Hello Everyone,
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 is that by participating in these classes people will learn how to identify the “key words and phrases” of the Gemarah. These key words and phrases serve the purpose of 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.
I began the study of the Gemarah when I was in the sixth grade. Since then, the Vietnam War ended and the Iron Curtain came down. But I have loved to study the Gemarah all through these historical events. Unravelling these unpunctuated pages is both challenging and rewarding and I hope that a bit of my enthusiasm will reach all of you.
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