"What significance is there to the study of Talmud?"

The indirect influence of the Talmud on the world, through many religious and secular channels in every area, is great.

But its direct influence on the Jewish people goes far from law or religion.

This difficult book is both a textbook which children began to learn at school age, and a book which the greatest scholars continued to study and develop throughout their lives.

This collective work reflects about a thousand years of creativity (from approx. 500 BCE until 500 CE).

It is, on the one hand, the reflection of the Jewish spirit.

And on the other it is, perhaps, the most decisive formative force in Jewish culture and of the Jewish people, forming life-style and character traits...

...What significance is there to the study of Talmud – a book which is not as poetic as a book of verse, not as gripping as a detective novel, and which does not contain facts like an encyclopedia?

It should be perceived as engaging in creating a complex system of thought and art, a super computer program that tries to depict the whole world, the engagement in which is never passive learning but rather active participation, in which every learner is, to an extent, an independent creator who continues the book in his own way.

The Talmud, our Sages say, has never been sealed.

It continues to be written in every generation by every single person who learns it.

To enter into it is to participate in a spiritual adventure in which the Jew travels through the collective soul of his people, and in which he discovers some of the inner plans of reality.

--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

Excerpted from an essay titled "The Talmud" by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

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"Why does God want us to study?"

"Observant Jews are obligated to be involved in studying Torah simply to study Torah.

As a religious activity, this is unusual.

Most religions have expectations about belief and about doing the right things, but they don’t obligate you to study.

Jews, however, study Torah as an independent activity that is not directly connected with belief or action.

In fact, the most studied books in Jewish life, like the Talmud, are books that have very little practical use.

So why are people studying the laws of things that happened in remote times – and were rare even then – or things that the Talmud says never happened and never will happen?

We devote time to it because what we are doing is going after knowledge for itself, not as something that is to be used.

Not everyone has the same level of active curiosity, but study is encouraged and done as an obligation.

The number of classes and lectures available in an observant Jewish community cannot be compared to anything that happens in any other place.

Why does God want us to study?

Theologically, it is a way to commune with Him.

The ability to study for the sake of study is what I call one of the very true human traits in which we are, in a certain way, higher than angels.

The angels don’t seem to have any curiosity; they know everything.

And animals learn only what they need to live.

So the only beings who are curious about anything are people."

--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From the essay "Curious Jews" by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

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"God, how shall I know that you are speaking to me?"

"The Divine problem is to call.

The human problem is to know who is calling.

You find it throughout the Bible and later, the constant question:

Whose voice is it?

Some people think that the mere fact of having a supernatural parapsychological experience is meaningful.

But such an experience is just that: a parapsychological experience, and that’s the end of it.

Merely hearing voices does not mean that one has heard the voice of God, and that is always the big temptation and the downfall of quite a number of people.

There are some who are cheats, meaning people who never had an experience, and are just imitating.

But there are many people who really heard something, and their very big mistake was that they didn’t identify the voice.

There is another biblical quotation:

When Gideon has his experience, he hears a voice and he says, “God, how shall I know that you are speaking to me?”

This is in many ways the most pertinent question.

“Give me a sign that it is You who are speaking to me” (Judges 6:17)."

--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From an interview in Parabola called "The Command to Hear"

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"Very few teachers have real knowledge"

"In Jerusalem, there is a teachers’ seminary that, in its first years, used to be a very good school.

The teachers in that seminary were some of the greatest scholars of Jerusalem at the time, and Jerusalem is a town with a fair amount of scholars.

Years later, I asked a number of the graduates of that school who was the person that made the greatest impact on them.

Interestingly enough, many of them said that it was the char lady – a little Yemenite woman with no formal education.

Whenever they had a real problem, they didn’t go to any of the teachers, nor to the principal: they went to this woman to get her advice.

Very few teachers have real knowledge.

In terms of knowledge, most teachers are not qualitatively different from their students, only quantitatively: small ignoramuses vs. bigger ignoramuses.

It is people like that char lady who are most needed in schools, because it is that kind of people who really matter.

You forget all the rest."

--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From an essay, "Character Education" by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

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"Where is the truth?"

"Some 150 years ago — this is a true story — a certain German prince wanted to know what the Talmud is.

He asked a certain rabbi to invite him to a yeshiva and teach him one page of Gemara.

Thus, for a few days this prince sat and studied the first page of Bava Kamma.

He found it very interesting and thought-provoking, but there was one thing that he could not understand.

At the very end of the page, it says that the problem they were dealing with throughout has no practical meaning whatsoever, that it is merely theoretical.

What is the point of such a book?

He asked, Who needs it?

I do not know what the rabbi’s reply to that prince was.

But if I were there, I would tell him that the main question of the Talmud is not “What do I need to do next?”

For that, there are other books.

When I want to know what steps I should take in order to cook a certain dish, I refer to the cookbook.

And in order to know what my next action should be, I open a book of halacha or any other sort of practical book.

But in the Talmud we have something that will not necessarily be of any tangible benefit to me today, tomorrow, or ever.

It is a value in its own right, something that gives me no respite.

For in the very final analysis, what I want to know is — Where is the truth?

And indeed, the central, all-encompassing question in the entire Talmud is, Where is the truth — as far as any human being can attain it."

--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From an lecture at a girl's school in Kiev by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

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"Lamenting our past wrongdoings will not serve us"

"The urge to repent grows out of the realization that it is necessary to change.

Lamenting our past wrongdoing will not serve us, for contact with evil is inescapable.

We must avoid, too, pondering the past and reliving it as it happened — complete with faults and mistakes.

Rather, we should meditate on it, as it ought to have been.

The main thrust of teshuva is not only to redeem, but to rebuild, the past."

--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From an essay title "Teshuva" by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

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"The Talmud is a human book"

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

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