Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

I admit I did something I was not supposed to with Jacob Neusner’s Learn Talmud: I read it instead of using it as intended for studying. It was fun and great experience, but did not benefit from it as much as if I had followed the author’s instructions. This book is a “teach yourself how to learn Talmud” kind of book, with the great advantage of having an expert guide to do so. After two short introductory chapters about what the Talmud is and why/how it should be studied the following 21 chapters are divided into four parts as shown in the table below. I drew the table of contents into a table format to point out the similarities of the structures of the parts.

Each chapter starts off with defining the subject of the lesson and points our attention to specific question to keep in mind while reading a particular Mishnah or Talmud section. Those are presented in their original Hebrew/Aramaic with vowels along with a line-by-line translation. As the objective of the book is to teach, each of these quotes have their vocabulary collected afterward for easier reference.

Each of the four major parts takes one Talmud page and helps the student learn it form beginning to end. This is designed to make you understand how a Talmud page is built up. In the chapters titled “The Talmud all together” you will be presented the whole Talmud page put together without vowels. By the time you get to those you are supposed to be able to read an understand it.

Based on the vocabulary of the author’s text, the design of the book and the nature of the selected Talmud sections I believe this book is designed for older children or young adults. Anyone can learn from it of course, but it is important that even younger people can do so. By the design of the book I refer not just to the drawings on the front and back cover (clearly showing younger students, but the similarly designed initial letters of most English only sections.

The book can be studied on its own but it is even more beneficial if you studied first Neusner’s “Learn Mishnah,” because this book is using the very same passages that one did. (Unfortunately I was not aware of this when I read this book. Now I will have to go back to Learn Mishnah.)

While I haven’t studied the book as I should have but I did collect some favorite quotes from it. Let me share them with you, hoping that it would encourage you to find out the context I grabbed these quotes out of and read the whole book.

• The Talmud is (1) the Mishnah and (2) the Talmudic commentary to, explanation of, the Mishnah. (page 7)
• The Talmud does not merely tell stories. It makes points. (13)
• The Talmud has kept the attention of the Jewish people for hundreds of years and not only because it is a holy book. The Talmud has fascinated Jews because it is a fascinating book. (14)
• What makes the Talmud “Talmudic” is its power to see the complicated sides of a simple problem. (18)
• We must be able to take the rule and find its general principle, then apply that general principle to a wide variety of cases. Otherwise we are stuck with useless facts. (28)
• Aggadah and halakhah when properly brought together and made into neighbors, talk to one another. (67)
• The Talmud represents a series of careful and deliberate choices, among many possibilities of how someone wanted things to be. (82)
• Judaism is a religion about keeping your word because it speaks about ordinary, everyday circumstances, moments when you say something you later regret. (84)
• We are what we do. But we do what we believe. (86)
• We cannot enjoy anything of this world without saying a blessing. (93)
• Supposed contradictions [in scriptures] may be solved by reference to different times or different situations. (98)
• Saying a blessing is a way of expressing our thanks to G-d. (102)
• If you work for a living, when will you ever find time to study Torah? (105)
• The Talmud is concerned with a life of holiness, but we live in a world uninterested in what is holy. (118)
• A paradox exists. The world belongs to G-d, but we must work to gain the benefits that should come freely if we serve G-d. (119)
• When the Mishnah tells us what to do, the Talmud asks why we should do it. (121)
• The conception of the Mishnah and the Talmud is that we can discover rules that will apply everywhere and to all the Jewish people. (125)
• The Day of Atonement will do us no good if we do not do our share of the work of repentance. (128)
• You have to make yourself available to the party against whom you have a grievance. (138)
• The Talmud is put together with amazing care. We se there is close attention to form and formality. (140)
• We must always discover for ourselves those things that in the end, we shall affirm and believe. (151)
• Part of the right reason to study Torah s that it is a joy and fun! […] The other part is that G-d wants us to study. (164)

If you study this book it will help you learn to think, it will hone your mental capabilities. Or as Neusner wrote,

The Talmud is important for Judaism today not because it was important a long time ago, but because it teaches us to think about the world in which we live. (42)