In “the sea of the Talmud” (as it is called by some) all can be found:
Farfetched and very abstract legal forms of thought, lively, fanciful fables, advice about commerce and agriculture, medical treatments, popular proverbs.
There is not — even in the most legal or circumlocutionary pages — a dry or “nonhuman” paragraph in the Talmud.
The personalities there are always human, people of whose lives we know the most intimate and prosaic details.
We know about their quarrels and sins as we know about their great qualities, and they are so close to us because they were fully men, because the Talmud is a human book.
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From the essay "Human Holiness" by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
