When they ask “Have you read it?” about the Talmud, they haven’t read it. They haven’t even seen a page of it. You don’t “read” the Talmud. It isn’t a book. It’s the infinitely hypertexted minutes of 800 years of debates - some of them debates that literally lasted centuries and are preserved in detail in its pages. It runs to well over 5,000 very large pages of dense Aramaic and Hebrew in small fonts. On nearly every subject it takes up, it quotes opposing views at length, views that are in the end rejected but are nevertheless preserved for all time. It spends a huge amount of time in stream-of-consciousness tangents that run like threads of interconnected contemplations throughout its 63 volumes. Some significant portion of the totality of the human experience is taken up at some point or another by the Sages of the Talmud. And all of that is just the Babylonian one. There’s another Talmud, the earlier Jerusalem Talmud, some of which has been lost. Its Aramaic is different, its topics diverge somewhat. It’s also wonderful. I’m a fairly well-read Jew. Yet I am only the lowliest neophyte when it comes to the vastness of the Talmud. That’s both a simple fact and also part of the ideology at the heart of Talmud study. Each tractate literally begins on page 2, so that no matter how much you study, you’ve never even reached the first page. This is the heart of Judaism: There is no learning without humility. I try to care about the bigots who have spent two millennia quote-mining that vast intellectual expanse, first to prove that Christianity or Islam are better than Judaism, then just to dehumanize and ultimately destroy the Jews. I try to care, but I fail. Because when all is said and done, the bigots have only their hatred. Whereas I get to swim in that vast ocean of wisdom. https://bird.makeup/@ihsan77402251/1858777934724821255
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