Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily.
Today I want to talk about the structure of the overall Talmud, and in order to do so, we first have to talk about the Mishnah. There are six orders of the Mishnah. The Mishnah is the text that was written deliberately to be memorized. In fact, the very word Mishnah, which is a Hebrew word, comes from the word to repeat. Leshonen means to repeat over and over again. The Mishnah is very, very concise and was made deliberately to be memorized. So you’ll find a lot of times that it rhymes. You’ll find a lot of lists, like BuzzFeed lists, like these are the three exceptions, these are the four rules you have to know, etc., etc.
So the Mishnah is very, very concise and the Mishnah is a very clearly deliberately edited text that we know exactly who edited it, when it was edited. The Mishnah came together by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, who lived around the year 200 CE, let’s call it. And that’s when the Mishnah was fully redacted and put together as a clear text.
Now, the Talmud or as it’s called the Gemara, is meant as a commentary, a running commentary and an elaboration on the Mishnah because the Mishnah is so concise, meant literally to be memorized. There are people still to this day;I know somebody who can sing the Mishnah.I know people who put songs to the Mishnah. Shout out to the Mishnah Project.
But the Talmud, or as it’s called the Gemara, is not made to memorize literally the words, although there are certainly people who do memorize it. But that’s not how it was designed to be studied. The word Talmud is traditionally translated as Gemara. You will always hear people talk about, “Are you learning Gemara? “What Gemara are you learning?” Gemara and Talmud are synonymous. And the word Gemara comes from the root word of gamar, which means to complete. The Gemara is the completion, is the actualization, is the realization of all of the teachings of the Mishnah.
Now, the Mishnah is divided into six orders. Each order of the Mishnah is called a seder. So we have the Mishnah;it’s divided into six orders. You’re not really going to hear people in a traditional setting call them orders of the Mishnah. You’ll hear them call them the seders of the Mishnah, sedarim of the Mishnah, sidrei mishnah. In fact, the term that you will very often hear for the entire corpus of Mishnah and Talmud, everything together, is Shas. Shas is an acronym for Shisha Sedarim, which means the Six Orders.
Now, let’s go through each one.
The first order is about agricultural law and it is called Zeraim. Zeraim literally means zera, like seeds, like planting. So the first order is Zeraim. That’s all about agricultural law: how farming needs to be done, when you are allowed to farm, when you deliberately have to leave your land fallow.
The second seder of Mishnah, or order of Mishnah is Moed. Moed is a very easy one. Moed is all about the holidays including Shabbos, but Passover, Purim, Chol HaMoed, which is the intermediate days, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. Each of these holidays has their own tractate, or masechta. So for instance, we have a masechta that is called Rosh Hashanah. That’s all about the holiday of Rosh Hashanah. We have a tractate called Yoma. Yoma, meaning the day, is all about Yom Kippur. So the second order, the second seder of Mishnah is called Moed.
The third seder of Mishnah is called Nashim. Nashim in Hebrew literally means women. This is not just about women. It is really about family life, marriage, divorce, how to operate a Jewish wedding, how’s a Jewish divorce finally finalized, the notion of a ketubah, kesubah, which is the document, the financial commitment, that goes into any family.
The fourth is Nezikin. Nezikin is damages. Nezek literally means to damage somebody. And this is all like, I think the word is like tort law. Like what happens if I fender-bender somebody? How much do I owe them? What happens if somebody lends me a book and then I lose it, which is why I don’t lend books. But let’s say somebody lends me a book and I lose it. That is all described in the fourth order, or now we’re going to use the term seder, the fourth seder is all about Nezikin.
The fifth seder is called Kodashim. Kodashim, which comes from the word you may be familiar with meaning kadosh, is about holiness. Now, holiness is not just—there are a lot of ways to be holy. This is talking specifically about the holiness found in the temple, the Beit HaMikdash, what we call the temple in Jerusalem, which has been destroyed for the last two thousand years. But what happened in that temple? What would go on there? What were the sacrifices being brought? That is all discussed in the fifth seder, the fifth order of the Mishnah, and that is called Kodashim.
Then finally the sixth and last order of the Mishnah is Tahoros. Tahoros is all about the laws of purity and impurity. You’ll find the laws of what happens if you, God forbid, are in proximity of a dead body. There are also other laws that are still observed today like the laws of purity and impurity relating to Niddah, which is about menstruation, women’s menstrual cycle. So that is the final order of the Babylonian Talmud is actually the tractate known as Niddah.
Now I want to make something very clear. We went through the six orders of the Mishnah. How the Mishnah is organized What we call the Shisha Sedarim, like that acronym. Shas is an acronym for the entirety, the entire corpus of the Mishnah and the Talmud. They’ll colloquially call it Shas.
Now here’s something very important to understand. These six orders of the Mishnah—not everyone has a Talmudic interpretation on it. There is not a tractate, there is not an individual volume on every single tractate of Mishnah. But each of the six orders has at least one tractate. The first tractate which we mentioned, which was Zeraim, only has one tractate on it in Talmud, and that is tractate Berakhot, where we’re going to begin our tour. Similarly, the last tractate, Tahoros, only has one, really one major tractate of Talmud on it and that is tractate Niddah.
Now I want to point out something that is very interesting which is an acronym to remember all six orders of the Mishnah. As we mentioned, the six orders of the Mishnah, the Shisha Sedarim, are Zeraim, agricultural law, Moed, holidays, Nashim, family law, Nezikin, torts and damages, Kodashim, which is sacrificial law, and then finally Tahoros, which is the laws of purity and impurity.
Now, if you look at these six orders—the Rambam already points this out, Maimonides points this out in his introduction to the Mishnah—it spells out a term and that is: you take Zeraim, Moed, Nashim, Nezikin, Kodashim, Tahoros, take the first letter of each order, there is an acronym called Zman Nakat. Zman Nakat, which literally means to choose time.
Now this is not insignificant. The role of time in the oral law is really front and center. In a way, you could think, we lost our physical homeland, the temple in space, the way that we continue to bring divinity, godliness and Torah into our lives, the temple that we can still, so to speak, construct is through time. It’s also the way that we find meaning in our lives. The way that we live to try to understand how different moments in our lives make sense. We don’t always understand it in real time, but as we develop and we get older and we look from the generations, we begin to understand more about our own lives.
The same is true in the development of the oral law. We don’t always understand where the story of the Jewish people is going, but the way that we build meaning, generation after generation, is through the lens of these six orders: Shas, the acronym Zman Nakat, choosing time, saying to yourself, “I don’t want to be a nomad in my own life.” When we think of a nomad, that’s somebody wandering. We can wander in space; you can also wander through time.
And what the oral law, what Talmud really gives us is a way to anchor and have rootedness in our own lives. That is why time features so prominently, this is not the last time we’re going to talk about it, but features so prominently throughout the entire discourse of Talmud—learning how to sanctify time itself.
I just want to mention two other really important ways in which the Talmud is organized. The first we mentioned are the different orders of the Mishnah. That is not the only way. The second way that the Talmud is organized is by tractates. Within each order of the Mishnah, as we mentioned, there are individual tractates, individual volumes that are part of this larger series. The word for a tractate is literally a masechta. That is the term you will hear. So somebody would say, “I am learning Maseches Kiddushin,” which is the tractate that talks about the laws of betrothal. I am learning—”What Masechta are you learning?”
The word masechta, it’s very interesting, comes from the root word which means to weave. Why is each individual volume called like to weave? What does this have to do with sewing, weaving? It has nothing to do with each other. But it really is—when you open up a tractate, you’ll see they don’t really flow that sequentially. There are so many ideas, every law touches upon a different concept and the way that the Talmud unfolds is literally like a tapestry. Everything is woven together. So you’ll have theological conversations woven together with legal conversations. You’ll have conversations that have to do with history or events or different types of stories that will crop up. And this is all woven together as part of one tractate and now the word we’re introducing is a masechta.
And then finally within each masechta are chapters. So some tractates are very long—they can have ten, eleven chapters. Some are very short. They might have only three or four chapters, but every tractate is organized into chapters. The word for chapter is a perek. So somebody might say, “I am learning perek bet, the second perek, the third perek. I’m learning the fourth perek in this masechta. What perek are you up to?” Perek means chapter.
So we have a seder, that’s organizing a big topic. Then the individual topics are the masechta. And then finally within each masechta everything is organized by a perek, which is a specific chapter.
One thing to keep in mind is very often the way Talmud is referenced is really by page number. Every Talmud, no matter where it’s published over the last few hundred years, all follows very almost identical pagination. Maybe there are very slight discrepancies. So when you see a work referenced or a passage of Talmud referenced you will very often see tractate, let’s use a random tractate, tractate Bava Kamma, that’s a tractate in the order of Nezikin that deals with damages, and you might instead of saying what chapter it is you might say it is masechet Bava Kamma, tractate Bava Kamma, and then it’ll just say a page. And they’ll say page forty-one and then they’ll say A or B which means which side of the page is it.
What we call amud aleph or amud bet. The first side of the page is called amud, which is a side of a page, is the first side, and the second side is amud bet, the second side of the page. So when this is referenced in English you might see an A or a B. Sometimes you might see one dot or two dots. But generally each page has two amudim, two sides of the page.
A page of the Talmud is normally referred to as a daf. A daf is a page, and that is where the term Daf Yomi, a page of Talmud a day, gets its meaning from. Daf Yomi means two sides of one page, and somebody might ask, “What daf are we learning today?” So you’ll be able to understand they’re really trying to figure out, What daf?” which means what page in what tractate which belongs to which seder. So somebody might say, “I am learning Berakhotdaf bet amud bet, which is the second side of the first tractate Berakhot, that’s the name of the masechta. That’s the first perek because it’s the first page. That is also in the seder of Zeraim. So now you know how to reference the Talmud.
That is the overall structure of the Talmud, which starts with a seder, smaller is a masechta, even smaller is a perek and then obviously even within the perek are the pages known as a daf. Side one is called amud aleph and side two is called amud bet. And now you too can reference the Talmud.
So I hope you do it and let’s keep making Torah sweet.