Hi friends. Today I want to talk about the three different types of ways of approaching the Talmud itself. And they’re all really, really important. I’m going to introduce three different terms and how they relate to each other. But this is really the deeper meaning of what it means to study Talmud, because not everybody studies Talmud in the same way.
I think there are really three ways in which you can approach the Talmud, but to be absolutely clear, each of these ways influences the other. The first way in which we approach the Talmud is approaching it like halacha. The word halachais colloquially used to mean Jewish law. That someone might read the Talmud and try to figure out what is the specific law regarding a specific situation.
Let’s give a very basic example. Somebody might learn the first tractate Berakhot and try to figure out what blessing, or a bracha—what blessing should I make on pancakes? That’s a good question. You’d have to figure out what are the ingredients in pancakes. What are the general rules and what we make blessings for. When do we make blessings? Do we make blessings on breakfast food? We do. But you would try to figure out and then based on that, because the Talmud might not talk about the exact food—they might not have the word pancakes—you’ll be able to figure out what is the law in that case.
This would have to do with the laws of Shabbos, with the laws of weddings, the laws of purity and impurity, the laws of damages. Many people approach the Talmud and try to figure out what is the bottom-line law. Now, you have to understand the halachadoes not emerge that clearly from the passages of Talmud. Talmud includes debates, and the authority of the Talmud comes from the fact that it was accepted by the entirety of the Jewish people.
This is the text that all Jews said are going to dictate the entirety of our practice. Now not all Jews are familiar with what’s happening here and there in Talmud, but what is amazing is that really all legal cases from the last 2000 years—to understand where is the starting point of how people try to figure out whether it’s a case related to marriage or divorce, life, death, anything—it always begins with a passage in Talmud. That is where we try to find any precedent. And that is where we approach the Talmud to try to figure out what is the law.
That is not the only way in which Talmud is approached. The most important distinction I think we really need to surface is the difference between halacha, meaning practical law, and another term that we can use as it relates to Talmud is called aggadta. Aggadta refers to the narrative, the stories, the theological ideas that are included in the Talmud. And every tractate has its own set of stories, its own ideas.
A teacher of Talmud who has had a big influence on my life is somebody named Rav Tzadok HaKohen MiLublin, who was a great Hasidic leader who lived from 1823 to 1900. Genius of geniuses, mastered both the law and all of theology. And he says something very important, which is if you really want to understand the central theme or central idea within any tractate, within any masechta, you really have to figure out the relationship between the passages of aggadta, meaning the narrative, the stories, and the halacha, meaning the actual legal debates that happen in there.
Now this is absolutely crucial. A lot of times people skip over the narrative parts, especially in school. When I was growing up in school, a lot of times the rebbe would skip over it: “Okay these are the stories. Let’s focus on the real stuff.” I think that is a terrible mistake. You don’t really understand the deeper theme of any tractate unless you plumb the depth and ask yourself the question: “Why is this narrative appearing here? Why is this narrative a part of this tractate?” That is always a question that I am asking when I am studying a tractate, and to really mine the deeper meaning of any topic, you have to figure out what is the relationship, what is the aggadta, the narratives, the theological ideas telling me about this larger subject.
So the first we have the halacha and the second that we have the aggadta. Now these are very often bifurcated. They are separated. In fact, there was a work that came out in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Shmuel Eidels, who is sometimes known by his acronym the Maharsha. The Maharsha is printed in the back of most traditional Talmuds and there’s something very interesting if you read the introduction. He says that he originally wrote two separate works. He wrote one work that was just focusing on the practical law, on the debates going back and forth, and he wrote another work that was just focusing on the narrative and the theology. He writes in his introduction, he says, “I regret that. That was a terrible mistake. I should not have divided these two works. In fact, I should have kept them together, almost like the body and the soul of Jewish life.”
We have a structure. Halacha is meant to be repetitive. It is meant to be replicable in a way that we don’t want to trust our emotions. There’s something that is central to halacha is a mistrust of spirituality. And I want to state this very clearly. A lot of people will say, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” You know what that means? That means that I only want to engage when I’m in the mood, when I’m feeling it, when it’s convenient. And halacha is meant to design, to be a system, that cultivates Jewish identity, that cultivates a consciousness of God and obligation and commitment. Even when you don’t feel it. Even on off days. Even on a random Wednesday. Even on a Sunday afternoon. That is the beauty of Jewish law—that it is cultivating a spiritual practice but with discipline, day in and day out.
But the ideas that animate the law, that is found in aggadta. And like the Maharsha writes in his introduction, these should not be separated. In fact, in later printings of his work, instead of having them as two separate works, because he wrote that “I regret this,” in later works and even in contemporary Talmuds, they merge them together. They’re in different fonts, but they’re a part of the same work. The narrative, the spiritual ideas, the transcendent stories, and the detailed debates about what to actually do—they always need to be wedded together.
Now, there is one more very important aspect in the way in which we approach the Talmud. It is not halacha, that’s the practical law. It is not aggadta, the narratives. There is a third part, and that is something that we call lomdus. Lomdus is the conceptual analysis of the Talmud. It is where we develop the categorization of the law itself. It’s probably what is spent the most time in actual traditional yeshivas. They’re not studying the practical law and they’re not studying the theology. What most people are doing day in and day out in yeshiva is lomdus. Lomdus means the conceptual analysis of the Talmud.
Now obviously these are all connected. The practical law, the conceptual ideas, and the spiritual narratives and theology are always working and influencing one another. It’s iterative. You can’t really understand the depths of the halacha unless you understand the meaning of it and unless you understand the conceptual ideas behind it. You can’t understand the conceptual ideas unless you really understand how they’re executed in day-to-day life. And of course, you can’t understand the theology and the spirituality if it’s divorced from the daily practice.
So whether it is the halacha, whether it is the aggadta, or whether it is the lomdus, all three of these are working together. And in fact, this idea actually appears in American law. There’s a really interesting article that I have struggled to actually understand but I find it absolutely fascinating.
In the 1983 introductory issue to Harvard Law Review, there’s a somewhat famous, when I say famous, I mean famous among certain legal scholars who also like Jewish law. It’s not actually famous. But in the Harvard Law Review, there’s an article written by Robert Cover called “Nomos and Narrative.” What do those words mean? Nomos is the law, and narrative is like the theology. And what he actually does, and this is what’s so fascinating, he opens up this Harvard Law Review article by explaining that all law ultimately has these two components.
We need the halacha, we need the actual what do you do. What’s the speed limit? But you also need the aggadta, you need the narrative. Nomos and narrative need to live together. And if you read this article, and of course we’ll provide a link to it, but if you read this article, he’s actually urging American jurists, American lawyers, to look to the Talmud. And he specifically invokes the structure of Jewish law saying we need this as well. I’ll give you an exact quote from the article where he writes:
“No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture.”
We have to know [both]. Jewish life is not just a set of rules. We have to know what the rules represent, both theologically and conceptually. And that is why when someone says they’re studying the Talmud, there are really three different areas of focus.
Some people focus exclusively or primarily on the halacha, that’s the law. Others focus primarily on the aggadta, that is the narratives, the stories, the richness of the ideas. And then finally, most people, especially in yeshivas, are focusing almost exclusively on the lomdus, that is the conceptual ideas on which all of the laws are actually based upon. So that gives you a bird’s-eye view of the three primary ways in which people approach the Talmud.
Like any individual, we have a body, we have a soul, we have fingernails. There are many parts to our sense of self, and there are many parts to the Talmud. But the same way you would never want a body without a personality, and you would never want a personality without a body, same is true for Talmud. And we weave these three areas together to create this incredible edifice that we now call the Talmud.
Let’s keep learning and let’s keep making Torah sweet.