Best 11 quotes in «talmud quotes» category

Rav Hisda nodded. “Despite the dangers, people continue to travel, often for long distances. This is what you would inscribe on an amulet for your brother to protect him on a journey. “May it be Your will, Adonai Savaot, that You conduct Tachlifa bar Haviva in peace, direct his footsteps in peace, and uphold him in peace. Deliver him from the hand of every foe and ambush along the way. Send blessing on his handiwork and grant him grace, loving-kindness, and mercy in Your eyes and in the eyes of all who behold Tachlifa bar Haviva. Blessed are You, Adonai, who harkens unto prayer. Amen. Amen. Selah.

Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, “When a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children.” She exclaimed, “You are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars].” But Rabbi Hiyya replied, “There is a wheel which revolves in this world.” —Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b

Ten strong things have been created in the world. The rock is hard, but the iron cleaves it. The iron is hard, but the fire softens it. The fire is hard, but the water quenches it. The water is strong, but the clouds bear it. The clouds are strong, but the wind20 scatters them. The wind is strong, but the body bears it. The body is strong, but fright crushes it. Fright is strong, but wine banishes it. Wine is strong, but sleep works it off. Death is stronger than all, and charity saves from death.

The Talmud teaches that there are four kinds of people in the world. The first person says, What's yours is mine. The second person says, What's yours is yours. The third person says, What's mine is mine. And the fourth person says, What's mine is yours. Which one are you?

There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where he finds God busily adding crownlike ornaments to the letters of the Torah. Moses asks God what He is doing and God explains that in the future there will be a man named Akiva, son of Joseph, who will base a huge mountain of Jewish law on these very orthographic ornaments. Intrigued, Moses asks God to show this man to him. Moses is told to 'go back eighteen rows,' and suddenly, as in a dream, Moses is in a classroom, class is in session and the teacher is none other than Rabbi Akiva. Moses has been told to go to the back of the study house because that is where the youngest and least educated students sit. Akiva, the great first-century sage, is explaining Torah to his disciples, but Moses is completely unable to follow the lesson. It is far too complicated for him. He is filled with sadness when, suddenly, one of the disciples asks Akiva how he knows something is true and Akiva answers: 'It is derived from a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai.' Upon hearing this answer, Moses is satisfied - though he can't resist asking why, if such brilliant men as Akiva exist, Moses needs to be the one to deliver the Torah. At this point God loses patience and tells Moses, 'Silence, it's my will.

The Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world. The Talmud became essential for Jewish survival once the Temple - God's pre-Talmud home - was destroyed, and the Temple practices, those bodily rituals of blood and fire and physical atonement, could no longer be performed. When the Jewish people lost their home (the land of Israel) and God lost His (the Temple), then a new way of being was devised and Jews became the people of the book and not the people of the Temple or the land. They became the people of the book because they had no place else to live. That bodily loss is frequently overlooked, but for me it lies at the heart of the Talmud, for all its plenitude. The Internet, which we are continually told binds us together, nevertheless engenders in me a similar sense of diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a home page?

The Talmud expresses subtle relationship in an apocryphal story of a dialogue between God and Abraham. God begins by chiding Abraham: „If it wasn´t for Me, you wouldn´t exist.“Lord, and for that I am very appreciative and grateful. However, if it wasn´t for me, You wouldn´t be known.

And yet I feel an uncanny kinship to Moses as the Rabbis imagine him in that story, as I suppose that the Rabbis intended I should. Theirs was a system that made a virtue of ambivalence and built uncertainty into bedrock assertions of faith. No wonder fundamentalists and fascists have hated it so. And why I feel drawn towards it even now and, in the face of everything, find myself oddly determined to carry my own flawed version away from the slope of Sinai where, according to tradition, my soul stood at the time of the original revelation.

You don't see the world as it is - you see the world as you are". - The Talmud

In my tradition, God revealed Himself in words and lives in stories and, no, you cannot touch or even see Him. The Word, in Judaism, was never made flesh. The closest God came to embodiment was in the Temple in Jerusalem...But the Temple was destroyed. In Judaism, the flesh became words. Words were the traditional refuge of the Jewish people - Yochanan ben Zakkai led a yeshiva, my father became a professor. And little boys, in the Middle Ages, ate cakes with verses inscribed on them, an image I find deeply moving and, somehow, deeply depressing. This might help explain a certain melancholy quality books in general, for all their bright allure, have always had for me. As many times as I went down to my parents' library for comfort, I would find myself standing in front of the books and could almost feel them turning back into trees, failing me somehow.

I cling to this notion now because it is what allows me to feel a connection to a vast body of knowledge of which I am not master, much as I am able to live in a society bursting with information that I will never wholly comprehend. I take comfort from a lesson that seems implicit in the Talmud itself, which is that not knowing Torah is part of the lesson of Torah.