Talmud Study Quotes

Being Orthodox Jewish is kind of like being raised on like network sitcoms.

In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study.

Pharisaism became Talmudism...But the spirit of the Ancient Pharisee survives unaltered. When the Jew...studies the Talmud, he is actually repeating the arguments used in the Palestinian academies. From Palestine to Babylonia; from Babylonia to North Africa, Italy, Spain, France and Germany; from these to Poland, Russia and eastern Europe generally, ancient Pharisaism has wandered.

I did go to cheder and was a bar mitzvah. We were members of an Orthodox synagogue, although we were not religious. My grandfather was Polish. He came to Ireland in the '30s.

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

If you study the Talmud you please God even more than you do by praying or fasting.

In my town we studied the five Books of Moses, but rarely the prophets. We studied the Talmud so much that I sometimes knew the prophets because of the prophetic quotations in the Talmud. We almost never studied the prophets themselves.

I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.