How to pronounce “talmud” in English

The Talmud is not really a book, it's more of a conversation, thousands of years old, still running today.

The Talmud is a book that was composed in multiple stages.

The Talmud, as we showed, spans so many generations, and it's still ongoing.

The Talmud is a canon.

The Talmud says you've got to share the water.

The Talmud deals a lot with civil law-- my ox runs over your fence, who's liable?

One rabbi in the Talmud says that if a sanhedrin sentenced one person to death every 70 years,

We say the Talmud is actually an oral text.

When you showed the Talmud, I was also struck by that the notion of contributing on other ideas and showing the conversation as really something we've

And community-- Talmud, it's a communal text, it's a conversation.

That's what the Talmud and its commentators are discussing here.

But the Talmud focuses on responsibilities much more than rights.

When you approach a Talmudic text, you're hearing, as I mentioned, voices that span generations, that span continents.

Within the Talmudic text itself, it's multiple opinions on a given topic.

There's a Talmudic text that talks about two towns, a town near and a town that's far.

And he was a Talmudic scholar.

It should be-- I want a Talmud.

And they're primarily studying the Talmud.

One thing that I love about the Talmud is that it's all about questions.

Sometimes the questions in the Talmud are not even answered.

And then the oral Torah of the Talmud is really a conversation that continues to flow and be written today.

Even the rabbis of the Talmud themselves, when they're commentating on the Bible, the Torah, it seems like they were coming across some things that really

And the rabbis of the Talmud struggled with that.

Very cutting-edge issues like sexuality-- the Talmud has six or maybe even eight different conceptions of sexual identity, of sexual being, in terms of gender.

And there's a story in the Talmud about a great rabbi who was very, very wise.

It might be a havruta studying the Talmud.

And this is a selection from the Talmud.

And it begins in the Talmud, that first-source Babylonian Talmud.

And that's really what the Talmud is about.

But his passion in life was the Talmud, which is this gigantic Jewish religious literature.

And his own intellectual passion about the Talmud was so profound that maybe that somehow

of the Bible and of the Talmud.

And the rabbis in the Talmud use that as a basis for explaining that we don't become an a DOM, we don't become an human being until we're born.

And it's in the Talmudic literature that there is a king who had to punish his son, and he had to crush him

And I started to try to mine the Talmud for some of these insights that we might be able to apply to our world.

For example, the Talmud reads back into the Bible.

But what you find when you study the Talmud-- or probably a lot of ancient texts, but specifically, in my experience, the Talmud--

So for example, the Talmud has a lot to say about privacy.

But privacy was something which really concerned the authors of the Talmud.

This was also something which really preoccupied the rabbis of the Talmud, because they were dealing in a world where there were

And that's such a key part of what Talmud study is all about.

So there's a lot of discussion in the Talmud about damages.

So that's the debate that the rabbis of the Talmud are going to have right here.

And you're always-- and you don't just read the Talmud straight, literally.

It sort of goes back to the biblical or the Talmud or any religious book talks about a tithe of 10%.

Here I am bringing my 2,000-year Talmudic text-- oh, this is important, listen to this, dealing with whatever issue we're dealing with.

Another rabbi, Rabbi Akiva in the Talmud says, well, if he were on that sanhedrin, there wouldn't have been any death penalties.

But actually, the way that the Talmud is structured and the way that the learning and the debate flows might have a lot to offer to our world today.

So that's one thing that I really took away from the Talmud, is the importance and the essence of learning as an act of questioning.