Shalom! I am Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg of the Ezra-Habonim, Niles Township Jewish Congregation in Skokie. This brief video is an introduction to the Mishna, The Gomorrah and the Talmud.
The Mishna, according to traditional Judaism, is a copulation, a text composed of sixty three track tapes or units divided into six sections, so these six saders have a total of sixty three track tapes, about ten per sader. And the deal with the whole variety of issues of religious life and of criminal and civil life, all of the ideas of God expressed in the tradition. Well, the Torah is the basic document of religion. It teaches the laws and commandments incumbent about Jews and non Jews alike, some for non Jews and most for Jews.
But the Torah itself is not a guide that you can completely live by because it needs further explanation. For example, to help the poor, it says you should give them the corners of your field, does not say how big. To slaughter an animal for proper eating it says, you shall slaughter it in the way I have told you, but how? It says you should not cook a kid in the mother’s milk, does that mean that you should not cook a particular kid in the mother’s milk, or generically prohibit meat and milk? It says you should not work on the Sabbath day and gives you some of the roles, but not all and it needs further elaboration.
So obviously, there have to an oral tradition to accompany in the text. Orthodox Jews believe that God said this to Moses, other Jews believe that this was developed over to many centuries to help explicate and explain and elaborate on the Torah.
The Mishna is really the basis of all that we hold dear in Western civilization. It gives you the basis of civil law, a criminal law, so many the basic issues of what happened when you have an accident that claimed, a counter claimed, witnesses, a crime, that is the Mishna. It is written in beautiful Hebrew. It was finally edited and compiled and written down in the year 220 of the Kamanira by a great rabbi named rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, Judah the prince, in order to preserve it.
Now this Mishna was discussed, both in Israel and in Babylonia, where the Jews were living and it text in Aramaic which is now called the Gomorra. The bad conversation went on for hundreds of years, in both communities, to help elaborate and clarify the Mishna. The Gomorrah explanation, with the Mishna together is called the Talmud. It is a subject and a text that is read everyday by hundreds of thousands of Jews; in fact there are many Jews that study a page a day. It is clearly the most important document that has preserved Judaism, besides the Hebrew bible, well worth studying. It is available in English, the Mishna independently and the Talmud together, in many varieties, with commentaries and explanation, but certainly something worth knowing.
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