Out of the Fog of Words

The Talmud is second only to the Bible in its importance and influence as a source book of Jewish religion. The term “Talmud” (literally “study”) is generic: there are actually two Talmuds, the larger and more authoritative Babylonian Talmud containing the teachings of the Babylonian Jewish sages (the so-called Amoraim) who lived in the third to fifth centuries, and the smaller Jerusalem (or Palestinian) Talmud which presents the teachings of the sages who lived in the Land of Israel in the third and fourth centuries. Both Talmuds are structured in the form of commentaries on the Mishna, the code of traditional law compiled about 200 C.E. by Rabbi Y’huda haNasi in the Galilee, which contains the teachings of the earlier sages (the so-called Tannaim) who lived in the first and second centuries C.E. In distinction from the Mishna, which is always brief and succinct, the voluminous Talmudic commentary appended to it is called the Gemara. The Jerusalem Talmud contains ca. 800,000 words; the Babylonian ca. 2,500,000 words. In the two Talmuds references are made to ca. two hundred Tannaim and no less than two thousand Amoraim. Both Talmuds are written partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic; the latter was the colloquial tongue in Palestine and in Babylonia in those days. [1]

Note that minor term: "Palestinian Talmud."

While the Middle East Conflict may have been cast in 1948 as a fight about land, it may have been always--and from long before 1948--an argument about literature.  In fact, while scholars involved with studies of culture and religion have been well aware of the breadth of commentary and expressive work churned up and out of each domain, the same would seem a dimension of which the general public has been and remains blissfully but cursedly unaware.  Such makes for a particularly hazy sense of causality in conflicts birthed on the engines of intellectual drivers.

There's no need for that old ignorance today. 

For any with the slightest interest in Islam, Dar-us-Salam Publications may quite handily provide access to a body of literature " . . . free from sectarianism and in accordance with the Qur'an and Sunnah."  Web address: http://www.dar-us-salam.com/about_us.htm

From the memorable experience of it, I may heartily recommend spending a few hours to days with Saifure Rahman al-Mubarakpuri's Saudi prize winning history Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum (The Sealed Nectar): Memoirs of the Noble Prophet, which features a witnessed account of the descent of the Angel Gabriel.

For interest in Judaism and Jewish culture and life, I know of no central publishing operation equivalent to Dar-us-Salam (and if you should know of one, please provide me with that information), but one may start  making rounds with the following: http://www.judaism.com/books/index.asp and http://www.artscroll.com.

Of course there are many other portals through which to encounter through language Judaism and Jewish culture--off the top: The Jewish Virtual Library (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/), the Wikipedia start page titled "Judaism" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism) -- just follow the headers beneath the Star of David -- and for any in the Tribe finding himself a little bit lost, there is, happily, Judaism 101 (http://www.jewfaq.org/index.htm) and Aish.com (http://www.aish.com/).

While our main and modern issue may no longer involve the provision of access to a diverse and immense corpus of cultural and religious literature, it certainly involves something near to it: access to time, and, related, encouragement of the love of reading for hours on end.

Who has time?

Who would today want to spend it reading?

If you should be so lucky as to account yourself two affirmatives, look around and ask "Who else?"

For the few who do have time, focus counts too, and that's become a hard thing to maintain, funded for it or not, in our fast-paced and media-soaked intellectual environment wired tight by global communications.

What makes this most annoying is that while people will kill one another, en masse, over matters confined largely to their heads, interest in "content of mind" seems confined to a relative handful of pundits and scholars when the same should become the province of every teacher of language and comparative literature and of some interest to every generally educated reader.

The origins of attitudes -- or beliefs and how we feel about them -- may be hazy at a glance across many dimensions in living, but all have their grounding in something one has experienced, heard, or read and then synthasized and revised.

The origins of law too have evolved out of ancient oral and written traditions, and one may well follow threads from the well known Moses to the fairly well known Maimonides to the positively obscure Lassa Oppenheim, an early 20th Century Cambridge professor, also Jewish, responsible for the world's first comprehensive and still influential English-language volume on international law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._F._L._Oppenheim).

In this most blessed day, one may read from a body of literature firmly established between the ancient Moses and the modern perceptive legal scholar Oppenheim.  Not that I wish to tackle the Mishnah, but the same is as available for purchase in English as The Sealed Nectar, and here is a URL to it: http://www.artscroll.com/mishnah.html.

Reference

1. Patai, Raphael.  Gates To the Old City: A Book of Jewish Legends.  Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981.

2. Al-Mubarakpuri, Saifur Rahman.  Al-Makhtum, Ar-Raheeq (The Sealed Nectar): Memoirs of the Noble Prophet. 

# # #