The Right Way to Teach the Talmud

There is a right way to teach Talmud. All Yeshivas essentially teach Talmud the same way - select the Tractate to teach -- open it and start reading. That is not the right way.

Here is a link to a short article that I wrote a while back, "Teaching Mishnah, Midrash and Talmud at the University."

I outline some of the course methods I have used in university courses and I make some generalizations, such as:

...I do not use the traditional Yeshiva approach to designing a "syllabus", i.e., start on page 2A and learn as much as time permits in the tractate. I also do not emphasize the notion of the texts as part of "the Halakhah." This concept is a relatively modern construct, composed of many strata of texts, commentaries and codes. Some would argue it is a tool of those who foster rabbinic authority rather than a purely intellectual asset of our rabbinic heritage.

Please see my article for more details. /repost from 8/5/06/

The Strange Mishnah for Cheerleaders: Tractates for the Buffalo Jills

Because of a lawsuit, the public now has access to the codes of conduct for the Buffalo Jills cheerleaders, who cheer for the Buffalo Bills football team.

The Deadspin website has published the documents along with comments on excerpts and a juicy title for their post: "Insane Handbook: Bills Cheerleaders Are Told How To Wash Their Vaginas"

Most codes of conduct fit better into the prescriptive genres we call Mishnah or Halakhah (in Jewish literature) rather than into the more dialectical genre that we call Talmud (in Jewish writings).

There are two Mishnah-like Jills documents attached to the Deadspin article: "Jills Glamour Etiquette Hygiene Rules" and "Jills Codes of Conduct 2013 2014."

Amazing to me is one assertion in the article, "A Jill is paid next to nothing—no money for gameday cheering, none for practice, none for the bulk of her minimum 20 personal appearances, none from the tips she receives but must turn in during the mandatory Jills Golf Tournament—and is classified by the team as a volunteer/independent contractor..."

The samples below provided by Deadspin would be somewhat comical, if they were not so tragically serious for the women to whom they are directed.

Happy Mishna Day

On this day in history the first Mishna was printed. Joshua Solomon ben Israel Nathan Soncino, the first member of the distinguished family of printers, completed publication of the work in 1492.

From Ha`aretz by David B. Green:

On May 8, 1492, Joshua Solomon ben Israel Nathan Soncino completed publication of what is believed to be the first printed edition of the Mishna. The text is accompanied by Maimonides’ commentary on the Mishna, in Hebrew translation.

Joshua Solomon Soncino (died 1493) was the first member of the distinguished Soncino family of printers to publish a book, a tractate of the Talmud (Berakhot), which he created in 1484. (Johannes Gutenberg had produced his first block-printed Bible in 1455.) The family took its name from the Italian town of Soncino, in northern Italy, east of Milan, where it lived for some time, but it could trace its origins to a German Jew called Moses of Speyer, in the 14th century.

You are as young as the woman you feel

From The New York Times OPINIONATOR | DRAFT come an essay on translation, a subject we detest, "The Treachery of Translators." The Times reports how, A translator learns that the law of karma can be unforgiving.

We suffered for years translating and publishing rabbinic texts, Mishnah and Talmud. Oh yes we pretended it was fun. And sure it gave us daily puzzles to solve and limitless opportunities to be clever.

It was in fact wretched and tormenting work. We don't do it any more. And we don't miss it even for a nano second.

The Times essay uses the silly clever funny suggestive assertion, "You are only as old as the woman you feel" as a quintessential instance of a sentence whose double meaning cannot be conveyed in a word for word translation.

Doh. As if we did not know that much stuff, "loses in the translation." It's always unnerving to confront those well written pieces that start off with a universally obvious premise, probe and poke it and conclude with nothing new.

Okay, this blog post tells you that the Times does that and you say that's obvious. Touché.