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To Dialogue With Eternity |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Jacob Neusner |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/1990 |
| Size: 3,563 Words, 20,410 Characters |
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THE TALMUD
The Steinsaltz Edition
Commentary by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
New York: Random House, 1989.
252 pp., $40
So much hype has accompanied the publication of the first volume of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz's translation of one chapter of one tractate of the Babylonian Talmud that it is easy to wonder whether, withal this sizzle, they're selling any beef. They are - plenty of it. Steinsaltz's edition is a good and useful piece of work and, when brought to completion in forty volumes, will serve synagogue study groups, Yeshiva and Hebrew day school classes, and others interested in a serious encounter with Judaism. There is in English no better way of embarking on the study of the Babylonian Talmud in its own text and circumstance than Steinsaltz's.
From its completion around A.D. 600, the Talmud of Babylonia (Hebrew: Bavli) has formed the foundation of Judaism: It is the summa, the starting point, the final authority. It is made up of two parts. The first contains selections of a law code, the Mishnah, which comprises sixty-three tractates divided into six divisions: agriculture, festivals, women and family, the civil laws and code, laws governing the Temple cult and it maintenance, and uncleanness taboos, the last covering about a quarter of the whole document. The Talmud of Babylonia selects thirty-seven tractates in the second, third, fourth, and fifth divisions (whereas the Talmud of the Land of Israel, which closed ca. A.D. 400, treats thirty-nine tractates, from the first through the fourth divisions).
To the tractates chosen for amplification and clarification is added the second part of the document, a systematic and well-crafted commentary on and supplement to the Mishnah. This other half may be called the gemara, or simply, "the Talmud." In fact, when people speak of the Talmud, they generally refer not to be Mishnah with its commentary but to the re-presentation of small sense units of the Mishnah, whether sentences or paragraphs, in the setting of the on-going ...
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...insaltz shows us how, in the philosophical tradition of the West, we Jews learn to make for ourselves the well-considered life. For affording access to that heritage of the Torah's wisdom in the conduct of the everyday and the here and now, he thoroughly deserves the public recognition that he has enjoyed. His work ought to win the Bavli the widest audience it has ever had in translation. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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