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Talmud
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Charity
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- See also: Tzedakah (Wikipedia)
- אָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר: גָּדוֹל הָעוֹשֶׂה צְדָקָה בַּסֵּתֶר, יוֹתֵר מִמֹּשֶׁה רַבֵּינוּ
- B. Bava Batra 9b:7
- Translation:
- Rabbi Elazar said: One who performs acts of charity in secret is greater than Moses, our teacher.
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Torah study
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- כׇּל הַלּוֹמֵד תּוֹרָה וְאֵינוֹ מְלַמְּדָהּ, דּוֹמֶה לַהֲדַס בַּמִּדְבָּר.
- B. Rosh Hashanah 23a:12
- Translation:
- Anyone who studies Torah but does not teach it to others is likened to a myrtle in the wilderness. The myrtle has a pleasant fragrance, but there is nobody to enjoy it in the wilderness.
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Quotes about the Talmud
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Rabbinic literature
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- The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness; carefulness into vigorousness; vigorousness into guiltlessness; guiltlessness into abstemiousness; abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness.
- Division of Mishna, as translated by Dr. A. S. Bettelheim. Religious zeal leads to cleanliness, cleanliness to purity, purity to godliness, godliness to humility to the fear of sin. Rabbi Pinhasben-Jaïr—Commentary on the lines from the Talmud. See also Talmudde Jerusalem, by Schwab, IV. 16. Commentary on the treatise Schabbath. Schul—Sentences of Proverbes du Talmud et du Midrasch. 463.
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Fiction
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- Abe Petrovsky: Michael, may I tell you a story?
Mike McDermott: Please.
Abe Petrovsky: For generations, men in my family have been rabbis. In Israel; before that, in Europe. It was to be my calling. I was quite a prodigy, the pride of my yeshiva. The elders said I had a 40-year-old's understanding of the Midrash by the time I was 12. But by the time I was 13, I knew I could never be a rabbi.
Mike McDermott: Why not?
Abe Petrovsky: Because for all I understood of the Talmud, I never saw God there.
Mike McDermott: You couldn't lie to yourself.
Abe Petrovsky: I tried. I tried like crazy. I mean, people were counting on me. … My parents were destroyed, devastated by my decision. My father sent me away to New York to live with distant cousins. …
Mike McDermott: And did your parents get over it?
Abe Petrovsky: No. I always hoped that I would find some way to change their minds, but they were inconsolable. My father never spoke to me again.
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Miscellaneous
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Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz
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- Once upon a time, under pressure of censorship, printers would inscribe in the flyleaves of volumes of the Talmud: "Whatever may be written herein about gentiles does not refer to the gentiles of today, but to gentiles of times past." Today, the flyleaves of our books bear a similar inscription, albeit an invisible one: "Whatever may be written herein about Jews does not refer to the Jews of today, but to Jews who lived in other times." So we are able to sit down and study Torah, Talmud, books of ethics, or books of faith without considering their relevance to our lives. Whatever is written there does not apply to us or to our generation, but only to other people, other times. We must expunge from those invisible prologues the notion that the words are written about someone else, about others, about anyone but us. Whether the book is a volume of Torah, a tractate of the Talmud, or a tract of faith, the opposite must be inscribed: "Whatever is written herein refers only to me; is written for me and obligates me. First and foremost, the content is addressed to me."
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Yechiel of Paris
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- Without the Talmud, we would not be able to understand passages in the Bible. … God has handed this authority to the sages and tradition is a necessity as well as scripture. … Anyone who does not study the Talmud cannot understand Scripture.
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Laura Geller
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- Jews don't read the Bible literally. We read it through the lens of generations of interpretations and acknowledge the evolution of human understanding of God. The Talmudic image of God is vastly different from the image of God presented in the Bible.
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Moses Hess
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- In the Jewish Quarter [Judengasse] was I born and educated; until my fifteenth year, they tried to beat the Talmud into me. My teachers were inhuman beings [Unmenschen], my colleagues were bad company, inducing me to secret sin; my body was frail, my spirit raw.
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- I was supposed to devote myself only to the Talmud. But the Talmud utterly repelled me, thought I was still a pious Jew-boy [Judenkind]. I wanted to satisfy my craving to be active, to do something: this craving looked for a sphere for itself because none was offered it. I did not want to be a good-for-nothing – and therefore I became a writer.
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Maurice Samuel
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- A hundred thousand men labored for twenty years to build the great pyramid: one man wrote the book of Isaiah. You will answer: "One man also wrote Hamlet and the Critique of Pure Reason and the Republic." But I ask: Are Plato and Shakespeare and Kant in your life what the Bible, the Talmud, the rabbis are in ours? To our very masses, the Jewish masses, the wonders of the world are Moses, Elijah, the Rambam, the Vilna Gaon, the Dubna Maggid, the chassid in the neighboring village. These actually dominate our life, as governments, mass radio exploits, armies and Woolworths dominate yours. We are the people of the Book. But we were the people of the Book before a million copies could be printed in a single day.
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Leo Tolstoy
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- A person who understands the law but who is far from the love of God is like a bank official who has the keys for the inside of the building but not the key for the front door.
- Leo Tolstoy's paraphrase of The Talmud, A Calendar of Wisdom, P. Sekirin, trans. (1997), June 15
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- The commandments of God should be followed because of love of God, not because of fear of God.
- Leo Tolstoy's paraphrase of The Talmud, A Calendar of Wisdom, P. Sekirin, trans. (1997), June 15
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H. P. Blavatsky
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- Maimonides, the great Jewish theologian and historian, who at one time was almost deified by his countrymen and afterward treated as a heretic, remarks that the more absurd and void of sense the Talmud seems, the more sublime is the secret meaning.
- H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (1877), p. 19
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- Maimonides, the great Jewish theologian and historian, who at one time was almost deified by his countrymen and afterward treated as a heretic, remarks that the more absurd and void of sense the Talmud seems, the more sublime is the secret meaning. This learned man has successfully demonstrated that the Chaldean Magic, the science of Moses and other learned thaumaturgists was wholly based on an extensive knowledge of the various and now forgotten branches of natural science. Thoroughly acquainted with all the resources of the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, experts in occult chemistry and physics, psychologists as well as physiologists, why wonder that the graduates or adepts instructed in the mysterious sanctuaries of the temples, could perform wonders, which even in our days of enlightenment would appear supernatural? It is an insult to human nature to brand magic and the occult science with the name of imposture. To believe that for so many thousands of years, one-half of mankind practiced deception and fraud on the other half, is equivalent to saying that the human race was composed only of knaves and incurable idiots. Where is the country in which magic was not practised? At what age was it wholly forgotten?
- H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (1877), p. 19
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- The Talmud states, it was proved to Elisha that Metatron could not be a second deity by the fact that Metatron received 60 "strokes with fiery rods" to demonstrate that Metatron was not a god, but an angel, and could be punished.
- Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, Society for Jewish Study (1983). The Journal of Jewish Studies, Volumes 34-35. The Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. p. 26. Retrieved 5 March 2014.
- Just as Hillel's actions were not based (even in theory) on any reasoned ethical system, so his moral teaching did not take the form of a systematic treatise, but was expressed in aphorisms, which were, no doubt, occasioned by particular circumstances, but have none the less a universal value. This value, indeed, is not for the doubter, who must needs either find a rational basis for morality, or discard it. They appeal to those who accept, as Hillel accepted, the fundamental postulates of Judaism; and their claim to universality rests, therefore, on the extent to which those postulates are in accord with the root facts of human nature. They are interpretative, not speculative. The moral sayings of Hillel recorded in the Talmud are few in number, but they embody with sufficient fulness the point of view which was expressed no less fully in his conduct. They are contained almost exclusively in the first two chapters of the "Ethics of the Fathers."
- We have quoted and have usually explained texts from talmudic literature. Such texts have been and still are often used in Israeli politics and often quoted in the Israeli Hebrew press. We have concluded that in the usual English translations of talmudic literature some of the most sensitive passages are usually toned down or falsified – as a result, we have ourselves translated all of the texts from talmudic literature that we have quoted in the book.
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