Will Success Spoil the Talmud?
GREEN, WILLIAM SCOTT
Will Success Spoil the Talmud? WILLIAM SCOTT GREEN When Andy Warhol predicted that eventually everyone would go on television and be famous for 15 minutes, he probably wasn't talking about the...
...They used it for individual tractates of the Talmud and scripture...
...To be sure, this trait does not diminish the accuracy of the translation, but it is a surprising absence from a book that aims to change people's lives...
...Adopting this pattern, Steinsaltz plans to translate into Hebrew only the Yerushalmi tractates that have no Babylonian Gemara...
...The notes also summarize the very technical halachic discussions in the Palestinian Talmud and several later commentaries about the circumstances in which, and the objects to which, the principle of "four cubits" applies...
...It is no condemnation to observe that the Talmud's discourse is parochial and restricted...
...It is a certain * 7 Days, December 27, 1989, p. 26...
...When people say "the Talmud," they mean the Bavli...
...Its influence on Jews as a whole was mediated through halachic codes, such as the Shulchan Aruch, and the rulings of rabbis, not through direct and searching study of the text by the masses...
...The two Random House volumes are English translations of the Hebrew edition, designed, copy edited, and produced as camera-ready copy in Israel by a 15-member staff of Steinsaltz's co-workers, headed by Rabbi Israel Berman...
...It makes one curious to know about the Talmud's impact on the lives of Osnos and other Jewish Random House staffers...
...In Judaism, expertise in Talmud was and is perhaps the most celebrated intellectual achievement and the mark of religious authority...
...For Steinsaltz and his followers, the Talmud is no spade to dig with...
...According to his aide at the Aleph Society, "Every word is his...
...Lest we doubt the intention here, Peter Osnos, the Random House editor who sponsored the Steinsaltz project, said the publisher hoped that the Talmud "will become a much larger factor in people's lives...
...As a result, Random House has expanded its plans for additional volumes...
...No one else claims to own it or to understand it better than we do...
...For newcomers this chapter will be a challenge because it is fairly abstract and consists mostly of halachic argumentation...
...Long on the "What...
...December 21, pp...
...He has supplied the Hebrew and Aramaic text with the normally missing vowels and punctuation marks...
...According to Mary Beth Murphy, a Random House publicist, by the end of February the first printing of 20,000 copies for each volume had sold out, and a second printing of 10,000 copies of each volume had been ordered...
...Baltimore Jewish Times, December 15, 1989, p. 65...
...In so doing, it clarifies the boundaries of talmudic discourse but does not transcend them...
...Although Talmud study was the essence of rabbinic piety, although Talmud has been the obsessive focus—even at the Bible's expense— of every system of traditional Jewish education, and although large numbers of Jewish males once were exposed to the Talmud during their primary and secondary education, most Jews never made the Talmud their own...
...His profound faith in the power of the Talmud to transform the Jewish people is poignant, if arresting...
...In a different area, the Steinsaltz Talmud also pays curiously litde attention to the Talmud's aesthetic dimension, the frequent elegance of talmudic argument, which is part of the pleasure of studying it...
...It makes it, at least, intellectually respectable...
...Unlike Random House, which Adin Steinsaltz, Talmud translator and commentator...
...by the patriarch Judah haNasi, known familiarly as Rabbi...
...they can consult the more comprehensive dictionaries or Hebrew glossaries of rabbinic terms...
...7 Days, December 27,1989, p. 28...
...Initially, the publisher committed itself only to one more volume, sometime in 1990 or 1991...
...The long-term market for the Talmud remains to be seen...
...Although Murphy says the "entire project is under contract," she would not confirm that Random House will publish more than two additional volumes...
...continued from page 27 literature...
...The Steinsaltz Talmud admirably and lucidly explains the Talmud's contents...
...Likewise, the overly brief, sketchy—and utterly traditional—picture of talmudic history and society supplied by the Reference Guide obscures the similarities and differences between the rabbis' circumstances and ours...
...Steinsaltz has made a career of popularizing biblical stories, rabbinic texts, cabalistic thought and chasidic philosophy to win Jews back to Judaism...
...it is used by rabbinical courts (most notably in questions of personal status for women...
...In another step toward that end, Steinsaltz plans to publish five volumes of a Russian translation of the Talmud, sponsored by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, by 1993...
...Though much of the Mishnah is anonymousr—so that the document often seems to speak for itself—it also contains opinions and disputes reported in the names of various rabbis, called tannaim, who lived before 200 C.E...
...It makes it something...you are really proud of...
...Jacob Neusner has shown, for example, that the Babylonian Talmud uniquely organizes discussion around both the Bible and the Mishnah and thus, unlike the Yerushalmi, contains substantial and systematic biblical interpretation as well as halachic debate...
...It is a text that offers no easy access to itself and no shortcuts to its wisdom...
...H owever profitable it may be for Random House and however it may enhance Rabbi Steinsaltz's popularity, is the publication of the Steinsaltz Talmud an event of religious or cultural significance for American Jews...
...The publishers of the American volumes even accept donations...
...With a $200,000 subsidy, Random House stands to make a bundle...
...Despite the Talmud's undeniable importance in Judaism, it never became a popular text...
...Study it...
...And there will be complaints about vocalization, halachic interpretations and other such issues...
...He claims that Jewish communities that have lost touch with the Talmud have 24 moment • JUNE 1990 disappeared quickly.* He told the Washington Jewish Week** that there is no cultural literacy for a Jew without his being able to have some Talmud....The Talmud is such a major component of our own culture, our behavior, our character...
...Agnon's modern Hebrew...
...it clearly is regarded as part of the nation's cultural heritage...
...Although its production required the most contemporary and sophisticated computer technology, in essential respects the Steinsaltz Talmud is a pre-modern work...
...Beneath that is a section called Halachah, which cites passages from various codes that drew halachic conclusions from the text under study...
...One wonders if commercial interests have not outweighed Rabbi Steinsaltz's more spiritual ones...
...The Mishnah is a philosophical legal treatise written in Hebrew and edited in Palestine about 200 C.E...
...After the initial season of Steinsaltz synagogue study groups winds down, after the novelty of the Talmud on television dissipates, will textual clarity be enough to turn the mass of American Jews into long-term Talmud students...
...Translation and Commentary of the Same Mishnah Passage If a person saw a lost object and threw himself on it with the intention of acquiring it, but did not perform the formal act of acquisition, he did not acquire it...
...One wonders which "original language" of Judaism Wieseltier means...
...Although it is not a sacred object like the Torah scroll, in Jewish culture the Talmud has been and still is the genuine article: It represents and embodies Jewish authenticity...
...One volume, in Hebrew, is already in print...
...Philo's Greek or Maimonides' Arabic...
...Of 40 projected volumes, 21 are now in print...
...The idea that merely buying a book—that owning an unused, unread book—can "change the world" is magical thinking...
...WILLIAM SCOTT GREEN When Andy Warhol predicted that eventually everyone would go on television and be famous for 15 minutes, he probably wasn't talking about the Talmud...
...Bomberg's pagination has been accepted ever since...
...He told reporter Russell Miller* that having Random House, as opposed to a Jewish publisher, produce the books "changes, somehow, the connotation of the word Talmud...
...Even a Jew if he doesn't study the book—if he buys it and places it on his shelf—that is a statement that there is a connection arid he wants one...
...We really should stop promulgating this caricature of the Jews and the Talmud...
...Rosenzweig's German or Heschel's "Yiddish and English...
...Those with enough Hebrew to use the Reference Guide probably don't need it...
...Now, Murphy says, Random House will bring out two more volumes of the Talmud, to complete tractate Bava Metzia, in the Fall of 1990...
...For religious reasons, Rabbi Steinsaltz looks for continuities, not disjunctures, between the Talmud and the present...
...That answer is Talmud, a very important ingredient of Talmudic discussion...
...To convert the Jews, he goes for the head, not the heart...
...Contrary to a widespread misconception, the Mishnah is not an interpretation of the Bible, which it rarely cites...
...These terms are nicely explained in English, but in each glossary the terms are listed alphabetically in Hebrew letters—according to the Hebrew alphabet...
...On this the Gemara asks: What is the reason that a person's four cubits are effective in acquiring property on his behalf, even though they are not, in fact, his courtyard...
...Getting good at the Talmud takes diligence, patience, acumen and time...
...To see how the literal translation and translation and commentary work together, let us look at an example, Bava Metzia 10a (Steinsaltz, pp...
...Bava Metzia has 10 chapters...
...Making the Talmud clear is not the same as making it interesting, or making it compelling, or making it fun...
...this will reduce guesswork and errors in reading...
...It is what I call, so to say, legitimization...
...ingredient that is beyond religion, beyond culture....People ask, "Why do the Jews always answer a question with a question...
...The fact that something is possible, that there is a book you can read, can change the world...
...Can these books affect Jews as Rabbi Steinsaltz hopes they will...
...In addition, 40Q purchasers (300 in the first three weeks of sales) sent Random House a reply card, placed in each book, asking to be informed when future volumes are available...
...Its most important expositor is Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040-1105), whose comments are essential to understanding its meaning...
...expects financial profit from the books' sales, Steinsaltz and his coworkers assert that neither the Israeli nor American Talmud project is a commercial venture...
...In part for these reasons the Hebrew version of the Steinsaltz Talmud has sold nearly 75,000 individual volumes annually—more than one million in all—a bestseller...
...It is a text for the few, not the many...
...The Random House version, by contrast, seems designed for an upscale rather than a mass market...
...Finally, marginal notes identify the rabbis named in the text, supply realia, and explain various rhetorical formulations and talmudic concepts...
...To be sure, there are some infelicities in the English—which, we should recall, is a translation of a translation...
...That's a touching * Baltimore Jewish Times, December 15, 1989, p. 66...
...Ironically, the very clarity of the Steinsaltz translation shows why the Talmud is a poor text for evangelism...
...The document consists of two distinct parts—Mishnah and Gemara...
...The ancient sages produced two Talmuds (that is, two Gemaras), one in Palestine (called the Jerusalem or Palestinian Talmud, or Yerushalmi) around 400 C.E., the other in Babylonia (called the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli) around 600 C.E...
...But will it work...
...Treasure it...
...While the Hebrew edition is a modest production and looks like it's all business, the Random House version is ornate...
...For all its stunning erudition, there is something quaint, almost anachronistic, about the Steinsaltz Talmud...
...And Random House's Murphy says that future volumes—despite their $100,000 subsides—will be more cosdy still...
...Steinsaltz has preserved the standard design of the printed Talmud page, which places the text at the center and surrounds it with commentaries...
...The Yerushalmi is followed only where the Bavli is silent or does not contradict it...
...Unlike the Bible, the Talmud is wholly and exclusively Jewish...
...Guilt about learning in translation is one thing Jews need not have...
...According to an executive of the Aleph Society, a recently formed New York organization that represents Rabbi Steinsaltz's interests in North America, Random House has no editorial responsibility for the project...
...If you don't know it, you don't know yourself...
...The other English volume contains— from the order Nezikin ("Damages," civillaw)—the first chapter of the tractate Bava Metzia (The Middle Gate), which deals with the problem of conflicting claims to ownership of a found object...
...On the left side is a translation and commentary, an expanded translation based on Rashi's commentary, which spells out the text's unstated assumptions and fills the gaps in the literal translation...
...Rabbi Steinsaltz is not selling the Talmud as a reference book or an encyclopedia...
...Although both follow the oudine of the Mishnah, neither covers all of it...
...The copyright belongs to Steinsaltz's Israeli organization, the Israel Institute for Talmudic Publications...
...The Babylonian Talmud is the epitome of rabbinic Judaism, which dominated Jewish life and shaped the essential structures of piety from the seventh to the nineteenth century...
...Even so savvy a critic as Leon Wieseltier, literary editor for the New Republic, in his New York Times review of the Steinsaltz Talmud,* writes: " There is no more powerful sight in Judaism than a page of the Talmud...
...Rabbi Steinsaltz really does want Jews to learn Talmud, and his teaching strategy is to remove or reduce the external barriers to the text's intelligibility, to refuse to let the Talmud be obscure...
...For all its pedagogical sensitivity, it still turns inward, presenting the Talmud only in its own terms...
...In general, there is little to quarrel with in this edition of the Talmud and there is much to praise and admire...
...Rather, it is the first collection of the rabbis' own tradition and teaching, primarily on matters of halachah (religious law and pracrice...
...Sadly, even Rabbi Steinsaltz may not have been immune to the commercial pressures...
...A book that can * 7 Days, December 27, 1989, p. 27...
...He is a true talmudic evangelist...
...His edition presents the Talmud not in a scholarly way, as a historical text, but in a religious way, as a tradition...
...The Gemara answers that the Sages instituted this law concerning a person's four cubits so that people should not come to quarrel over the ownership of property they find...
...It's not the kind of book you want to write in, the way serious learners do...
...How much beyond the text itself is Steinsaltz's...
...He wants Jews who study it in translation to feel guilty because "Judaism is a portable religion and it travels best in the original language...
...the Steinsaltz Talmud is a better linguistic translation than a cultural one...
...First, there is the sheer erudition...
...He obviously believes that exposure to the fleshed-out workings of the talmudic tradition, especially to its intellectual challenges, can change the Jewish people...
...He told the Washington Jewish Week,** "Publicizing the Talmud is per se something...
...More than half of its 323 pages/ (pp...
...It takes a special teaching skill to anticipate a learner's need for information, to know which facts to supply and which to ignore, and to place the answer in the text just when the question is most likely to arise...
...For nearly nine centuries the Bavli has held pride of place as the authoritative rabbinic source on questions of religious practice...
...Because of the Bavli's preeminence, it has been at the center of yeshivah learning, and there is a considerable body of sustained and sophisticated commentary on it...
...Actually, the Soncinos, the great Jewish publishers of Hebrew books, first used this basic page design—with commentaries surrounding the island of text—in the 15th and early 16th centuries...
...The Palestinian Talmud treats 39 of the Mishnah's 63 tractates, the Babylonian 37...
...The Hebrew edition sells in the United States for around $20 per volume...
...Here there is room for some doubt...
...The suggested retail price, $40 per volume, is not cheap...
...But he has filled the page with what, for Talmud study in any language, are pedagogical novelties...
...Translation and Commentary of the Same Gemara Resh Lakish said in the name of Abba Kohen Bardela: A person's four cubits acquire ownerless property for him everywhere...
...The Reference Guide, one of the two handsome Random House volumes, is supposed to "facilitate the study of the Talmud, both for the beginner and the more advanced student...
...Unfortunately, it seems constructed to serve neither...
...To answer these questions we must be clear about what the Talmud is and what it is not...
...Like any evangelist, Steinsaltz does what is necessary to get his message across, even if that means reducing the Talmud to sound bites for television and newspapers...
...The Talmud is for specialists...
...Ordinary Jews rarely consulted the Talmud to find out what to do...
...Every rhetorical expression or halachic concept assVimes a realm of tacit knowledge that the Talmud never articulates—knowledge not only of scriptural "facts" and halachic "data" but, more important, of how those facts and data should interrelate to yield persuasive arguments and proofs...
...The teacher's zeal is palpable on every page of the Steinsaltz Talmud...
...Donors have subsidized both volumes...
...The commercialism of this project may have undercut Rabbi Steinsaltz's religious message by presenting the Talmud as a thing to own rather than a text to study and a tradition to be changed by...
...The Babylonian Talmud, the Bavli, the quintessential text of Jewish religion and culture, had its American mass media moment when the Israeli rabbi Adin Steinsaltz appeared on such programs as ABC's "Good Morning America," CBS News' "Nightwatch" and NPR's "All Things Considered...
...What is the reason...
...The rest of Wieseltier's description is equally sentimental and excessive...
...The media hype for the Talmud, timed to precede Chanukah, paid off...
...Second, there is the general reliability of the literal translation, which always lets you know when it is adding words the text does not contain...
...Unlike the Bible, the Talmud is a text Jews revere precisely because most of us will never master it...
...They are thus translations of translations...
...Random House seems to be banking on such romanticism about the Talmud—and the sense of Jewish inauthenticity this romanticism conveys— to sell the Steinsaltz volumes...
...Even if it were true, it wouldn't make Jews distinctive...
...Among American Jews, anxiety about authenticity, usually phrased in terms of "identity," is a nagging and unnerving preoccupation...
...Its large size, high-quality paper, elegant printing, satin bookmark and lush, multicolored cover make it more appropriate for the coffee table than the library—a book for show rather than study...
...While Random House pitched the Talmud by evoking American Jews' romantic—and parochial—sentimentality about a text most of us never knew, Rabbi Steinsaltz sought to sell it by appealing to what he sees as an American Jewish sense of cultural inadequacy about the Talmud itself...
...Rabbi Steinsaltz uses Random House to display the Talmud in the aura of cosmopolitan high culture—precisely what the Random House ads deny it has...
...of the Talmud, but short on the "So What...
...The Random House investment in them was supplemented by a $100,000 subsidy for each book, paid to Steinsaltz's organization, which entitled the donor to control the book's dedication...
...For all its completeness, the Steinsaltz Talmud does not display the Talmud's potential contemporaneity...
...But last December that is just what happened...
...Literal Translation of the Accompanying Gemara Resh Lakish said in the name of Abba Kohen Bardela: A person's four cubits acquire for him everywhere...
...The terms are translated but not transliterated: If you can't read Hebrew, you will be lost (though the index, in English, may help...
...Faultfinders will scour the Steinsaltz Talmud for grist, but they won't find much...
...He succeeds to an impressive degree...
...The Christian publisher, Daniel Bomberg, made it into the standard form for the printed Talmud when he printed the first edition of the entire Talmud (Venice, 1520-1523...
...It daunts, teaches, scolds, tempts, pleases, defeats...
...89275) are devoted to four glossaries of technical terms—Mishnaic Methodology, Talmudic Terminology, Talmudic Hermeneutics and Halachic Concepts and Terms— used in the Talmud and rabbinic continued on page 54 * Reference Guide, p. vii...
...Gemara (sometimes also called Talmud as distinct from the usage of Talmud that embraces the Mishnah as well) is the commentary on the Mishnah, written mostly in Aramaic, produced by rabbis called amoraim, who succeeded the tannaim...
...Steinsaltz regards the Talmud as essential to Jewish survival, both physical and cultural...
...The Steinsaltz Talmud makes the Babylonian Talmud accessible largely by making it clear...
...The Jew asks, "Why not...
...Steinsaltz might better have begun his English Talmud with a more user-friendly tractate, such as Berachot ("Blessings"), which contains much aggadah (rabbinic narratives about biblical or rabbinic figures), in contrast to halachah...
...So it's a little deceptive * Jacob Neusner, Judaism: The Classical Statement...
...sentiment...
...Because of the insularity of the Talmud's discourse and the peculiar complexity of its arguments—to say nothing of its size— even basic competence in it demands very hard work...
...But in terms of selling books, it is very good economics...
...December 21, 1989, p. 26...
...That judgment is no condemnation...
...Perhaps, as a Steinsaltz aide suggested, Bava Metzia was chosen as the first volume because in places it deals with business ethics and might be considered a practical beginning.* Sometimes students do start their study of Talmud with Bava Metzia, but they generally start with the second or third, not the first chapter which is Volume I in the Steinsaltz Talmud...
...As with so much else in Jewish culture, to deal with the gap between our great esteem for, and our minimal knowledge of, the Talmud, we tend to romanticize it and over-venerate it...
...of Chicago, 1986), p. 240...
...The irony here is strong...
...A person acquires any ownerless property that is within a four cubit radius of him, because this area is considered as if it were his private "courtyard," and it acquires ownerless property on his behalf as his own courtyard would...
...In Israel the Talmud is studied even in secular schools...
...27, 37...
...113-114): Literal Translation of a Mishnah Passage [If a person] saw the found object and fell on it, and another person came and seized it, the one who seized it has acquired it...
...Despite extensive overlap, each Talmud supplies Gemara to tractates that the other does not...
...Will access to a clear, detailed, multigenerational rabbinic discussion of how "four cubits acquire for a person everywhere" draw American Jews to Judaism, make them (more) religious...
...It is written in a scholastic shorthand that presupposes not only extensive knowledge of the Bible and rabbinic tradition, but also codes for interpretation...
...Third, there is the pedagogical astuteness of the enterprise...
...In the bottom register of the page are notes that offer a precis of selected comments and observations of post-talmudic commentators...
...In terms of Rabbi Steinsaltz's larger message about Judaism and the Talmud, it is bad religion...
...In the development of Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud completely eclipsed its Palestinian counterpart...
...For example, the commentary does not suggest what in our world is comparable to the Gemara's "four cubits" so that we can grasp what is and—equally important—what is not at stake, for the rabbis who wrote the Talmud and for us, in the Talmud's discussion...
...And it is the sight of tradition itself...
...His appearances last winter—in the press, on television and radio and before lay groups— were part of a promotional campaign by his publisher, Random House, on behalf of the first two volumes of his English version of the Babylonian Talmud {The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, Volume I: Tractate Bava Metzia, Part I [Random House, 1989] and The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, A Reference Guide [Random House, 1989...
...Steinsaltz knows the talmudic and halachic traditions very well, and he has deployed that knowledge with judicious skill...
...If there is a central visual image in Judaism, it most likely is the seferTorah, the Torah scroll itself, unfurled in front of the congregation after being read...
...Wieseltier's romanticism about the Talmud even includes an anxiety about translation...
...The Mishnah is divided into six large sections or orders—Zeraim ("seeds," agriculture), Mo'ed ("appointed time," festival), Nashim ("women," marriage and family law), Nezikin ("damages," civil law), Kodashim ("holy things," the rules of the Temple cult) and Toharot ("purities," uncleanness taboos)—that together contain 63 tractates...
...The Talmud is challenging, not defeating...
...As you never could before...
...The Evidence of the Bavli (Chicago: Univ...
...Wieseltier is talking about the page design of the printed Talmud, which * "Unlocking the Rabbi's Secrets," December 17, 1989, p. 3. he credits to the Romm family ("the widow Romm and the brothers Romm"), whose press published what has become the standard printed edition of the Talmud in Vilna (the "Vilna Shas") from 1880-1886...
...It is a slap in the face of slovenliness and superficiality...
...The notes explain that "a person's four cubits" means "the immediate area of which a person disposes" and that Abba Kohen Bardela—identified in a note in the page's upper left corner— innovates when he claims that the "four cubits" can effect acquisition of ownerless property...
...Beneath the literal translation is Rashi's commentary, produced in the Hebrew typeface known as Rashi script, but here punctuated...
...Therefore, if another person came and seized it, the person who seized it acquired it, because the object was still considered ownerless and the second person's action was a valid mode of acquisition...
...The Bavli's Gemara is better edited, more elaborate and more comprehensive than the Yerushalmi's...
...The Sages instituted [this] so that [people] should not come to quarrel...
...To suggest that the Soncinos' page layout is the most powerful visual image in the Jewish religion is an exaggeration that misrepresents the Talmud and pushes Judaism all out of shape...
...After all, such analogies are the primary means by which we get into an unfamiliar text and the text gets into us...
...On the upper right of each page is a literal translation, which stays close to the original and adds almost nothing...
...That's as far as the commitment goes, however...
...The Hebrew of the Bible or the Hebrew of the Mishnah...
...These volumes initially appeared in Israel in 1988 as part of Steinsaltz's best-known project, the translation of the Talmud into modern Hebrew...
...Its role is limited to manufacture, publication and marketing...
...Its ads for the two-book set were aimed not at the general reading public but only at the Jews: "Read it...
...to say, as Rabbi Steinsaltz does, that Jews learned from the Talmud "always" to answer a question with a question...
...Rather, making the Talmud accessible to all Jews appears to be the linchpin in their evangelistic mission to reengage Jews with their religious heritage, to make Jews more Jewish...
...Can the Steinsaltz Talmud alter this historical pattern and make the Talmud a text for the many...
...be read, can be studied, even when it is not, makes a change...
...Despite the Talmud's undeniable importance in shaping the life of piety and intellect in Judaism, it never became a popular text...
...You can say the same of Socrates...
...The Steinsaltz Talmud evokes or demands few analogies with the present...
...The Steinsaltz Talmud is unique among translations of the Talmud in any language because it systematically brings the reader both to the Talmud itself and to the text's cultural afterlife in commentaries and codes...
...However accurate such criticisms might be, they will not tarnish the overall achievement of the work...
...The consequence, Neusner writes, is that "the Bavli would serve...as both an encyclopedia of knowledge and a summa of the theology and law of Judaism...
Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3
