Free download files of the Babylonian Talmud in English

I am proud to provide for you as a gift, a download of the complete Babylonian Talmud English translation.

The Talmud in English is online and free at my site, Halakhah.com, http://www.halakhah.com/ - serving up 60,000+ downloads each month.

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH WITH NOTES, GLOSSARY AND INDICES UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF RABBI DR. I. EPSTEIN B.A., Ph.D., D. Lit. FOREWORD BY THE VERY REV. THE LATE CHIEF RABBI DR. J. H. HERTZ. INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR.

This set contains the Sedarim (orders, or major divisions) and tractates (books) of the Babylonian Talmud, as translated and organized for publication by the Soncino Press in 1935 - 1948.

My site has the entire Talmud edition in PDF format and  about 8050 pages in HTML format, comprising 1460 files — of the Talmud.

I recommend that on your web site or blog you add a link to this site http://www.halakhah.com.

Highlights include: A formatted 2-column PDF version of the Talmud at Halakhah.com.

Please recognize and help support this effort 
by clicking and donating here.

Are you a hedgehog or a fox?

My teacher in college c. 1971 in a seminar at the Bernard Revel Graduate School mentioned a book by Isaiah Berlin with great enthusiasm. He then applied the concept of the two archetypes, hedgehog and fox, to describe the nature of the work of two medieval rabbis (I forget which ones, but I'll wager he said Rabbenu Tam was a hedgehog and maybe Rashi was a fox.)

So I went over to the library and read the book, as I often did when one of my teachers mentioned a volume with high praise.

The other day at the office I tried to explain the archetypes to a talented programmer, noting after summarizing Berlin's theory that said developer came across as a hedgehog. And right then I realized that apparently I had lapsed into speaking Aramaic - or that was the look I got from my colleague.

Wikipedia has a nice precis of the book (it's just an essay really of 90 or so pages which is here in a PDF)...

"The Hedgehog and the Fox" is the title of an essay by Isaiah Berlin, regarding the Russian author Leo Tolstoy's theory of history.

The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: πόλλ' οἶδ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"). In Erasmus Rotterdamus's Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum.)

Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust) and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson).

Turning to Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of these two groups. He postulates, rather, that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog, and thus Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history that Tolstoy presents in his novel War and Peace.

The essay has been published separately and as part of the collection Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly.

Some authors, for instance Michael Walzer, have used the same pattern of description on Berlin, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary political philosophers. Berlin's former student, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, has been dubbed a hedgehog by Berlin and readily admits to it in an interview after receiving the 2007 Templeton Prize.

Berlin expanded on this concept in the 1997 book The Proper Study of Mankind. Philip Tetlock, a political psychology professor in the Haas Business  school at UC, Berkeley, draws heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields (especially politics) in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?.

You can read the first ten pages or so at Questia or here. Or the whole essay here.

And now we must ask, Are you a hedgehog or a fox? Choose!
(reposted from 7/08)

Do all Korean Children Study the Talmud?

The Talmud is a Best-Seller in South Korea according to the The New Yorker.

Is it a bestseller? Yes. Is it the Talmud? No! It is a long story and quite convoluted.

On 4/1/11 we posted this:

There are stories circulating that all South Korean children study the Talmud. Do they?

We'll go out on a limb here and say, no, Korean children do not study the Talmud.

We'll go further out on a sturdy limb and say that this whole story is akin to an urban legend.

One blogger, Mostly Kosher, has tried to verify the news items claiming child Talmud study in Korea and he came away mostly "debunking" the story.

He found that at best Korean children have heard of some Talmud stories and maybe even read them in an abbreviated comic book form and that they have a positive opinion about the wisdom that can be found in the Talmud.

Another blogger, Raising Wings, has more details on the origins and content of the so-called Korean Talmud.

That's a good thing, but it does not at all mean that Korean children engage in the serious and demanding enterprise of Talmud study.

About Magritte: Ceci n'est pas une Juif

We cannot believe that we never posted anything about Rene Magritte, especially about his "Treachery of Images" series most famous for his this is not a pipe painting circa 1929.

At MOMA you will be able to view "Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938" September 28, 2013–January 12, 2014. "Bringing together some 80 paintings, collages, and objects, along with a selection of photographs, periodicals, and early commercial work, the exhibition offers fresh insight into Magritte’s identity as a modern painter and Surrealist artist."

And that is not us smoking a pipe in our photo. It is a digital photo of an original oil painting of us smoking a pipe, which we posed for a while back.

And second, this is not a blog. This is the image of a blog. And a blog is the image of an idea. And those ideas that you may find here are normally images of other people's thoughts, images and  representations, occasionally interspersed with some of our own original brainstorms.

Last, we always obey our own commandments here: Though shalt not be profound, foremost among them. And we try to heed other people's wisdom of the ages, such as Thou shalt not take seriously thine own press releases. But those too are only images of guideposts. And that was not philosophical.

Should we not ask, as is our wont, Was Rene Magritte Jewish? According to one unsubstantiated post, he was half Jewish. We are not convinced. We gather from our handbooks that Magritte was not a Jew, that he was baptized and practiced the Catholic rite as a youngster.  His art has little to no religious content. Enfin... Ceci n'est past une juif.

Bob White Reviewed My Book

The erudite and insightful Robert White reviewed my book on his distinguished blog, rwhitesf: 

Three Dot Journalism and A Book Review (Tzvee Zahavy, God’s Favorite Prayers)"

Thank you Bob!

Experience God's Favorite Prayers

Technology to the Rescue to Solve the Social Problem of Sock Puppets

The integrity and value of social networks and of commercial product and service reviews depends on the authenticity of the content.

Big companies like Amazon and big universities like Cornell and others are hard at work developing policies and algorithms to solve the problem of sock puppet posting of reviews and other content on the Internet.

Here are three examples:

1. Cornell software fingers fake online reviews: Cornell brainiacs have come up with software that spots fake reviews, something we humans aren't good at. Fictitious happy customers beware.

2. A sock puppet detection algorithm on virtual spaces. Knowledge-Based Systems (January 2013), 37, Complete, pg. 366-377.

"On virtual spaces, some individuals use multiple usernames or copycat/forge other users (usually called “sock puppet”) to communicate with others. Those sock puppets are fake identities through which members of Internet community praise or create the illusion of support for the product or one’s work, pretending to be a different person. A fundamental problem is how to identify these sock puppets.

"In this paper, we propose a sock puppet detection algorithm which combines authorship-identification techniques and link analysis. Firstly, we propose an interesting social network model in which links between two IDs are built if they have similar attitudes to most topics that both of them participate in; then, the edges are pruned according a hypothesis test, which consider the impact of their writing styles; finally, the link-based community detection for pruned network is performed. Compared to traditional methods, our approach has three advantages: (1) it conforms to the practical meanings of sock puppet community; (2) it can be applied in online situation; (3) it increases the efficiency of link analysis. In the experimental work, we evaluate our method using real datasets and compared our approach with several previous methods; the results have proved above advantages."

3. Amazon Tackles Review Problem, Deletes Wrong Reviews (Forbes): Amazon is quite strict about their policy. They take questionable reviews right down, and if questioned they explain it bluntly:

I’m sorry for any previous concerns regarding your reviews on our site. We do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product.

We have removed your reviews as they are in violation of our guidelines. We will not be able to go into further detail about our research.

I understand that you are upset, and I regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. However, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on this matter.

As is often the case in the world of high-tech, social problems can be solved in part by developing even more high tech.

We recommend these books for you!

Video: Bangladesh Fanatics Demand Death Penalty for Blog Blasphemy

Bangladesh fanatics gathered to demand the death penalty for blog blasphemy:

"Hundreds of thousands of people have held protests in Bangladesh to demand that the government introduce an anti-blasphemy law that would include the death penalty for bloggers who insult Islam."

See the video report on AlJazeera.

The Pitputim Blog Makes us a Wonderful Post

Thanks go out to the wonderful blog Pitputim for the promotions for our publications by Reuven Brauner et. al.. They said:

I am pleased to inform you that several new ETC publications by Reuven Brauner are NOW available on Rabbi Tzvee Zahavy’s wonderful Torah resource site http://www.halakhah.com (http://halakhah.com/index.html).

Newly uploaded are:

1. An updated and revised edition of 25 RULES FOR PERFORMING MITZVOHS derived from the famous Halachic compendium, the Chayei Odom. This is available at http://halakhah.com/rst/25rules.pdf.
2. A completely new translation with commentaries of SEFER MISHLEI (the Book of Proverbs). This you can find at http://halakhah.com/rst/mishlei.pdf.
3. The first volume (Bereishis) of Dr. Seligmann Baer’s (author of Siddur Avodas Yisroel) famous MASORETIC TEXT OF THE TANACH. This can be accessed at http://halakhah.com/rst/baer1.pdf. The remaining books of Tanach (except for Shemos through Devorim which were never produced) will be available, too, but due to their large size we are trying to figure out if it should be made available as zip files or on Drop Box or something like that.
4. Another volume in the Hadgashas Hane’emar series, SEFER YONA http://halakhah.com/rst/yona.pdf. Soon to be available on halakhah.com, please G-d, will be Sefer Esther (in time for Purim) and Sefer Ruth http://halakhah.com/rst/ruth.pdf. BTW, the entire Tanach has been formatted like this and, please G-d, will be made available in due time, as well. I think this format is an excellent study tool, particularly for young students, facilitating faster and better comprehension of the text.

Besides these items, halakhah.com hosts a number of other ETC monographs and works including the comprehensive Hebrew Verb Root thesaurus Shoroshim http://halakhah.com/rst/shoroshim.pdf, hundreds of non-esoteric passages from the Zohar http://halakhah.com/rst/kkz.pdf, an index to the usage of all verses and passages from Tanach in our liturgy, called Shimush Pesukim http://halakhah.com/rst/pesukim.pdf, a nice translation of Pirkei Avos with many unique and interesting lists http://halakhah.com/rst/pirkeiavos.pdf and lots more unique, fun and educational material.

On top of all this, you have the entire two-column, easy to read and download, REFORMATTED SONCINO TALMUD – the only complete, online, English language translation of the Talmud at http://halakhah.com/indexrst.html as well as the more traditional format of the Soncino, found scrolled-down lower on the same page. 

Rabbi Zahavy has made available some of his excellent works there, too, including access to an outstanding, world-class and highly-recommended philosophical exposition called Whence and Wherefore written by his late father, Rabbi Zev Zahavy, ztz”l. This book explores the most fundamental issues of the purpose and meaning of the creation, life and existence.

NYTimes: A Dissident Egyptian Blogger's Visit to Israel

Inspiring courage. From The New York Times:

THE LEDE BLOG: A Dissident Egyptian Blogger's Visit to Israel

Maikel Nabil, an Egyptian blogger who was jailed for eight months last year by Egypt's military for expressing his views on politics and religion, began a tour of Israel...

http://nyti.ms/VV7HSt

Is science fiction Jewish?

It's a fair question. Is science fiction Jewish?

Some bloggers say yes, science fiction, is Jewish!

The Exploring Our Matrix blog brings up the question in this way, "Is the Oldest Science Fiction in the Talmud?"

The basis for the question is this text from the Talmud (b. Menahot 29b) which presents Moses as a time traveler.

Rab Judah said in the name of Rab, When Moses ascended on high he found the Holy One, blessed be He, engaged in affixing coronets to the letters.

Said Moses, ‘Lord of the Universe, Who stays Thy hand?’

He answered, ‘There will arise a man, at the end of many generations, Akiba b. Joseph by name, who will expound upon each tittle heaps and heaps of laws’. ‘Lord of the Universe’, said Moses; ‘permit me to see him’. He replied, ‘Turn thee round’.

Moses went and sat down behind eight rows [and listened to the discourses upon the law]. Not being able to follow their arguments he was ill at ease, but when they came to a certain subject and the disciples said to the master ‘Whence do you know it?’ and the latter replied ‘It is a law given unto Moses at Sinai’ he was comforted.

Thereupon he returned to the Holy One, blessed be He, and said, ‘Lord of the Universe, Thou hast such a man and Thou givest the Torah by me!’ He replied, ‘Be silent, for such is My decree’.

Then said Moses, ‘Lord of the Universe, Thou hast shown me his Torah, show me his reward’. ‘Turn thee round’, said He; and Moses turned round and saw them weighing out his flesh at the market-stalls. ‘Lord of the Universe’, cried Moses, ‘such Torah, and such a reward!’ He replied, ‘Be silent, for such is My decree’.

Well beam me up Scottie. I for one am convinced totally that the Talmud has the earliest science fiction!

Times Mag: Does Swimming Make You Smarter?

Yes, according to an article in the Times Magazine, "How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain" by Gretchen Reynolds, swimming does make you smarter.

The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does...

Just how exercise remakes minds on a molecular level is not yet fully understood, but research suggests that exercise prompts increases in something called brain-derived neurotropic factor, or B.D.N.F., a substance that strengthens cells and axons, fortifies the connections among neurons and sparks neurogenesis. Scientists can’t directly study similar effects in human brains, but they have found that after workouts, most people display higher B.D.N.F. levels in their bloodstreams...

We swim a mile a day. That's why this blog is so darn smart.



The Kindle Edition of the Classic Soncino Talmud in English
Talmudic Books for Kindle on the Talmud, Bible, Kabbalah and Prayer

Tzvee's Talmudic blog in New York Magazine

Tzvee's Talmudic blog was mentioned in New York Magazine Comments this week

Talmudic Books for Kindle on the Talmud, Bible, Kabbalah and Prayer
The Kindle Edition of the Classic Soncino Talmud in English

The Sunrise and the Redemption of the Jews in Yerushalmi Berakhot and in the Book of Esther

Talmudic life extends the space-time continuum with an acute awareness of the physical here-and-now and deepens the spectrum of thought and meaning with trajectories back into the distant past of the scripture and forward to the hopeful expectation for salvation.

This passage below from the Talmud Yerushalmi Tractate Berakhot demonstrates key aspects of the logic of a Talmudic life - what we explore every day in this blog. The rabbis in the passage practice a mindfulness of the natural world on a seamless continuum with thoughtfulness about their textual world, their imagined pasts and futures.

Below, in this passage that we cite, they want to understand the dynamics of sunrise, part of their everyday natural lives. They need to know when day begins so they can start to say their daily prayers at the correct hour.

On their way to determine this they talk about visual observation and use poetic terms from scripture. They measure the elapsed time of a pre-dawn period by specifying durations for physical activities of walking. But their walking has no physical or temporal boundaries. The dusty roads of the Land of Israel in late antiquity lead them directly into the book of Genesis.

The four miles that the rabbis might walk to determine a period of elapsed time are the same four miles that Lot and his wife and daughters would walk at the behest of heavenly angels. And if those biblical four miles were really not four miles, miracles made them so.

And yet the passage tells us, when rabbis Hiyya and Simeon once were walking in a real valley at daybreak, they were not satisfied to speak about the technical definitions of the durations of the pre-dawn periods, though they surely could have done just that and stopped.

They instead looked at the rays of the dawn and launched their time machine into the future, into a peroration on the redemption of the Jewish people. As they mindfully noted the real rays of that dawn, they pondered the equally real rays of the prophetic words of Micah and of the melodramatic story of biblical Esther.

Link to the Reformatted Soncino Talmud in English Online at Halakhah.com

The Reformatted Soncino Babylonian Talmud English translation is online.

Download this newly reformatted edition of the Talmud in English free at http://www.halakhah.com/indexrst.html

This new edition was reformatted by Reuven Brauner of Raanana Israel in 5771. It is in PDF file format in two-column pages.

The standard description of the publication is: TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH WITH NOTES, GLOSSARY AND INDICES UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF RABBI DR. I. EPSTEIN B.A., Ph.D., D. Lit. FOREWORD BY THE VERY REV. THE LATE CHIEF RABBI DR. J. H. HERTZ. INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR. THE SONCINO PRESS, LONDON.

This edition Contains the Sedarim (orders, or major divisions) and tractates (books) of the Babylonian Talmud, as translated and organized for publication by the Soncino Press in 1935 - 1948.

The site has the entire Soncino Talmud edition in the newly reformatted easy to read PDF format.

The earlier edition in one-column format in PDF and HTML is also available on the site.

Please add a link to the site http://www.halakhah.com on your web site or blog.

"God's Favorite Prayers"

New Yorker Roz Chast: the Blog Content Pie Chart

 Please Purchase My Great New Book -- "God's Favorite Prayers"

Two Great Blog Reviews of "God's Favorite Prayers"

Dr. Claude Mariottini, professor of Old Testament at the Northern Baptist Seminary, has published a marvelous review my new book on his blog, starting as follows:

My fellow blogger Tzvee Zahavy has written a fascinating book titled God’s Favorite Prayers (Teaneck, NJ: Talmudic Books, 2011). The book deals with Jewish prayers and spirituality...

NYTimes: Blogger Richard Silverstein received classified US intelligence files on Israel

Blogger Richard Silverstein of the Tikkun Olam blog made the NY Times page one today, for his role in a USA-on-Israel espionage case in 2009.

Leak Offers Look at Efforts by U.S. to Spy on Israel
By SCOTT SHANE
New details have emerged in the case of an F.B.I. translator who was sentenced last year to 20 months in prison for leaking classified information to a blogger.

Reuters: Crossrider's Kobi Menachemi on his Google+Facebook Browser App

We just got an invite from Barak to Google+ and now we read about this, the app that lets you manipulate Facebook from Google+. Look out Zuckerberg, the Israelis are coming.

Israeli firm's app allows Facebook viewing on Google+

By Steven Scheer

JERUSALEM, July 12 (Reuters Life!) - An Israeli company has developed an application that allows users of the newly launched social networking site Google+ to also view their streams from sector leader Facebook.

Called "Google+Facebook", the application was developed last week by Crossrider, whose main business is developing Internet browser add-on extensions, and already has more than 100,000 downloads, according to Koby Menachemi, Crossrider's co-founder and chief executive.

Countdown to God's Favorite Prayers: Proofs Arrived

The new book is coming...the proofs arrived via UPS

"This book invites the reader into the heart of Jewish spirituality, to learn about its idiom and imagery, its emotions and its great sweeping dramas. It invites the reader to meet six ideal personalities of Jewish prayer and to get to know some of God's favorite prayers."

The countdown has started...  changes as needed.

Tzvee's Talmudic Blog Passes One Million Page Views

Thank you everyone for coming to read us.

This weekend Tzvee's Talmudic Blog passed the "One Million Page Views" mark. We find that amazing.

We've been providing for some time now 3330 blog posts with bits of talmudic analysis and opinions on religion, jews, judaism, tanakh, bible, talmud, mishnah, midrash, haggadah, israel, rabbis, anti-semitism; synagogues, prayer, liturgy, siddur; teaneck, scandals, universities; politics, minnesota; terrorism, inventions, google, amazon, iPad. נושאים: דת, יהודים, יהדות, תנ"ך, מקרא, תלמוד, משנה, מדרש, ישראל, רבנים, אנטישמיות, בתי כנסת, תפילה, סידור, ארכיטיפים

We'll keep doing this for another while. Lots of stuff going on. Stay tuned.

Okay. We can't resist  repeating the awful headline that the New York Post came up with recently to describe tacky Congressman Anthony Weiner's resolve not to resign under fire from his office: "WEINER: I'LL STICK IT OUT."

We will stick it out too, i.e., continue blogging along.