it really makes sense there would be this A different approach not only to
the text but sort of to other generations in the scholarship.
>> How special is the Hebrew University for the Israeli Academy?
Are there other universities in Israel that have Rabbinic literature taught and
in what departments do they get taught?
>> So the most notable parallel would be Bar-Ilan University,
which is actually a religious university.
Defined as such and has a very strong core curriculum in Jewish studies.
And Bar-Ilan University has a designated department of Talmud.
I believe, I haven't checked it recently, but I believe it also has
a separate department for what is known as [INAUDIBLE] I think [INAUDIBLE]
division of labor between the two, but this may be a thing of the past.
Tel Aviv University has a Talmud track or Rabbinic literature
track in their greater department of Hebrew culture,
and it has currently several Talmudic scholars.
One of the, I think an example of a person whose work
I find particularly admirable is Ishay Rosen-Zvi.
And I think Ishay is one of those people,
when I was saying earlier that those differences between the American and
Israeli approach, to some extent, are being bridged.
I think that he is one of the pioneers of the-
>> Yeah, Ishay Rosen-Zvi,
who's at Tel Aviv, has at least two books that are out in English.
>> Yes.
>> So that would be one of the major differences,
is starting to write books in English.
>> Yes.
>> Both books and in English.
And he also has some wonderful colleagues there.
In other university department, Talmud scholars are in departments,
sometimes of, what is it, Jewish philosophy, sometimes Jewish history,
sometimes Jewish literature.
So it varies, but usually there is more than one.
And there is, I think, and
we are extremely fortunate in this respect to have that.
That's sort of our little mini Talmud community around here.
>> So a provocative question,
a thought question from one of our viewers.
Steve Friedman writes,
traditionally is the oral Torah any less authoritative than the written Torah?
And for this, we're going to have to stand up-
>> [LAUGH]
>> And put one leg in the air-
>> [LAUGH] That's right.
>> So that we can model the way rabbis answer a basically unanswerable question.
>> Right, who wants to take this?
>> Yeah, so at some point, there was a division that became established,
that did become traditional between the written Torah and the oral Torah.
And this, kind of, was played out in terms of very practical legal considerations and
rules about different punishments if you violated a law of
the written Torah versus the law of the oral Torah.
Different ideas about in a case of doubt for
example, whether it will immediately,
as you do in a case of doubt for an oral Torah matter or
stringently in the case of doubt for the written Torah matter.
But the boundaries between what exactly constitutes written Torah and
what constitutes oral Torah aren't necessarily so clear.
And there's also a tradition of dispute about whether
a rabbinic interpretation of a law in the written Torah
should count basically as a written Torah because it's
based really on this law that's found in the written Torah or
as oral Torah because really, fundamentally,
it's rabbinic interpretation.
So, yeah, unclear.
>> I'll add that the other major difference between them has to do with
the technology of writing.
The distinction was preserved that oral Torah had to be preserved orally.
So you couldn't write it down, or you generally didn't write it down.
But I don't know, does that make it inherently less authoritative?
Probably, I mean, probably if you have veneration of the written Torah
through synagogue rituals, and you're referring to your Torah scroll for
Midrash in a variety of ways, it probably has a slightly higher degree of authority,
at least in the early part of the Rabbinic Period.
But then as you go along, as you get further into the Rabbinic Period and
the post-Rabbinic Period, some of these differences probably disappear a little.
>> And I will just, the last dimension I would add to that,
since I think our asker, is the oral traditionally.
If we're looking at it from the perspective of modern Judaism,
we have to remember that there's a social dimension to that.
So now we have various strands of Judaism.
One of the most significant ways in which those different denominations of modern
Judaism distinguish themselves from each other is
the place of oral law vis-a-vis written law.
So it also gets inscribed into this greater system of okay,
which is the most authoritative to you and how do you read them, and so on.
>> Right, so, we don't know exactly how our user means the word traditionally.
And actually, today we have lots of different traditions.
>> Yes.
>> So, you could try to go back to premodernity and
come up with what was traditionally held in the 17th century, let's say?
But even if you did that, it probably would vary by region, culture,
probably class might have had something to do with this, intellectual background.
So it's hard to even answer the question, even in a premodern way,
but certainly in modernity, it's difficult.
So I think we've come to the end of our time.
I know I've enjoyed this conversation.
>> Very much so.
>> And folks at home, let us know what you think and
whether you think we should do this again.
Good talking with you and we're going to sign off.
>> Thank you, big!
>> Bye.
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