Hi friends, and welcome to Talmud Daily. I am so excited to give a tour of the entirety of the Talmud, just ten minutes a day.
Today I want to introduce three important terms that are all going to be absolutely crucial for our Talmud journey. And those three terms, and of course we’re going to break down each of them, are Tanakh, Torah Shebiksav, and Torah Sheba’al Peh.
Let’s break down these three terms. The first term that we said is Tanakh. Tanakh is an acronym. It is made of the three Hebrew letters, tav, nun, and chaf, and it stands for Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim.
Torah refers to the five books of Moshe, of Moses. That is the book of Genesis, the book of Exodus, the book of Leviticus, the book of wanderings, Bamidbar, and the book of Deuteronomy, known as Devarim. That is the “ta” in Tanakh, and then Nevi’im and Ketuvim, the “nakh” part, is the collection of the prophets, that’s Nevi’im, which means prophets. And Ketuvim are the scriptures, like Psalms and Proverbs.
Tanakh is the corpus of what we call the Written Torah. Written Torah literally in Hebrew is Torah Shebiksav, the Torah of the text. When we talk about an immutable text—one that we do not change, we do not trifle with, we do not make additions or subtractions to—we are referring to the text of the Torah and more largely the book of Tanakh. The collection of Tanakh, all of the books of Tanakh, which again is Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim.
Now, we have another set of terms that I think is really important, and this is where things can sometimes get confusing. We have a term called Torah Shebiksav, the Written Torah, and we might use that term to refer to a verse, most likely in the Torah, in the Five Books of Moshe. But we may also use that term in the Written Torah to find an allusion for a law in the Prophets, in scripture, in Psalms, anywhere within these three collections known as Tanakh.
But that gets us to the third term, Torah Sheba’al Peh, the oral tradition. Now, the oral tradition, we believe, is something that we got originally at Sinai. But it doesn’t mean that we got everything at Sinai. It doesn’t mean that the words of every Mishnah and every Gemara were literally dictated to the Jewish people. We got the main principles at Sinai, and the concept of an oral tradition has always existed with the Jewish people from our inception.
What we really got at Sinai was the sense that the Torah is not meant to exist exclusively on the page, but there’s always a secondary tradition, what I would like to call the lived tradition of Yiddishkeit, of Judaism and Jewish life. This is what we call Torah Sheba’al Peh, which is the Torah of the Ba’al Peh, of the speaker.
Now really the main distinction between Torah Shebiksav and Torah Sheba’al Peh is orality versus writing. And that can get confusing because so many of the works that we include in Torah Sheba’al Peh have already been written down.
What are the classic works of Torah Sheba’al Peh? I will name a few. The most classic work of Torah Sheba’al Peh is the Mishnah. The Mishnah is the very short basic rulings that start with the beginning— the Talmud is all worked around the collection of the Mishnah—and the Mishnah was preserved, at least initially, orally. You can actually see this when you sometimes read the Mishnah. You will notice there are a lot of rhyming couplets in the Mishnah.
The Mishnah actually was originally written down to be remembered as a song. That’s originally how it was preserved. Even before it was written down, it would be preserved orally through speaking and literally they would sing the words. There are people now who still have made tunes to the Mishnah as a way to remember it. They were deliberately the lyrics, so to speak, of Torah Sheba’al Peh, of the Oral Law.
The Talmud comes a little bit later. The Mishnahwas written in the year 200 CE by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. The Talmud comes significantly later. We’ll do a deeper dive into the history of the Talmud, but the Talmud begins to emerge in the fifth and sixth century but is really only committed to writing much more later on, probably in the eighth or ninth century, and we will talk a little bit more about that.
But I think it’s really important to understand this distinction. At the heart of Judaism, and the heart of the way Jewish wisdom has been preserved, there’s always a written tradition and there is an oral tradition. This goes to the very heart of how Jewish life, Jewish commitment, is preserved and handed down. Even now that the Talmud and the Mishnah have all been written, we still have a Torah Sheba’al Peh, we still have an oral tradition. What’s that oral tradition? It may not be the words of the Talmud; that we have written. It certainly is not the words of the Mishnah; that has also been written and published.
What is the oral, the ongoing oral tradition? That is actually how to live and bring Judaism into your life. How do you keep Shabbos? You could read as many books about Shabbos as you want. You are not going to be able to appreciate the actual oral tradition that Shabbos is, of what a home feels like on Shabbos, without, so to speak, the Torah Sheba’al Peh, the oral tradition, the lived experience and tradition of Judaism.
So even once everything has been written down, even once we so to speak have a Torah Shebiksav, a Written Torah, that includes even the Mishnah and the Talmud and so many of the commentaries, there always exists an oral tradition. The oral tradition is how we keep Shabbos, how do we pray, how do we make blessings. This is the tradition that’s handed down in stories, through commitment, by looking at how people live their lives. And I think that this distinction between a Written Torah and an Oral Torah is foundational to what Jewish life, Jewish thought, and Jewish commitment is all about, and we’re going to talk about this dichotomy in upcoming episodes in our introduction.
So thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily, and let’s keep making Torah sweet.