Lost and Found in This Week's 'Daf Yomi' Talmud Study

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

One of the chief functions of the Talmud is to make biblical law more practical. Often this means spelling out details that the Bible elides, as when the Talmud determines exactly what kinds of work are forbidden on Shabbat. But it can also mean moderating the demands that biblical law makes on Jews. God has the authority to simply tell Jews to do what is right; but the rabbis know that doing right is difficult, ambiguous, and often impractical, and so they often interpret the law in more lenient ways. In part, this difference reflects the nature of the society to which the laws are meant to apply. The God of the Torah is giving orders to a relatively small population of Jews living alone in a desert encampment, while the rabbis of the Talmud are dealing with a much more developed society, urban and mercantile, in which Jews are dispersed among a larger population of gentiles. Matters that would have been straightforward for Moses and Aaron are much less so from the perspective of the Roman and Persian empires.

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