The Talmud’s Unwritten Introduction

Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily. We have just concluded kind of our initial introduction to the Talmud, and now we’re going to step in tractate by tractate going through the essential themes of every single tractate in the Talmud. And the first tractate of the Talmud is a tractate known as Brachos. This appears in the first order, seder of the Mishnah, of Zeraim, and the opening to the entire Mishnah and Talmud is the tractate known as Brachos, which literally means blessings.

Now, as we mentioned, one of the unique features of the Talmud is that the Talmud does not have an introduction. It doesn’t have authors listed on it and doesn’t have a clear introduction. You’re kind of thrown right in. On the first page of Talmud, 2a, in Brachos, you will have concepts that you will only really be fully fleshed out in the last tractate of the Talmud.

But I have a suggestion that I would like to share with you today and really develop, and that is that the first mishnah of Brachos, the opening of the entire Talmud, is actually the introduction to what the Talmud is all about. This is the introduction to what the project of the Talmud is trying to instill and protect in Jewish life and in Jewish thought. We may not have a formal introduction, but the opening, in a way, if you read it closely and carefully, is the introduction.

The first mishnah and really the first page of Talmud opens with a question. I’m going to read it in Hebrew, and then, of course, I will translate it. The question is as follows: “Me’eimatai korin et Shema ba’arvit? When do we read Shema in the nighttime?” This is the opening question of the entire Talmud. Shema, which is the prayer that we say, “Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad,” where we literally invoke, we say, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one.” We invoke with our language divine unity, and we specifically ask: “When is the obligation to recite Shema at night?”

And the Talmud brings a few different opinions. The first opinion is very strange. You would expect an opinion to say 6:00 p.m., 7:00 p.m., 8:00 p.m. The Talmud doesn’t give you a time. It tells you: “You know when the obligation begins?” When the kohanim, the high priests, when they would serve in the Temple. When they would go in to eat their terumah, which was the gifts that they were given by the Jewish people. It’s very strange. First of all, give me a time. When on the watch is this?

This is the introduction to the entire Talmud, and it’s deliberate. You want to know why? The Talmud creates a practice for bringing divinity, for bringing transcendence into your daily life. It is literally the project of a world. It is looking at the world and saying: You know what? God’s obvious presence is not there. It’s going to be up to us in exile to bring divinity into the world. We don’t have open miracles. We don’t have prophecy. How are we going to bring Godliness and divinity into our lives? That is the question of how do we bring divine unification even in the darkness of exile.

This is the opening question of the Mishnah: “Me’eimatai korin et Shema ba’arvit?” From when can we begin saying Shema, divine unification, specifically at the night, in the nighttime, when it’s not clear, when it’s dark? How do we find God in this in this cloud, in this fog, in this darkness? The opening of the entire Talmud is this question: how do we still have and access divine unity in a darkened world? That is the project of the Talmud itself.

And it’s important, something to be sensitive to, and we’ve mentioned this in passing once before. [One] should be sensitive that it’s asking specifically a question in time. The Talmud is trying to address a world where Jews are scattered throughout the world. We’re not all centered necessarily around a Temple in Jerusalem. We’re scattered everywhere, and we need to learn how to find meaning. While it might not be in the actual land that we are standing upon, we have to be able to find meaning and holiness in the other canvas of existence, which is not place, but is actual time. Which is why a theme that we will see over and over again, beginning with the first idea of an Oral Law going back to the sin of the golden calf and miscalculating how long Moses, how long Moshe was going to be with God, we miscalculated the time.

And then, again, the acronym that we mentioned for the six orders of the Mishnah: Zeraim, Moed, Nashim, Nezikin, Kodashim, Tahoros. That is an acronym for the term Zman Nakat, choosing time. The entire project of the Mishnah and the Talmud is coming to sanctify the fabric of existence itself. We may not have an easy, accessible homeland for much of Jewish history, but we still are able to find and access divinity in time itself. Brachos is the introduction to the project of what the Mishnah and what the Talmud is trying to solve: bringing divinity into the darkness. Finding unity even when there’s no sun shining outside, even when there’s no clarity.

Now, when you continue in the Mishnah, there’s something very interesting. As we mentioned earlier, the Talmud is composed both of laws and debates, but also of narrative and theology and stories. In the opening, we have this dichotomy as well. There is a story in the very first mishnah, trying to acclimate you. Most mishnayot, most mishnahs, do not have this, but we open with a story to acclimate you to this idea: we need stories and we need law. The story is also absolutely essential to understanding the larger project of the Talmud.

You can open it up, and the story is as follows: there were children of a great rabbi who came from a party, and they asked him, said, “Uh-oh, we haven’t read the Shema yet. What should we do?” But he said, “Don’t worry, even though you’re supposed to read it earlier, the nighttime obligation, you can really continue to fulfill your obligation until the break of dawn.” And that’s exactly what they did.

Now, this is also very illuminating. The mishnah is not just bringing this up as an aside. It’s trying to tell you something essential. This is what happens in life: we get caught up in the parties, we get caught up in the distraction. We forget about the need and the obligation for our own lives to bring divinity into our own lives. We get caught up at a work event, at a party, at a get-together, and all of a sudden, like we forget that life has a transcendent purpose. We forget there’s a reason for life itself. And we can forget, “Wait, were we supposed to like be thinking about mission and purpose and transcendence. I was just hanging out just now.”

So that is why we have this story here. It’s an analogy for life itself: the distractions of life, the distractions of staying regimented. If there is one idea at the heart of Jewish law, it is a mistrust for our own emotions. We don’t just wait until you’re feeling it, until it’s convenient. We want to have a program where we don’t have to wait until we remember to find divinity, but we have the guardrails in place that we remember not to forget. We remember not to get distracted. And that’s the opening issue of the first mishnah.

There’s one final thing that I want to say that is so powerful in the opening mishnah in Brachos, and that is being sensitive when we introduce new Hebrew words. We have a lot of Hebrew words in the actual Bible, in the actual Torah. We have many, many Hebrew words. In fact, and I wrote a book about this, we have a lot of Hebrew words for sinning, for when we don’t fulfill our obligations. In the Bible, we call this either chet, an avon, a pesha. The first mishnah in Brachos introduces a new word that does not appear this way in the entire Torah, and that is the word aveirah.

And aveirah comes from the root word it means like kind of a sin. I don’t like the word sin that much, even though I wrote a book about it, Sin-a-gogue, could put up a little picture of my book cover over there. Got to push product. But aveirah means to transgress, means to la’avor, means to pass over, to transgress.

The first mishnah in Brachos, even though we have so many other words for sin, ends with this word that says, “Why did the rabbi say you should really try to fulfill this obligation earlier. Don’t wait till dawn? Kedei leharchik et ha-adam min ha-aveirah, to prevent you from falling into sin.”

Why do we use this new word called aveirah in the very first mishnah in Brachos? And I think this is something very profound, because the project of the entirety of Jewish law as developed in the Talmud is a roadmap. It is a map for your life, which is what allows you to finally, almost like reify, conceptualize when you don’t fulfill that obligation, when you forget, when you stay too late at the party and get distracted, you are now transgressing that map that you have for your life.

You know the contours of the canvas of existence. You know how to fill up every space, whether you’re having a good time, whether you’re in synagogue, whether you’re studying. What the beauty of Jewish law and Jewish practice is that it fills up the whole canvas with you. It animates your entire life. But it gives you a roadmap for existence itself. And you want to know what comes with a roadmap? The notion of an aveirah. The notion of you went in the wrong direction. You steered clear. It’s a way of thinking of Jewish law, instead of a set of precepts, it organizes the entirety of Jewish obligation into an actual map for your life.

But once we have the map, that is what gives rise to the concept of an aveirah, of a transgression: “I’m on the wrong highway, I’m on the wrong road, this isn’t going to take me to the life and the fulfillment and the divinity that I am looking for.” So that is why the first mishnah introduces a new word. What, you know, fancy, a neo- a neologism? Neologism? I think that’s how you pronounce it. That’s a fancy word for a new word. A neologism for the very concept of sin. Where sin is now a transgression. You can’t transgress until you have the road map. The road map is the Mishnah and the Talmud. And now that we have that, we know how to stay the right course.

So I am so excited to go through the ideas, the concepts, the joy of tractate Brachos. We’re going to cover one each week, a new tractate. This week is the opening tractate of Brachos, and I’m so excited to share more with you. Let’s keep making Torah sweet.