Why are the commentaries so significant to jews

But I cannot believe that He has revealed Himself only in Israel; and I do not see how any revelation can come to man except through man. This applies to the great insights attained by the philosophers, scientists, poets, and prophets of many peoples; it applies also to Hebrew Scripture and tradition.

Despite my reverence for the Bible, I find in it not only evidence of divine inspiration, but also of human fallibility. What prevents me from according absolute authority to the Torah is not primarily the discovery by modern scholars that the Pentateuch is a composite work and largely post-Mosaic; it is the unmistakable fact that the Torah contains some elements which are intellectually untenable and some that are morally indefensible.

It is no longer possible to allegorize what is irrational and explain away what is unethical. I do not believe any revelation, however genuine, is absolute and final. But the recognition of human deficiencies in the Torah does not require me to reject it altogether. It contains much that is sublime and challenging; and even the survivals of primitive thinking serve a purpose: they enable us to measure the grandeur of the spiritual achievement which the Bible records. The commandments of Scripture and tradition, ethical and social, as well as ceremonial, are not to be adopted blindly.

They must be considered thoughtfully and reverently. Only on the basis of genuine understanding can the individual make the decision as to which of the commandments he can and should obey, which should be modified, and which he may or even should discard.

In arriving at such judgments, he may well be guided by the opinion of informed and committed members of his own religious community, and he will not lightly disregard the consensus.

But as a free person, he must assume the responsibility of the ultimate choice. Experience seems to indicate that the regular and intelligent observance of tradition and rite enriches the spiritual life of adults and children alike. Reform Judaism, which at the start challenged the Orthodox doctrine that the ceremonial law is no less divine and binding than the ethical imperatives, today tends to encourage more observance, especially in the home.

But even more urgent is the problem of applying to present-day situations the great moral principles proclaimed by the prophets. To respond as believing Jews to the challenge of war, poverty, and racial injustice is today the great mitzvah. But a deep concern with social morality in no way conflicts with the cultivation of personal piety, including custom and ritual.

This question seems to me not at all urgent, and indeed not very meaningful. Western culture has been profoundly influenced by the Hebrew Bible; it has also, without knowing it, absorbed much of Pharisaic Judaism, as transmitted by the New Testament. It is not surprising, then, that Christians share many of our beliefs, and that Jewish moral standards are accepted even by persons who do not consider themselves religious.

This does not make these values any less Jewish, or any less compelling to us. I remember a kindly Christian lady who asked me if we Jews have the Psalms too. Judaism remains significantly different from historical Christianity, if only by rejecting much that Christianity added. For us this is hardly a problem: I deny that Judaism would be improved by divesting it of its distinctively Jewish elements. On the contrary, it would lose immeasurably by severing its essential connection with the life and experience of the Jewish people.

Much of its power lies in the fact that it is not an abstraction, that to be a Jew is not merely to assent to a creed, that the Jew must identify himself with a varied and inspiring past and with all Jews in the world today, whatever they believe or practice, even if they renounce belief and practice.

To the born Jew, this means that he may select from the total Jewish heritage what he is able to believe and to do; but to be or not to be a Jew is not really within his choice. For to repudiate his identity is to deny part of himself. On the other hand, I have found that prospective converts to Judaism are often greatly attracted by its specifically Hebraic and traditional elements. What I have written will appear theologically naive to some persons of Jewish origin and sympathies; to others it will seem hopelessly inadequate because it does not accept the divine origin and absolute authority of the entire Torah.

Realizing this, I myself am bound to avoid dogmatic definitions as to who is and who is not a Jew. If someone regards himself as an affirmative Jew, I shall be reluctant to deny his claim, however appalled I may be by his notions about Judaism. To me, the notion of white supremacy, for example, is a repudiation of a central truth of Judaism—the oneness of mankind. To me, Communism appears completely incompatible with Judaism, not only because of its explicit rejection of religion, but because it denies the rights of the individual conscience.

But then, some of my fellow Jews hold that one who rejects kashruth has rejected essential Judaism, and others hold that one who does not migrate to the State of Israel really cares nothing about Jewish survival. I shall then vigorously oppose racialism and Communism and try to keep them from influencing the actions of the organized Jewish community—just as my Orthodox and Zionist friends will work for what they believe is good and oppose what they believe is wrong.

But I shall not be, willing to read out of Jewish life any persons who want to be a part of it. In short, I reject all the absolutisms. In politics, the extreme Left, the radical Right, or absolute anarchism are not the only possible choices. In religion, we are not limited to the choice between rigid authoritarianism and complete skepticism.

Faith goes beyond what reason can demonstrate, but it need not be absurd. There is surely no glory in absurdity! Without surrendering the right to think and act in freedom—insofar as anyone can attain freedom—I can believe in a very literal sense in the God who revealed His Torah to Israel.

And I can try to carry on the Jewish tradition of study, worship, and deeds of love. The affirmers often do not know what they affirm; and consequently those who deny the idea are even less aware of what they deny. Affirmation as well as denial thus become forms of insistence on the magic of mere words to the complete neglect of clarity of meaning.

I believe that God did indeed speak to Moses, as the Bible says. I am, however, unable to imagine, much less to describe, the actual event. The divine revelation of the Bible is the mysterious contact between God and man by which God communicated His truth and His law to Israel through Moses in a manner that excluded every possibility of doubt in the mind and conscience of the recipient of the revelation.

Only a Moses could have described the actual event and only for Moses himself. Revelation is a fundamental principle of Judaism. One does not accept it on the strength of its contents. One believes in biblical revelation on the same grounds on which one believes in Judaism. Therefore, one cannot distinguish between one part of the revelation and another. Reason will never lead us to revelation and, therefore, the appearance of rational insignificance is no argument against revelation.

Revelation is not a rational, but a supra-rational category. On the basis of reason, I do not engage in the futile task of reinterpreting revelation in order to rationalize it. On the basis of reason, I reject all revelation; on the grounds on which I accept revelation as a category of the supra-rational, I accept every word of the Torah as revealed, i.

This does not make me a fundamentalist. Only non-Jews have been fundamentalists, never Jews who took their place within Judaism. Because it is revelation, the Torah is from God; because of the oral tradition, the Torah is for man.

It is not essential that the so-called ritual commandments should at all times and in every situation show obvious ethical or doctrinal content. To fulfill even the ritual commandments is to do the will of God. Doing the will of God represents for the Jew the only possible contact between himself and God outside the actual revelational experience—which theoretically is a constant possibility, though actually it occurs very seldom.

Contrary to the entire antinomian Pauline tradition, Christian or emulated by Jews, the doing of the will of God is for the authentic Jew a deeply inspirational and highly ennobling experience. It is an intensely religious experience, which keeps religion itself alive. Since for the religious Jew, all ethics and doctrine are anchored in Judaism, the ritual commandments, which are one of the sources of Judaic inspiration, are never without ethical or doctrinal relevance.

Judaism is neither ethics nor doctrine, but a life of obedience to God out of awe, and of submission to Him out of love; within this life ethics and doctrine too have their place. But if this is the case, would not any commandment of God, because it expresses His will, have the same religious significance or effect? The answer to this old theological question is yes; no matter what the contents of the commandments were, man would still be obligated to submit to the will of God and obey them.

But it so happened that God revealed and commanded this Torah and not another one, because of His concern for man. As to the meaning of the commandments, even those that apparently have neither ethical nor doctrinal content, one must—as always—refer to the oral tradition, as well as to the continually developing philosophy and theology of Judaism.

The commandments, however, remain unchangeably binding. Judaism is not a religion of mere faith, but of a faith that leads to the realizing deed. A religion of mere faith is a religion of the soul; a religion which is a way of life is a religion of the whole man. Faith is always private; the way of life, which demands the comprehensive deed, is always public.

An act of faith concerns only the individual soul and its God; a deed, because of its public quality, concerns other people. And the more comprehensive the deed, the more it concerns others and affects them.

In fact, a way of life which comprehends life in all its manifestations is not realizable by the individual, but only by a group, a people, a community that makes its realization a communal responsibility. Such a way of life, a religion of the all-comprehensive deed, is Judaism. Judaism had to become the religion of a people, if it was to be at all.

It is for this reason that in my book, God, Man and History , discussing the subject of the chosen people, I made the statement that God did not choose the Jews, but the people that God chose became the Jewish people as a result of their taking upon themselves the task and responsibility for the realization of Judaism. On numerous occasions the Bible itself warns the Jews against every form of national or racial conceit.

If Jews at times do indulge in a sense of national or racial superiority, this is not a consequence of the religious concept of having been chosen by God. Rather, it derives from the historic experience of Israel, based on the treatment Israel has received at the hands of other nations and religions. Bearing in mind that experience, often it was hardly possible for a Jew not to be convinced of his own moral, ethical, and religious superiority.

As to the rest of mankind, Judaism teaches that the righteous of all the nations have a share in the world to come. Judaism did not once contribute monotheism to the world, as this question assumes; it is still being contributed. Monotheism is not yet the possession of the overwhelming majority of mankind. It is not even a reality in the kingdom of Christianity. The God of monotheism, who tolerates no mediator between Himself and man, is not the deity that by its very nature necessitates a mediator.

Man, too, is understood by monotheism in a manner vitally different from the way he is seen by Christianity. The man of monotheism can only confront God without a mediator; in Christianity, man cannot confront God except by way of the mediator. The entire position and purpose of man in the monotheistic scheme of things is greatly different from the Christian interpretation. Nor is monotheistic messianism Christian messianism. From the Jewish point of view, the only non-Jewish monotheistic religion is Islam.

But neither has Islam accepted Jewish monotheism. Allah who rules by fate is not the God of Israel; nor is Islamic man, who is ruled by divine fate, the man of Jewish monotheism. Here, too, the ramifications of Jewish monotheism reach into every area of human existence. As ever before, Jewish monotheism is still in the possession of Israel alone. Nor can this ever be otherwise. Even if all mankind should accept Jewish monotheism, Jewish monotheism would still remain in Jewish hands.

According to Judaism, Jews do not simply happen to be monotheists, but rather monotheists are of necessity Jews. The quality of obligation in Jewish ethics is absolute. But absoluteness of obligation may be derived only from the will of God that wills the good. The unbelieving Jew or the secular humanist adheres to an ethic that derives from man or society.

Consequently, such ethics must forever remain relativistic. Secularist ethics possess neither universal nor absolute validity. The Nazi criminals pleaded correctly that they acted in accordance with the valid law of their state. As to Christian ethics, one should remember that it is questionable whether Christianity is universal rather than totalitarian. The very concept that human salvation may be achieved only through faith in Jesus destroys the idea of a universal mankind.

It divides humanity into the redeemed and the unredeemed. The unredeemed, given over to original sin, can do little good in this world; only the redeemed are free from the morally and ethically crippling burden of original sin. Thus, from the Christian point of view, Christian ethics is superior to the ethics of the unredeemed.

A Christian is kind even to the unredeemed. Because of the Christian premise, Christian humility is inverted pride. Monotheistic ethics is universal. The one and only God is the father of the one and only mankind. As to Buddhism or Hinduism, it is questionable whether they are not amoral and altogether lacking in ethical seriousness. According to the Bhagavad-Gita, the truly wise mourn neither for the living nor for the dead.

In the world of Maya nothing may be taken too seriously. Reality, what truly matters, is to be found not in this world, nor in individual existence. But there is no ethics in the All. It should, however, be understood that such a statement by itself is rather far from being a program for the solution of the very real problems involved in the conditions of the Negro citizens of this country.

I believe that dialectical materialism is not the only possible philosophy of Communism. A communistic form of social organization need be neither anti-religious nor atheistic, just as capitalism is not of necessity God-fearing and non-materialistic.

There are sufficient historic examples to prove the point. One cannot be a good Jew and a Marxian Communist. But one may be a Communist without being a Marxian materialist. A religious communism is not a contradiction in terms. I cannot, however, see how one can be a good Jew and a Fascist.

Christianity promised redemption through a self-sacrificial act of God. The sacrifice was made, but all historic experience has gone to show that the promise has not been kept. Mankind has remained unredeemed. For me this fact proves that that God is indeed dead. The theological meaning of the concentration camps and the crematoria is that the guilt of man has never been taken from him through any divine self-sacrifice.

Man has been let down by the God who made the promise. This is essentially a Christian dilemma. The God of Israel never made such a promise.

On the contrary. His plan for mankind has never been revealed. Whatever the divine plan, there was never any doubt left that according to the God of Israel man himself had to play an important part in his own salvation. Either God or no God; if God is dead, then He was never alive. If God is dead, then He can have no theology. If He is dead, why bother at all? From the Jewish point of view it is the not altogether unexpected Christian version of the old pagan cry about the death of Pan.

The most serious challenge to Judaism is not modern thought but modernism as such. But modernism is an attitude, not a thought. It has been brought about by affluence and the increase in the means of living, which in themselves seem to guarantee security to man.

Man has become rich in means, and the rich in means never seem to be in great need of ends. At the same time, the future of man is so dark and impenetrable that the very complexity of the problem induces man to throw up his hands and adopt a philosophy of carpe diem. It is not modern thought which poses the challenge to Jewish belief, but the absence of a genuine inclination on the part of most Jews to think seriously about human experience and the human condition in our times, and to do so from a position of rootedness in their own historic tradition.

I confess I cannot answer the questions put to me. What will do: a Whiteheadian resolution of God with science? Every response begets another question or two; every answer fathers new doubts in the believer no less than in the man who says he has no faith.

The more significantly human our questions are these days, the less anyone seems able to give relatively firm and unshifting answers to them. That, probably, is why the only literature that thrives today is criticism, though with the continuing decrease of positive voices, the critics must spend much of their time criticizing other critics.

Another reason answers do not come easily is the nature of Judaism. Moshe Rabbenu never claimed to be the theological answer man. That role, of course, was left to Elijah, but only when he came to announce the advent of the Messiah.

Judaism, finding stability in law and community, could maintain great theological openness without losing its identity. While answering many questions firmly, our tradition ignored some and left a good many others open for debate, divergence, and hopeful waiting. That older dynamic of integrity was badly shaken by the Jewish Emancipation.

Worse, since the Emancipation began, Jews have never been able to arrive at a new theological equilibrium. Every time it seemed as if a satisfactory Jewish intellectual adjustment to this radically new social circumstance might be achieved, the cultural milieu itself underwent major transformation.

German philosophical idealism, Zionist nationalism, Reconstructionist naturalism, Buberian existentialism—all spoke to a world which disappeared virtually the moment those doctrines were elaborated.

How can you adjust your Judaism to a culture that will not stand still? The Emancipation has not meant a revolution in Jewish life but a series of revolutions—and the end is not yet in sight. Finally, and most important, how shall we speak when the passions on both sides of the conversation regularly turn answers into charges and questions into refutations? One cannot try to speak for Judaism without being plunged into great anxiety. The Jewish community appears so perfidious and out for such tawdry gain.

Every indicator seems to say that this precious Jewish heritage may soon be squandered away by an unthinking generation or two. No wonder that such explanations as can be offered quickly turn to moralizing and denunciation, often made the more inaudible by the tone of assured sanctity in which they are sounded. Yet even where the words proceed simply, they are often not heard. We listen only in order to rebut. We attend only to determine which of our armory of retorts will be most devastating.

What shall we hit them with most damagingly—religious wars, David Hume, the Grand Inquisitor, or the bourgeois nature of the synagogue? The depth of the defenses is understandable. To believe, even to begin to believe, would mean to change our lives, probably fundamentally. The stakes are great on both sides and that generally leads to the ludicrous situation where those who cannot speak directly are talking to those who refuse to hear.

Yet we must do what we can, and I begin with these words on our special problem of communication because I am convinced that how we talk to one another is as important as what is said. Let me begin with an assertion that itself could form the focus of a lengthy discussion. Today, only religious faith, only Judaism or Christianity, can provide the basis for a social and therefore personal ethic worthy of the name. Individuals may still care, but hot concern is odd in a society intent on playing it cool.

What contemporary social institution can be counted on to give Western man a strong sense of moral direction? The university? The mass media? The corporation? The country club? The laboratory? The couch? The debate over the end of ideology hinges on the recognition that no general support for social-ethical values is now available to us.

To hope that selective involvement and situational response can long be relied upon to produce effective social-ethical results seems most unrealistic to me. It is an effort to secure the present by living off the inherited religious and philosophic capital of other generations. It may work for a while but already the shortage of resources to draw upon is becoming clear. If we are to affirm our sense of social ethics we must do so through some sort of religious faith.

That does not make religion true, only useful. But I believe that the reverse is also real, that men who know, not in a detached or technical way, but in a very intimate and personal way, that these social concerns are not just individual caprice but are fundamental to the universe itself—such men are already religious. They already have faith in a ground beyond themselves which mandates and authorizes their personal and social ethics no matter what vulgarities and degradations the culture around them cultivates and celebrates.

Their commitment, their faith is so close to what the Jewish tradition knew as God that, from my point of view, the critical point of acknowledgement has definitely been passed. From there we move on to the lesser, though significant, questions of conceptions, envisagements, relationships. That is why I am not deeply troubled by the death-of-God theology. It has not yet had to face the positive question of the grounding of moral values.

Such statements as have appeared indicate that this movement will not be able to evade the relationship of God to value noted above. For a change, Judaism has been through a modern experience before Protestantism and the results of our investment in secular Zionist ideology, humanist modern Hebrew literature, ethical culture, and salvation by socialism can well indicate the ultimate sterility of this line of thought.

These need to be grounded in something transcending man himself. So somewhere at the core of his being, each man must make up his mind as to whether there is meaning and hope for life or not. Intellectuality alone cannot resolve so existential an issue, though reasoning may open one to decision. What is ultimately required is faith. I have profound respect for those men who deny general meaning yet in the face of the plague manage to commit their lives to the decency of fighting it.

I also believe a great many men live in faith but do not wish to acknowledge it. Which means that the truly central religious issue is getting people to see the question and make their choice.

Most of us prefer the modern style of building a worthy life by chasing diversion to avoid decision. The agnostic who glories in the righteousness of his indecision either hides from the faith he has or, in fact, has committed himself to a life of absurdity. The agnostic, and not the atheist, is the real hollow man. What Judaism can contribute to the world is not, then, an idea or a concept—how strange such German idealistic philosophical constructions begin to sound!

What Judaism can uniquely give the world is Jews, men, and equally important, communities that live by their social, messianic hope and try to effectuate them in day-to-day reality. That does not mean all Jews are noble or even that individual Jews are faithful all the time one of the many things the Bible is quite frank about. What it does mean is that when this people is faithful to its God and its tradition, it produces an astonishingly high proportion of men and communities whose sense of interhuman responsibility is as great as anything mankind has ever known.

No other human institution has yet shown the capability that Judaism has of transforming a statistically large number of individuals into socially motivated persons and groups.

More important, Judaism has given Jews such a fundamental sense of the importance of the communal, linked to the human, linked to the personal, that the social concern has not vanished from among them even under the most trying circumstances, persecution and affluence alike.

Believing in the same righteous God of history the two faiths will often agree or act similarly as they face issues which their religious affirmations reveal as universally human.

Still, if providing a foundation for personal and social value is the main virtue of religion today as seen from outside the circle of faith, then it is not the occasional identity of moral action but the question of its source which should most concern us.

Here there is a subtle but substantial difference between the two faiths. Partially it is the old issue of primacy for faith or works, and while that is in part a false distinction, the weighting of the response is decisive for determining the essential character of the ensuing life of faith.

The responsible act remains critical as long as their Jewishness does not die. The nature of the hope is likewise significantly different.

Where Judaism knows Exodus, Christianity has Easter. To my Jewish eyes, though Christianity affirms that God has acted for man in history, the hope He has given through the resurrection is that men can rise out of history. The halakha gives dignity to each act now, no matter how long the Messiah may tarry; despite years of study, I have never been able to understand what significance there can be in Christianity to the acts done in the increasingly long interval between the first and the second coming.

The distinctive mood, then, of the Jewish religion is, of all things, hope. It is obviously not a simple trust that God will literally not suffer us to stumble.

Egypt was our house of bondage for four centuries before it was the place of Exodus. And before Auschwitz and Treblinka, there was Assyrian genocide, Roman savagery, Crusader zeal, and Cossack brutality. Jewish hope is not to be dissociated from Jewish suffering. It is born in Jewish pain; that is why Jews have known how, religiously, to sigh—the impossible equivalent in a tranquil English to what the Yiddish feels as krechtz.

If one may say so, it is almost as if Judaism is not surprised when men are beasts. The Evil Desire precedes the Good by thirteen years according to tradition, and the non-Jewish world does not have the benefit of Torah with which to subdue it. Sodom and Gomorrah remain contemporary, a lesson we had forgotten.

The story of the survival of this improbable people is its chief testimony. The Jews have known not one but many Exoduses. All of them have been, if history has laws or repetitive patterns, miracles. Just by being here, then, the Jewish people is an evidence of hope. And when the Jewish people is faithful in practice to the God it knows has kept it alive despite the mammoth historical forces arrayed against it, it is an active force for hope. Somehow the Jews know this, even today.

Without anyone having to remind them of their pledged responsibility, against the reality of what they themselves had experienced of what it might mean to be a Jew, they rose up out of their concentration camps and, lehavdil , American apathy, to refuse Hitler his final victory.

They insisted on continuing as Jews. That makes no sense. It happened. So, again, goes Jewish history, literally incredible, yet the real record of God and men shaping history.

Some will say this is a harsh, even cruel hope. It does not promise much to the individual Jew or any given Jewish community, certainly not ease and security. What they do not complete, they know the Jewish people will stubbornly work out.

And though the Jewish people falter, God will see it through history, as tough and punishing a course as that may be. He has done so until now. He does so today. He will continue to do so until the Messiah comes. Yet it is the most precious thing a man or mankind itself could have in this troubled age. It is hope, realistic without being pessimistic, positive but not naive. The issue cannot be the commandments. The question of Jewish practice in a time of radical social dislocation is more usefully one of the respective roles of God and man in revelation.

If only man creates—then, like a diet, the laws are too easily changed and the values tend to disappear. Neither the older orthodoxy nor the older liberalism will do.

My understanding of revelation involves both man and God actively. Its best analogy is human relationship. The intense personal reality of a relationship demands that we express and fulfill it in action, but the person who knows this must find which acts will be appropriate to the relationship.

Thus man fills in the content of the law—that is his honorable role—but he does so in response to the living presence of God who is the source and the criterion of the appropriateness of his action. In the case of the Jew, because the covenant relationship is historic and communal, the decision cannot be made in terms of what is purely personal and momentary. Tradition will play as much of a role as innovation. We stand in a curious post-halakhic, pre-halakhic stage. Some seem to my liberal mind presently inappropriate to the reality of the relationship as best we know it.

Yet, as a nucleus, perhaps a decisive one, of American Jews comes more and more to believe and practice, a new, general, community-wide standard of Jewish observance may well emerge if the social milieu does not once again drastically change. Rashi's words are usually rendered in a special font known as Rashi script and always appear on the inside margin of the page. The rest of the Talmudic page is taken up with commentaries by other rabbis from the 10th Century onwards.

One section - the Tosafot, or "additions" - deals with difficult passages and apparent contradictions in the Talmud. Another section provides cross references to identical passages elsewhere in the work, and another directs the reader to rulings in medieval Jewish law that relate to that section of the Mishnah 1 and Gemara 2.

There is also room for modern explanations and glosses on the language. The Talmud comprises six orders, which deal with every aspect of life and religious observance. It is further divided into 63 parts, or tractates, which are broken down into chapters. This particular page is the first chapter of the first tractate in the Talmud, named Berakhot or "Blessings". It is page two of the Talmud - the first page after the title page.

In fact, it is referred to as 2a - the facing page will be 2b. Chapter names are taken from the first word of the Mishnah 1 , which is also shown in large font in an illustrated box.

In this case the word is mei'mata or "From when" — the complete first line of this first chapter of the Talmud is "From when should we recite the Shema 'Hear O Israel in the evening time?

Going through the text a page a day, the book takes seven-and-a-half years to complete - a moment that is eagerly anticipated and celebrated with an event called Siyum Hashas. Attendance levels at Siyum Hashas events illustrate the Talmud's growing popularity.

In , the completion of the seventh cycle was marked by an event in New York's Manhattan Center with 5, attendees. In , some 20, people in the US took part in the event and in , at the completion of the 12th cycle, all 90, seats at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey sold out for the event. And with each daf yomi cycle, the Talmud gets more accessible.

Modern students can avail themselves of podcasts and round-robin emails from top scholars, and discuss difficult passages in online chat-rooms. A big moment came in , with the publication of the first complete English-language edition of the work for more than 50 years, the Schottenstein edition.

But there is no need to lug a giant volume around with you - the publisher, ArtScroll, is one of a number of organisations to have launched a Talmud app. Since its launch last year, users have made around 15 million downloads, mostly of entire Talmudic volumes, Mayer Pasternak, director of Artscroll's Digital Talmud, told the BBC. To put that in perspective, the Jewish world population is thought to be a little under 14 million.

Pasternak says the Talmud is peculiarly suited to a digital treatment. We have about a million links in the digital app and we have a team of scholars putting the links in. He adds that a social shift is under way. For many Orthodox Jews, Talmudic study by women is seen as at best unnecessary and at worst, highly undesirable. Gila Fine, editor-in-chief of religious publisher Maggid Books in Jerusalem, recalls that in her Orthodox school girls were not taught the Talmud.

I could never win an argument ever, because it stopped beyond the covers of this book, which I could not enter. When she was 17, she secretly pulled a volume of Talmud down from her father's shelf, but was too scared to open it. It was only later on, when Fine was at a progressive women's seminary, that she read the book properly. She was profoundly disappointed. Unlike the lofty, magisterial prose of the Torah, she found the Talmud to have "all the imperfections, the trivialities, the multiplicity of voices, the wild associations - everything that characterises human conversation.

But Fine eventually fell in love with the book and is now overseeing the publication of a new edition. She relates in particular to the Aggadah, the folkloric stories in the Talmud, which rub shoulders with the dense, legalistic Halakha text, and seem sometimes to subvert it. It was just such a story that was read out in the Israeli parliament in February this year.

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