In the Babylonian Talmud, we find two statements of Rabbi Tarfon that are parallel to those of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount as recorded in the book of Matthew. It is somewhat surprising, in general, that there’s a...
An interesting article that seems to have made its way around the Internet this summer is David Benkof’s “Stop Saying Ivanka Trump Converted To Judaism“, in which the author says “Unnecessarily highlighting someone’s status as a Jew-by-choice implies she is somehow...
As reported recently by The Talmud Blog, there has been nearly a dozen completed doctoral dissertations on the Talmud and rabbinic literature last year. These doctoral dissertations have been completed mostly in the United States of America and Israel in...
The Saul Lieberman Institute of Talmudic Research announced today that they have compiled full word-for-word comparisons of the textual witnesses on entire chapters of the Babylonian Talmud! These synopses are compiled and presented as an Excel spreadsheet, each file encompassing one full...
In this week’s issue of the Jewish Journal, there were not one, but two references to gender in rabbinic literature(!), which is certainly exciting that rabbinic literature is getting some attention in Jewish newspapers. However, I found the description of...
When it comes to lighting candles on Hanukah, the amount of candles lit is now commonly done in an ascending manner according to the night. The original source for this is the following text (bShabbat 21b): תנו רבנן: מצות חנוכה...
For its tenth episode, “The Joy of Text” went with its second ever mini-episode focussing on a Talmudic text. This month’s episode, which was published a week ago, focussed on the following Talmudic text on one of the ways that...
Having written earlier about one rabbi in the Talmud who was recorded as having stated nine religious aspirations, I wanted to briefly look at how the Talmud discusses one of them, in particular. One of them is that his portion is...
Last month’s episode of “The Joy of Text” switched up its format for what it’s calling a mini-episode. In this mini-episode, in lieu of its typical format of a main topic, a guest interview, and then Q & A all...
Last week, a new website started up to discuss Talmud from a historical and contextual approach. With two posts thus far, TheGemara.com is a project of Project TABS. So far, Dr. Shai Secunda, who completed his doctorate at Yeshiva University,...
