Hello Everyone,
For the Jewish people everywhere, this past week has been a horror. I have no doubt that everyone, whether they live here in Israel or they live abroad , has felt the horror of the attack by the terrorists of Hamas on our people .
For myself, the greatest source of consolation has been to study Torah, despite the difficulty that I find in concentrating on what I am trying to study. When I prepared today’s class I thought of this verse from Tehilim:
תהלים פרק קיט פסוק צב, צב
(צב) לוּלֵי תוֹרָתְךָ שַׁעֲשֻׁעָי אָז אָבַדְתִּי בְעָנְיִי:
For those of you who are new to this class here is the introduction that I wrote when the class began in January:
I am writing to welcome you to this series of classes on “Keywords in the Gemarah.”
Along with the Tanakh, the Gemarah forms the essence of Judaism. Every Jew ought to have at least a passing familiarity with the Gemarah. But the Gemarah is a challenging text. It is written in Aramaic and the text has no punctuation marks.
In my lifetime (which began in 1958) there have been two monumental projects whose purpose was to make the Gemarah more approachable. The first project was that of the late Rav Adin Even Yisrael-Steinsaltz zt”l. Rav Steinsaltz took it upon himself to publish a punctuated edition of the entire Babylonian Talmud accompanied by a translation of the text into spoken Hebrew. The second project was undertaken by the ArtScroll publishing company. Their project was to both translate the text of the Talmud into English and to print an anthology of the major commentaries adjacent to each page of text. It follows that the translation of a single page of the Talmud may end up being six pages long in the ArtScroll edition. It is worth pointing out that Rav Steinsaltz’s Hebrew commentary has been translated into English and is published by the Koren publishing company. Similarly, the ArtScroll edition of the Talmud has been translated into Hebrew.
The Aramaic text of the Gemarah is remarkably terse. In any translation, be it the translation found in the Koren or ArtScroll edition of the Talmud, a single line of Aramaic text may be three lines long in English. I truly believe that there is a beauty in the Aramaic text of the Talmud which does not appear in even the best translations. There is a musical rhythm in the Aramaic text.
The text of the Gemarah does lack punctuation marks. The text is very abrupt and the syntax is not at all like that of spoken English ( or Hebrew, or Spanish or any other language that I know of). But the Gemarah is remarkable in that it presents legal theories with such brevity.
My hope for this course is that by knowing how the Gemarah uses certain key words and phrases as punctuation marks. Some phrases indicate that a question is being asked. Some phrases are prefaces to answers. These key words and phrases are the keys that unlock the discussions that take place on each page of the Talmud.
So please write to me whenever you have ideas or suggestions for these sessions. Since I do not know you personally, I do not know what level of skills each member of the class possesses.
My email address is sfischman@webyeshiva.org
I look forward to meeting with you tomorrow.
Stuart Fischman