 I want to begin by saying that the Talmud is not a book, in much the same way that art is not a painting and music is not a song, Talmud is not a book. We don't read the Talmud, we experience the Talmud, we encounter it, we engage it, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. The Talmud isn't a book. It's actually comprised of 37 tractates, composed of 2,711 pages, and normally bound into 20 volumes like this. The Talmud has provoked incredibly strong reactions, both positive and negative. In 1842, King Louis IX of France ordered the confiscation of all volumes of the Talmud in his country. In June of that year, 24 wagon loads containing 12,000 volumes were burned in Paris. For his efforts, the church canonized him as a saint in the year 1297. He is Saint Louis. Over the next 500 years, there were numerous burnings of the Talmud, mass burnings in many cities such as Toulouse in England, in Rome, and in Poland. And beginning in the 16th century, there were many books, many works that were published attacking the Talmud. These attacks have continued up until the very present time. Now, these written volumes are not very easy to find. However, because of the internet, these very crude attacks have inspired numerous articles and videos that are extremely popular on the worldwide web. If you want to search any Google search or a YouTube search for the word Talmud, usually many of the first findings on the first page of these Google searches will turn up odious titles like The Truths about the Talmud, or the Sick Evil Jewish Talmud, or the Satanic Talmud, or the Talmud on its dark side, or the Jewish Talmud exposed. And what these authors have done basically is in much the same way that many non-Jewish authors have manhandled the Jewish Bible. They've also tried to ransack the Jewish Talmud from material that they thought was scandalous, that they thought made Jews look bad. And basically all of these attacks are based upon purposeful, misquoting of the Talmud, mistranslating, and usually simply quoting out of context and ignoring what the Talmud is actually teaching. Now, aside from all of these ugly attacks on the Talmud, there is another side to the story. And many have seen the Talmud very positively. For example, in 1931, Hermann Strach, who was a German Christian scholar, published a very positive 360 page overview introduction to the Talmud in Midrash. He was someone that wasn't just cherry picking the Talmud for embarrassing quotes. He was someone that seriously studied it. And in all of his studies, he didn't find an ugly, disgusting book. He saw it as a very positive kind of book, even though, theologically, he didn't agree. We know that modern Koreans have been drawn to the Talmud since the mid-1970s. And books containing collections of stories from the Talmud are extremely popular in Korea. Some people estimate that just about every home in Korea has one of these digests of Talmudic stories. Now, when I first came to Toronto in 1991, I served as a Jewish chaplain at the University of Toronto. And one of the groups that I facilitated was a weekly Jewish meditation and spirituality circle. One of the regular attendees went on to become a reform rabbi and wrote the following. From the first moment that I encountered the Talmud, I have found traditional text study more spiritually gratifying than any other religious practice. And I had a lot to compare it with. I was raised Tibetan Buddhist by parents who were cultural Jews. They exposed me to meditation, to chanting, to yoga postures, Hindu devotions, and spiritual pilgrimages all before the age of six. I enjoyed all of these activities, but it wasn't until I encountered the Talmud and began studying it in my early 20s that I felt a sense of spiritual fulfillment. In 2013, Ruth Calderon became a member of the Israeli Knesset. The topic of her inaugural speech was her long-time relationship with the Talmud. That was the entire focus of her very moving inaugural speech at the Knesset. She described growing up in a secular home, in a secular society, and feeling a void. And then she said, when I first encountered the Talmud and became completely enamored with it, its language, its humor, its profound thinking, its modes of discussion, and the practicality, humanity, and maturity that emerged from its lines, I sensed that I had found the love of my life, which I had been lacking. Calderon described how she became a serious student of the Talmud, ended up obtaining a doctorate in Talmudic literature at Hebrew University. She studies Talmud every single day, ended up founding two institutions for Israelis, secular and religious Israelis that can come together and study the Talmud. Some of these programs have been replicated here in North America. And then she concluded her remarks with a profound and moving exposition of a Talmudic passage to the entire Knesset. If you get a chance to see her speech or read a transcript of it, I recommend it very highly. Today was Yom HaZikaron, the Israeli Memorial Day, which commemorates and remembers the fallen soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces, as well as victims of terror in Israel. On March 6, 2008, eight students at the Merakaz Harav Yashiva in Jerusalem were brutally murdered. Doron Maharetah was 26 years old at the time. He was the only non-teenager in the group. Doron was raised in Ethiopia and didn't have a very strong Jewish education. After immigrating to Israel, he had a strong desire to attend the Merakaz Harav Yashiva. But because he didn't have a strong background in Talmud, he was turned down. He was not accepted. So he said to the administration, not willing to give up so quickly, if you won't let me study here, at least allow me to wash dishes in the mess hall. And so for the next one and a half years, he washed dishes but spent every spare moment in the study hall. And he would ask students what they were learning and spent his evenings and Shabbatot immersed in the Talmud. One day he asked the head of the Yashiva to test him. The Rosh Yashiva smiled and tried to gently dismiss Doron, but Doron wouldn't move. And he forced the Rosh Yashiva into a Torah discussion. About a topic in the Talmud. The very next day Doron became a full-fledged student in the Yashiva. Three weeks before he was killed, he completed the entire Code of Jewish Law with most of its commentaries, which is an accomplishment that many, many senior rabbis still probably have not completed during their lifetime. Now Talmud study requires an immense amount of dedication. Kids get introduced to Talmud study in school at about the age of ten, and as they get older they devote an increasing amount of time to studying Talmud. In post high school Yashivas, they devote about six to ten hours a day to studying Talmud. Many men who get married continue studying full time after their marriage in a Kolel, which is basically an advanced Talmudic seminary for married men. They're like post graduate fellows and they receive a stipend to allow them to devote themselves exclusively to Torah studies. There are about ten such Kolels just here in Toronto. Working people also try to devote their time to studying the Talmud. In 1923 Rabbi Mayor Shapiro launched a worldwide initiative where he proposed that every single person in the world study the same page of Talmud each day. Now at this rate of studying one page a day, you'll finish the entire Babylonian Talmud in about seven and a half years. We are now in the thirteenth cycle since Rabbi Shapiro began his program, and each year the number of participants grow. I attended the celebration of the completion of the eighth cycle of the Talmud at the Felt Forum of Madison Square Garden in New York City back in 1982. That gathering attracted well over 5,000 people. However, the major American gathering for the completion of the twelfth cycle, which was held in August of 2012, was held at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey and drew about 100,000 participants. And there were obviously smaller gatherings all throughout the world. Here in Toronto at the Sony Center downtown there were 3,000 people who attended. Now a page of Talmud is called a DAF, and the daily page is called DAF Yomi, the daily page. There are many hundreds, if not thousands, of DAF Yomi classes, both live and online that take place throughout the world. Since everyone is studying the same page of Talmud, you can be traveling almost anywhere in the world and find a class to attend, and they will be on the same page that you were studying wherever you came from. Here in Toronto there were at least 30 such classes taking place at various locations throughout the city every single day of the week. In New York City, train commuters decided to use their time travel to work to study the DAF Yomi. In 1991, the 751 train out of Long Island Railroad going from Farakoway to Manhattan began a DAF Yomi class. They have since completed the entire Talmud three times. Now with that very long introduction, let's now try to understand what the Talmud is and what the Talmud isn't. I once heard a story about a man who sent his son to a tailor to make a jacket for him, and he sent the son with his measurements. The son took the measurements to the tailor, and the tailor said you can come back in a week to pick up the jacket. The son did that, and then the son took the jacket back to his father, and the father tried it on, and he got very upset. He said this is ridiculous, it doesn't fit. So the father went back to the tailor with his son and complained, and he said to the tailor, this jacket doesn't fit. And the tailor said, could you please put it on? And the man proceeded to put it on, and the tailor says, well now I know what the problem is. You want the jacket to fit, you got to take off your old jacket first. And so often we approach a subject with preconceptions that really make it difficult for us to understand the subject correctly. The incorrect, the incorrect but widely held assumption is that the Talmud is basically a commentary to the Bible. And this model sees the Talmud as secondary and supplementary to the Bible, but sees the Bible as primary, like Shakespeare as opposed to literary analysis of Shakespeare. Clearly Shakespeare is primary, and if you read a scholarly analysis of Shakespeare, that's secondary. And so that's how people normally see the Talmud. It is a commentary and analysis of the Bible, but what's primary is the Bible, the Talmud is secondary and supplementary. Now as we'll soon see, the Talmud is basically the repository of Judaism's oral Torah, and we'll try to clear that up in the coming minutes. But seeing the oral Torah as subsidiary to our written Torah is faulty. Actually the exact opposite is the case. Let me try to explain why the oral law is actually primary and not secondary. Number one, I'll share two reasons. First of all, the oral Torah preceded the written Torah. It wasn't as if there was a written Torah, and then as an afterthought, the oral Torah comes around. The oral Torah actually precedes the written Torah that we have today. The teachings that God revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai 3,300 years ago were communicated by God orally to Moses, and then Moses to the people through their 40 years in the desert. The written text of the Torah that we have, the five books of Moses, were only composed and presented to the Levites and priests at the end of the 40 years in the desert, before the nation entered the land of Canaan. And the written text of the Torah that we have basically serves to confirm and anchor the oral teachings that had been transmitted to them. So one reason why the oral Torah is primary is that it actually came first. But there's a second reason. The written Torah actually came, not only second, it came to supplement the full oral revelation that had been received. Rabbi Shem Shem Mahfal Hirsch explained that the written Torah is basically the lecture notes of the oral Torah. Let's understand this. Imagine if you go to a lecture at a university, and after the lecture you walk by the podium where the professor stood, and you see their note cards on the lectern, on let's say a little three by five cards. Now what is primary? The notes on those little cards or the lecture that you heard? Obviously the lecture is primary. The notes are really supplementary or secondary to that. The notes are not the lecture. Again, the notes are not the lecture. They don't contain all the information that is conveyed by the professor. As a matter of fact, if all you had were the notes, if you didn't come into the lecture and you came in after the lecture was over and you picked up those notes off of the lectern, you wouldn't understand those little three by five cards of the professor. The professor would understand those notes because they're going to help him deliver the lecture. But you coming in with just those notes will not understand what they mean. Furthermore, let's think about this together. How is information usually imparted? How do people really learn anything? Can you imagine someone who purchased all the books, all the textbooks that are studied in a medical school? Someone goes to medical school for four years, buys a whole shelf full of medical textbooks. And imagine someone does the same thing. Someone just purchases all those textbooks that a medical student will study during their four years in medical school. And that's all they do, they read those textbooks and study them very seriously. Would they be able to then function as a doctor? Just because they read those textbooks? There's much more to education than reading texts from a book. Written communication alone is actually very limited. Most of the things that we learn in life are not just through reading and instruction manual. Usually, if you're trying to learn a skill, you need to see it being done. You need to actually try it. You need to be able to ask questions. There's almost no one on the planet that I know that learns how to use a computer by reading a manual for the computer. They have someone show them, they ask questions, they do trial and error, they play around with it. But we don't usually learn anything by just reading a manual. So Jewish children learn the basics of Judaism by experiencing it in their homes. Throughout Jewish history, Jewish kids don't really learn the basics of Judaism by having their parents or teachers hand them a book. They learn the basics and the most important lessons of Judaism by osmosis because it's lived in their homes. They learn through experience. And children have already celebrated Shabbat and Passover for years in their home. Before they study the laws of those holidays in the Bible. Furthermore, God himself relied upon formative spiritual experiences to communicate these most important ideas to his people. Again, this is important to understand. God did not simply communicate important truths to us by writing them in a book and having us read those passages in the book. God relied primarily upon having the people of Israel experience certain things. Our understanding that God exists and his nature is rooted not in text that we read, but in the embryonic experiences of the people of Israel, of our history. So for example, in the very first of the Ten Commandments, God says, I am a Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery. Our knowledge of God is rooted in the experience of the Exodus from Egypt, is rooted in the experience of going through the desert where we became electrically aware of God's presence through our interaction with him. And that's why when Moses asked God prior to the Exodus, he said, God, if the Jewish people want to know who are you, what's your name? And God says to Moses, I will be what I will be. What God is saying is if you want to know me, you'll see, you'll experience me. I will be what I will be. I can't give you a word for who I am. You need to experience me. And throughout the Bible, therefore, God directs the Jewish people primarily to remember these formative events. The instructions of God is rarely make sure you read the text. Make sure you read the memo. What God is constantly saying is never forget that you were slaves in Egypt. Never forget how I took you out of Egypt. Never forget how you went through the desert for 40 years with miracles and I fed you the manna. Never forget how you stood at Mount Sinai and you heard the voice of God. Remember these formative events in your history and teach them diligently to your children. The Bible doesn't say hand your kids a book. It tells parents to personally explain these truths to their children and then to ground these truths in experiential events like observing the Shabbat and holidays. Now, one way of viewing the relationship between the written Torah and the oral Torah is that the written text is like a zipped or compressed file. Our written Torah, the five books of Moses, is like a compressed or zipped file containing the general contents of God's revelation. But it's very clear that when you read the written text of the Torah that it needs to be unzipped. There is an entire mountain that exists beneath the tip of the iceberg that is the written Torah. In other words, the written Torah is one side of the proverbial coin. When you hold that coin, it testifies itself to the fact there's another side and that other side to the written Torah is the oral Torah. Let's just look at a few examples and I can share with you thousands. Number one, the Torah we have, the written Torah, is clearly a legal code. It contains hundreds of commandments, things that we're obligated to do, things that we're prohibited from doing. And there are many times penalties for violating the laws of the Torah. That's clear, important question. At what age does a person become responsible and culpable for violating the laws of the Torah? Can a six-year-old child be punished for violating the Sabbath? Can a ten-year-old child be punished for eating a cheeseburger? What age does a person become responsible for observing the Torah? The Torah doesn't say it's not written anywhere in the Torah. Well, how do we know? This was explained to us in the oral part of the Torah. In the book of Numbers chapter 29 verse 1, we're told in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a holy convocation, you shall not do any laborious work, it shall be a day of sounding or blowing for you. That's all the Torah says about our Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. All were told on the seventh month, the first day, it's a holy day, you have to have no laborious work done and it's a day of blowing or sounding. It doesn't even tell you what this holiday is celebrating. What is it for? What's it about? What does it mean to blow something? What are we blowing or sounding? It doesn't say. None of the details are provided in the Torah. It sort of is a pregnant passage which screams out more information is needed. That information is provided in our oral Torah, which explains that what you're going to blow is a horn, a ram's horn. And we're told exactly what to blow. You don't blow the Star Spangled Banner or O Canada. There are certain notes that you're supposed to blow and all of those instructions are explicated in the oral Torah. In Leviticus chapter 23 verse 27, the next holiday, we're told on the tenth day of the seventh month, ten days later, shall be a day of atonement. It shall be a holy convocation for you and you shall afflict yourselves. Now what does that mean to afflict yourself? How does a person afflict themselves? Some people might afflict themselves by not having coffee in the morning. Or maybe they afflict themselves by not having sugar to put in their coffee. Or maybe they would afflict themselves by listening to classical music. Some people find that irritating. Maybe some people would find it irritating to sit with a life insurance salesman for two hours. But what does it mean to afflict yourselves? The Torah doesn't describe what is to be done. The written text just says it's a day where you have to afflict yourselves. And yet the oral Torah explains exactly what that means. We fast, we don't eat, we don't drink, etc. Leviticus chapter 23 verses 39 to 43 describes the festival of Tabernacles, Sukkot. In verse 40 we're told, take a pre-eats hadar. It's not clear how to translate that. Is pre-eats hadar a beautiful fruit of a tree or the fruit of a beautiful tree? And at the end of the day what is it referring to when it says take the pre-eats hadar? Apple, pear, kiwi, what are we supposed to take? It's not in the Torah. And then we're told to take that with branches of date palms, widows and myrtle leaves. But take it and do what? The Torah just says take them. What do you do with them? For what purpose? None of that is explained about this incredibly important holiday. And then in verse 42 we're told you shall dwell in booths for seven days. Well how do you construct a booth exactly? Are there rules? And then if it says to dwell in the booth for seven days can you leave for a few minutes? Can you go for a walk? Can you go to work? Or it seems to say you have to dwell in the booth for seven days. So what are the laws of this holiday? We're not told in the written text. In Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 8 this is the passage of Shma Yisrael. It says you shall bind them as a sign upon your arm and they will be as totafot between your eyes. Bind what as a sign on your arm? What exactly does that mean? And what in the world are totafot? If you read the text of the Bible these are unexplainable. It doesn't mean anything. And yet the oral Torah explains these are our phylacteries and we're told exactly how to make them. They're made out of leather. They have to be square. There are certain parchment scrolls inside. Again all of the details are missing from the written text. Deuteronomy chapter 12 verse 21. It basically says you don't need to come to the holy temple in order to be able to eat meat. You can actually be told to eat meat wherever you would like. The only thing is you have to slaughter the animal as I have commanded you, God says. The text of the Bible, the Torah, written Torah says you have to slaughter the animal as I have commanded you. And yet you could look through the entire Bible from top to bottom. You won't find any instructions on how to slaughter an animal. So what does it mean when it says slaughter the animal as I have commanded you? Where are those instructions? Where are they found? They're found in the oral Torah. The Torah prohibits doing any milacha on the Sabbath. There are about 12 times the Torah prohibits doing milacha on the Sabbath. For example in Exodus chapter 31 verse 15. And we're told that if you do milacha on the Sabbath, it's a capital crime, a capital offense. The problem is what does this mean? Don't do milacha. It doesn't mean work. The word for work in the Bible in Hebrew would be avodah. The Torah doesn't say don't do avodah. And even if it did by the way, what would that mean? Even if the Bible said don't do avodah, what does work mean? Does it mean don't go to work? Does it mean don't do something which is strenuous? Does it mean don't do something which physicists were defined as work in physics if you move a object over force, moved over a distance is work. So picking up this Talmud and moving it across the room would be work in terms of physics. What does it mean don't do any work? Even that's not clear. But at least the word is understood. You know we have a handle on the word work. But the word milacha has no other places in the Bible that it's used. So what does the Torah mean when it says you cannot do milacha on the Sabbath? What is included in that prohibition? And we have to be so careful because if we do milacha, there can be a death penalty, theoretically. It's not explained in the written text, but it is found very clearly explicated in the oral Torah. Let me chapter 14 verse 21. Lo sivashel gidi bechalev imo or bechalov imo. If you open up a Torah scroll, you'll see there are no punctuation marks. There are no dots. There are no vowel markings. So the word chetlamin bet can be read as chalov, milk, or chalev, fat. So are we told not to boil a kid in its mother's milk or in its mother's fat? So the actual reading of the Torah itself we wouldn't know without an oral explanation. Exodus chapter 25 verse 9 and Numbers chapter 8 verse 4 tell us that Moses was shown a diagram, was given a vision of what the tabernacle was to look like. When God gave the instructions to how to build a tabernacle in the desert, the Torah tells us that it was done by Moses according to the vision that was shown him by God. It's very difficult just to write a few paragraphs like the Torah has and think that you can actually put together a mishkan, a tabernacle. It's not so simple. So in order to communicate it to Moses, clearly God actually showed him a vision. I don't know of any Bible that contains pictures or diagrams. So clearly there is information that was given to Moses that was not written in the Bible itself. And these are just a few examples. On one level, the oral Torah gives all of the details that are not contained in the brief general descriptions found in the written Torah. One of the simplest ways, it's not really the most accurate way, but one of the simplest ways of understanding the oral Torah is that it's the details about all of the commandments that are found in the written text that are not fleshed out in the text itself. Now the word Torah means instruction or teaching. The written Torah, if you pick up five books of Moses, the written Torah is like a table of contents of Jewish living. That's what the written Torah is. It's like a table of contents. But the full exposition only appears through the oral Torah. However, on another level, the written Torah and the oral Torah work hand in glove together. And what they do together is to provide a stereoscopic richness that you would not get if you only had one of them. Let me give you an example. If you pick up the written text of the Torah, it says in three different places, in discussing the laws of causing bodily injury to someone, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot. That's what the Torah says. Very clearly, three different places, if you cause bodily harm to someone, it's an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot. Now why is it that for the entire period of Jewish history, since we became a people and left Egypt, why is it that no Jewish court ever handed out, never imposed that kind of punishment? Why is it? The Torah says it very clearly and yet no Jewish court ever chopped off someone's hand or ripped out someone's eye. The reason is because the oral Torah that we have explained that this was not the actual penalty that was to be imposed. The oral Torah taught that if you chop off someone's hand, you must monetarily compensate them for five things. Number one, the medical treatments they're going to have to pay for, that's going to be on your tab. Number two, they're lost wages. If they're injured and they can't work for six months, you have to pay them for their back wages. Number three, the court will assess the value of the limb that you injured. Don't ask me how that's done, but they might say that an eye is worth $200,000, a hand $100,000. Whatever their assessment is, you have to pay them for the value of the limb that you hurt. Number four, you have to pay them for the pain that you caused them in the injury and also the court will assess how much the pain is worth. And number five, you have to pay for the embarrassment they feel as a result of the injury. That's the actual practice in Judaism. And it's clear that there are at least three reasons, three major problems with carrying out the literal penalty that is written in the Torah. Again, the Torah says an eye for an eye. There are at least three problems with that. Number one, for a court to rip out someone's eye or chop off their hand would be a disgusting barbaric act. That's the least of our problems. Number two, it certainly would not help the victim. If someone's eye is poked out and the court pokes out the eye of the attacker, the victim is not benefiting by that punishment. And number three, it would not be equitable. If the court penalizes the attacker by doing exactly what he or she did to the victim, it would not be a fair kind of punishment. Let's give a few examples. What if the victim was a fully-sighted person and the attacker pokes out one of their eyes? But the attacker was someone that only had one eye to begin with, a one-eyed attacker. And now the court's going to poke out their one remaining eye. Well, that's not fair because the victim can still see pretty well out of one eye. But with no eyes left, the attacker can't see at all. Or imagine that the victim was an opera singer and they had their hand chopped off. But the attacker was an airline pilot or a surgeon or a pianist. So the victim is still able to function and be a productive member of society missing one hand. The attacker, if the court imposes that kind of tit for tat penalty, will no longer be able to function in the profession that they were doing. So for those three reasons and possibly more, to impose the same penalty that the attacker inflicted on the victim is just ridiculous. And that's why the Torah says in the oral Torah, you do not poke out someone's eye. Rather, the attacker has to pay monetary compensation. Of course, there's a very obvious question now. If that's the intention of God, if the intention of God all along was that the attacker pay money, then why didn't the written text of the Torah just say that? Why didn't the text of the Torah just say money for an eye, money for a hand, monetary compensation for a foot? And I believe the reason is that if the Torah had written that, it would have been incredibly crass. It's like saying if you rip out someone's eye, write a check. Really? That's really an appropriate penalty. That really somehow is justice. Someone rips off someone's arm and they just write a check and everything's hunky-dory. Everything's fine. So the written Torah protests and the written Torah says, no, because saying a check for an eye would not convey, it would not convey how absolutely horrible the crime was. It would seem to trivialize the disgusting action of the criminal. So what the written Torah attempts to do is to express its revulsion for such a horrible act and says, look, what you did was so evil that you deserve to have your eye taken out. On some level, if you chop off someone's hand, you deserve to have your hand chopped off. However, as we saw for the court to do this, it would be barbaric and it wouldn't help the victim and it wouldn't be equitable. So the oral Torah teaches that in practice, the attacker pays compensation for the five things we've discussed. So what happens here is that the written Torah and the oral Torah complement each other to provide a much richer understanding and teaching than just having a single-dimensional written Torah. What the written text does is it states what the person deserves on a visceral level. On a visceral level, you deserve to have the same thing done to you. The oral Torah modifies this and delineates what is done on a practical level. Now what may have been the reason for transmitting the Torah both in written and oral components than just having it all written in one big book? It's a very fair question. Why didn't God just put everything in a book? Why have some of it oral, some of it written? What I want to do is share several possible reasons, but there are many more. Number one, the oral Torah is vast. The laws of the Sabbath alone contain thousands of details. The written Torah, any written Torah, could not possibly encompass everything of the oral Torah. The oral Torah contains conceptual principles and rules that could then be applied by scholars to any situation that would arise. But you can't put every possible situation that may arise in a book. The Torah was given 3,000 years ago. There were no microwave ovens back then. There was no technology like we have now. So for the Torah 3,000 years ago, to have the laws of everything that will ever happen in history is just not possible. Number two, a written text can always be misinterpreted. You know, there's a famous story, I'm not sure if it's a true story, but there's a famous story told about a big meeting in communist Russia in the early days of the Communist Party where Stalin has been having a huge feud with Trotsky. And at this big conference, Stalin gets a telegraph from Trotsky. And Stalin picks it up and he reads it and he's very happy. What does the telegram say? It says, Dear Stalin, you were right. I was wrong. I should apologize. And Stalin was thrilled. Someone comes over to Stalin and says, you know, sir, your Excellency, you're not really reading that telegram properly. What it really says is, Dear Stalin, you were right. I was wrong. I should apologize. The same exact words. But how do you understand those words? And so the truth is any written text can be misinterpreted. What the oral Torah does is it's transmitted from teacher to student. If the student has any questions about the text, they can ask this teacher to clear up anything that's ambiguous. If the teacher sees that the student isn't understanding something, the teacher can clear it up on the spot. There's a built-in system of quality control when you have an oral Torah. Number three, a written Torah can always be put on a shelf and forgotten about. When I was a kid, I received a world book encyclopedia. I rarely opened it unless I was trying to look up something in those pre-Google days. But normally I wasn't reading my encyclopedia. An oral Torah cannot be left on a shelf. It demands constant engagement with a teacher on an ongoing and regular basis. Number four, the Torah is not just information. It's not just data. It's a way of life. We don't just learn data from a teacher. When you have a teacher, you learn values from the teacher. The teacher is a living model of Torah values. You can't fully learn the ethos of the Torah from reading books. You just will not get everything from a book. A teacher is a living Torah. And when you personally experience the kindness of a teacher, their sensitivity, it impacts much deeper than the words of a book. A student learns by seeing their teacher pray, by seeing their teacher eat, by seeing their teacher's commitment to Torah study. And these are very vital lessons that are only possible through a dynamic personal interaction with the teacher. Number five, the oral Torah is not a neatly laid out code or encyclopedia of law. It's not an encyclopedia. It's not a code. The oral Torah is a discussion, a conversation, a debate, an analysis. It seeks to understand the law, not just to know the law. It seeks to understand the conceptual principles underlying the laws, more than the simple facts themselves. And so the oral Torah requires a lot of work and effort to understand and figure out more than a written text would. The oral Torah is very difficult and a written text is very straightforward. So what happens with an oral Torah is it produces a much greater engagement and attachment to the Torah than a written text word. And finally, number six, an oral Torah prevents Torah from being co-opted and usurped by others. We know what happened to our written Torah. Others laid claim to the written Torah, claiming that they are the only ones that understand it properly, claiming that they are its only rightful heirs, and claiming they are the real children of Israel. That's what happened with our written Torah. If everything we had was put into a book, our entire Torah could be purloined. And so to prevent that, what God revealed to us was not something that you could just put into a book. Only people who were engaged with it on a personal level have it. Now the oral Torah was supposed to remain oral, transmitted from teacher to student, and so it was for about 1,500 years. But then our political situation changed. Our Holy Temple was destroyed in the year 70. We lost sovereignty over the land of Israel, and tremendous persecution of our people ensued. It made it virtually impossible for people to have the peace of mind necessary to study and to maintain a vast oral Torah. So around the year 200 of the common era, around the year 200, Rabbi Yehuda HaNusi, Judah the Prince, published a highly, highly condensed version of the oral Torah that we call the Mishnah. It is composed primarily of case law. You look at the Mishnah, it's basically lots of cases. And it's designed as a mnemonic, as a tool to allow us to keep our memory intact, to allow us students to derive the basic concepts and to memorize all of the oral Torah. The Mishnah is organized into six orders that are comprised of 63 tractates. The first of these orders is called Zareem seeds. It discusses the agricultural laws in the land of Israel and the laws of prayers and blessings. The second order is called seasons, discussing the Sabbath and holidays. The third order is called women, discussing family law, marriage, divorce, etc. The fourth order is called damages. It discusses civil law, court procedures, torts, business law, lost and found, etc. The fifth section, the fifth order is called sacred things, discussing the sacrifices in temple service. And the sixth order of the Mishnah is called purity, discussing the laws of ritual purity and impurity. Now the Mishnah itself was studied, debated, analyzed and discussed for hundreds of years. And the extremely concise nature of the Mishnah, however, was not sufficient to guarantee the survival of the oral Torah. So eventually two different compilations of the sages unzipping and analyzing the Mishnah were published. These are called the Talmud or we call it the Gamara. There was a version of the Talmud that was completed in the land of Israel around the year 350 of the Common Era. And it is called usually the Jerusalem or the Palestinian Talmud. Scholars in Babylonia published their Talmud around the year 505 of the Common Era. The Babylonian Talmud is considered the more authoritative and is the version that is normally studied because there were more scholars living in Babylon. The conditions in Babylon were much easier because in Israel still at that time there was tremendous persecution. And finally the Babylonian Talmud was worked on for many, many more years than the Palestinian Talmud. So it's considered to be of a higher quality. Now the Talmud is a vast literature and it contains the following as a summary. The Talmud contains the explanations of laws that are found in the written Torah. I went through some of those before that were revealed by God to Moses. The Talmud contains the derivation of laws using the principles of interpretation that were revealed to Moses. The Talmud contains intense discussions and analysis of these laws to arrive at their conceptual underpinnings. The Talmud contains, in addition to all of these laws that are considered to be literally from God, the Talmud contains protective enactments of the rabbis, which had the basis in the authority given to them by scripture, by God, to enact such legislation. However, these rabbinic enactments did not have the status of biblical law. They had to be very clearly taught as a rabbinic enactment. As an example, just to make it clearer for you. If you read in the five books of Moses we saw before it says, you cannot do any milacha on the Sabbath. What does that mean? The oral Torah, which again was given before the written Torah, explains that milacha is defined by 39 different conceptual categories of activity. One of these 39 types of activity is writing. Writing. You could be writing with a pen, with a pencil, with a crayon, with a quill pen. Whatever you're writing with, writing is considered a violation of biblical law. The rabbi said, you know what, we're so used to carrying around pens and pencils, even though the Torah doesn't say you can't carry around a pencil or pen on the Sabbath. The rabbi said, you know what, let's be smart and we are going to prohibit people from handling things they're not allowed to use on the Sabbath. So on the Sabbath the rabbi said, don't handle pens. If you handle a pen you're not violating a biblical law, you're violating a rabbinical law. The Bible said you cannot have sexual intercourse with certain people. We just read about it last week on Shabbat, we'll be reading it again this week on Shabbat in Leviticus chapter 20. It didn't say you cannot hug and kiss these people. The rabbi said, if you're not allowed to sleep with someone from the Bible, we're going to recommend you don't hug and kiss them and even be in a locked room together with them. So the rabbis had the authority to protect the Torah with their rabbinic legislation. In addition, the Talmud contains positive enactments of the rabbis, such as their recommendation that before we eat bread we wash our hands, or lighting Shabbat candles, or instituting the Halladay of Hanukkah. All of these are rabbinic enactments. And finally, about one-tenth of the Talmud is composed of what is called agadata, which is non-legal material in the Talmud we had. One of our lectures last spring dealt with this section of the Talmud called agadah, and it's a non-legal part. It discusses philosophy and mysticism, etc. Now we're faced with one final problem for tonight. By committing the oral Torah to writing, warrant all of the vital advantages that we discussed for having an oral Torah lost. I discussed before many advantages of having an oral Torah. So by committing our oral Torah to writing, didn't we lose that? Paradoxically, the oral Torah was never lost. Even after it was committed to written form. Because the genius of the sages, who composed the Talmud, was to compose it in such a way that it still never lost its oral nature, its oral character, and still it requires a teacher tethered to the tradition. Because you can't judge the Torah from its own perspective. Because you can't just read the Talmud. It's not a book of information. It doesn't present data to us. You are basically thrown into the middle of a discussion, taking place with scholars living over many centuries. And the style of the Talmud is chaotic. It's purposely intricate and involved. And it's this style that preserved its oral nature. After all, the Kutskerebi observed that the sages who composed the Mishnah and the Talmud didn't violate the prohibition of recording the oral Torah in written form. There was actually a prohibition against committing the oral Torah to writing. And the Kutskerebi said they never violated that prohibition. Because the depth of the oral Torah can never be contained in a book.