TORAH 101: Post-Mishnaic Development of Oral Torah

We have made great progress in our study of Rambhams, magnificent, magisterial, authoritative

introduction to his commentary to Mishnah.

Of course, Mishnah, that is the first canonized codified work of oral Torah, and a thousand

years after the Mishnah was written, Rambhams wrote his magnificent, sprawling, vast commentary

to Mishnah.

And in this commentary, he offers an introduction that serves as an overview, a survey of all

of oral Torah, and we spent a lot of time going through, as he does, just the overview of

the buts of the Mishnah.

There are six orders of Mishnah, and we went through each one of those orders one at

one at a time.

And once he finishes enumerating all the different buts of the Mishnah, the Rambhams returns

to his original topic, namely the introduction to Mishnah, and an overview of oral Torah.

And today we're going to learn about the Mishnah itself, and what was included in the Mishnah,

and some of the details of how the Mishnah was written, and then we're going to also transition

to the post-Mishniyat era.

Once the Mishnah was completed, how was it studied, and how was oral Torah further developed?

So the Rambhams starts off this section with a very interesting point.

Which sages are included in the words of the Mishnah?

The Mishnah effectively is the writing down the codification of the oral Torah since the

times of Moshah, and therefore there are thousands of sages that were part of this transmission

from Moshah to Joshua through the period of the prophets and the elders and the judges

and so on.

First temple era, second temple era, it's about 70-100 years of history spanning from Moshah

to represent the prince, author and architect of the Mishnah.

Yet, if you examine the sages that are mentioned in the Mishnah, there is a very distinct starting

point.

The sages not include the sages that preceded a sage named Shimon Hatsadak, Shimon, the

righteous.

This is the earliest sage that is featured in the Mishnah.

All the sages that preceded Shimon Hatsadak, Shimon the righteous, are not mentioned, and

this is an idea that the Rambo actually revisits later on in his treatise.

He mentions this as it seems like it's almost like a side point.

The first sage mentioned is Shimon Hatsadak, Shimon the righteous.

And it's not clear, it doesn't tell us why, like why is this, is this some arbitrary

starting point, Kempi?

So we know Shimon Hatsadak, he is described as the remnant of the men of the great assembly.

Mishiyare Anshay Knessas Agdola, there was a great assembly, a Knessas Agdola.

This is a name given to a body of sages.

The Sanhedrin, Sanhedrin is the great Supreme Court.

And Sanhedrin typically comprised 71 sages, but at one very pivotal point in Jewish history,

this assembly, this body was expanded from 71 sages to 120 sages.

And this body did some very important institutions that benefited and shaped the Jewish people

going forward.

This body was convened at a very pivotal point in our history.

At the beginning of the second temple era, at that time the nation was undergoing vast

sea changes, maybe most notable is the fact that prophecy was going extinct.

This was the twilight period of prophecy.

Prophecy was waning, it was coming to an end.

And from that point forward, there is no longer going to be any new books of the Tanakh

of the Bible, because the books of the Tanakh are only written by prophecy, via prophecy.

And therefore there is going to have to be a period, a turnover period where the books

of the Tanakh are sealed.

And then we're moving forward, as I like to joke, it's a non-profit era.

No longer do we have this incredibly helpful asset that the nation has a direct connection

with God via prophecy.

Moreover, we're going to have a second temple, and the temple will be built in Jerusalem,

but it's not going to have the same power and glamour and holiness as the first temple.

So we live in a temple era, but it's not quite the same.

A lot of the vessels of the temple are missing, and a lot of the miracles that were ever

present in the first temple will not exist in the second temple.

And also, the nation is going to be divided, Jews going to exile, and even though that's

very rough, initially, they do well, and they settle down, and they plant roots in their

new home.

And then a contingent goes back to the Holy Land, goes back to Jerusalem, rebuilds the

temple.

But from that point forward, you have Jews living everywhere.

You have a stattered nation.

You have Jews in the land and Jews in the diaspora in many different places.

Moreover, there is a temple, but we don't have sovereignty, and there's a lot of external

threats that are constantly looming from various different enemies.

And even internally, the nation is driven by various different break-off groups, factionalism,

and sectarianism.

So for all these threats, there's a body that's convened, men of the Great Assembly, and

they are instituting some very important changes or edicts that will help position the nation

going forward.

For example, the most notable one, perhaps, is the canon, the biblical canon.

We have 24 books of the canon, who decided what's included, and what's excluded, the

men of the Great Assembly.

They also instituted the canonized prayer text.

The text that we say in our prayer, the Amida prayer, was canonized by the men of the

Great Assembly.

Well, the top of the stripes, this, it says, amongst this group, were the end of the

prophets, the waning period, the twilight period of prophecy.

As of the stripe, he is the one who is most associated with this body, and his student,

and his successor, as high priest, is Shimon, Hatsadik, Shimon, the righteous.

He was a high priest for 40 years, and he's like the last member.

He's the revenant of the men of the Great Assembly.

And that period, that period where prophecy ends, and the nation transitions to its new way

of resisting, that's when, really, we see the beginning of the massive, explosive growth

and development of oral Torah.

So, maybe that's why, Shimon, the righteous, is like a fitting starting point for the

sages to be mentioned in the Mishnah.

Now, Rambam describes some of the nature of the Mishnah.

To the Mishnah, again, it's all the laws that are assembled in 60 plus books, across

six orders, but how was it written?

He tells us it was written very succinctly.

Everything was written very precisely, very sharply, very closely, very clearly, but with

the fewest possible words.

The word of the Mishnah is absolutely packed with meaning, and it's teaching you all sorts

of different ideas, but it doesn't spell it all out.

It's unparalleled, clarity and precision and such synchness, and that's of course a positive.

But of course, weaker students who don't have that same panoramic overview of Torah,

and don't have that same intelligence, they can actually benefit for spelling out

all the details.

If you have a verbose explanation where you unpack an idea and you designate four or five,

six, seven, eight different ideas that are all found in one word of the Mishnah, the

weaker students benefit when things are spelled out, which is actually what the Talmud

is as I do as we shall see in just a bit.

It primarily is written as a commentary to the Mishnah and to explain all the secrets

included in the Mishnah.

You open up a book of Talmud and it always starts off with a teaching of the Mishnah, one

or two or three lines, and then it has pages and pages of elaboration that it's exactly

what the Mishnah is trying to say, and it will often post questions in a minute.

We have this massive body of Mishnah, we have one teaching in this Mishnah, I want teaching

of that Mishnah and they seem to be at odds.

There's a contradiction.

The Mishnah and the Talmud written on top of the Mishnah, it's an enormous corpus, 60

plus books, 523 chapters that Ramam tells us, thousands and thousands of individual Mishnah

teachings, and the Talmud is waiting a minute.

This Mishnah made sense, but it is in direct conflict with that other Mishnah.

You have a problem, you have to resolve it.

The Talmud will spell it all out, what the question is, and maybe what exactly precisely

is the difference, and how to resolve these two apparently incompatible teachings in

the Mishnah.

And it shows us how if you read the Mishnah very carefully with great scrutiny, you could

see the precision of that distinction that Talmud draws out between two teachings, it's

actually found in the actual words of the Mishnah.

But of course, to appreciate that, you have to be a great sage who has a panoramid view

of all of Torah.

You read the Mishnah and it doesn't identify which case it's addressing, what they're

referring to.

Now Talmud is this case or that case, is it this, is it that, or is it something else?

And it can't be this, for this reason, it can't be that for that reason, and it can't

be the third thing for the third reason, it must be this fourth thing.

Talmud is doing all the deductive reasoning that just included the words of the Mishnah.

And of course, the Mishnah could have saved us from all that trouble, but it's written

in a way with that crystal clear precision that if you did all the analysis and turned

over every stone, you would arrive at the true intention of the Mishnah.

You could deduce exactly what the Mishnah is saying, we have to do a ton of work to

unpack it.

Now I'll read you to the prince, who's the architect of the Mishnah, to him it was just

obvious, because he had crystal clear intelligence, razor sharp intelligence, and all these

distinctions that we worked so hard to try to understand, in Talmud, it was all obvious

to him.

But over generations, there was need for more elaboration and more explication.

And that's why, following the Mishnah, we have many, many more books that are written.

And then I'm going to list them.

A student of Rameshwar of the Prince was Rabbi Riyah, and he wrote a book that's an expansion

of the Mishnah, to explain and clarify the themes that are unclear in the Mishnah.

That's known as the Tosefta, the word Tosefta means to add additions, additions to the Mishnah.

And everything that's in the Tosefta, you can actually deduce from the Mishnah.

It's just, you have to work really, really, really hard to unpack and analyze and understand

and probe every Mishnah to understand all the laws that are explicated in the Tosefta.

But he wrote the standalone work to make it easier to understand the Mishnah.

And that's not the only such work, not the only post-Mishnahic work.

There's a whole class of works known as Briso's, meaning teachings that are external.

Teachings not included in the Mishnah.

So you have, for example, the Sifra.

That is what's known as midrash halacha.

Briso's, teachings not included in the Mishnah, on the book of Leviticus, on Bayekra.

Also known as Taurus Koenim, the Torah of the priests.

And then you have Sifri, which is the same idea, on the books of Babidbar, Numbers, and Devarm.

And there's many, many more such works.

And the Talmud would often cite not only the teachings of the Mishnah,

but also teachings of various Briso's, not included in the Mishnah.

We have the Great Canon, and that's the Mishnah.

And that's codified and organized and canonized by Rebidra of the Prince.

And we have all these other texts written subsequently to help elaborate and expand

and identify areas of lack of clarity in the Mishnah.

But again, it can all be found in the Mishnah.

He used to have to work really, really hard to unpack it.

But none of those other works Ramam tells us are quite as clear, as concise, as sharp,

as the Mishnah.

And therefore, when we look at the Canon of the Mishnah and all the other Mishniyik era works,

the Mishnah always takes precedence over all those other works.

Which is why if you see in the Talmud, Talmud say, wait, we have a Mishnah,

and we see a Briso, which is a teaching from the Mishniyik era, but none included the Mishnah.

And they seem to be at odds.

If we cannot reconcile that, we will always favor the Mishnah over

the Briso.

The Mishnah was accepted universally, the great sages,

and the ordinary sages from top to bottom, everyone praised and lauded and extolled the Mishnah.

And that's why following this era, even though you have all these other works,

the principal study would be the Mishnah.

And every generation, after the Mishniyik era,

which, to simplify matters, is around the year 200 of the Common Era,

it's about 150 years or so after Temple's destroyed.

Every generation would delve into the Mishnah, would investigate the Mishnah,

would try to understand and explain the Mishnah to the best of their abilities.

And it's true over the course of the decades and the centuries after the Mishnah.

Some disputes arose in exactly how to understand some portions of the Mishnah.

But in every single generation, following the Mishnah,

there wasn't a single generation that there wasn't further analysis

and further laws and further insights deduced from the Mishnah itself,

included in those terse succinct, sharply written words,

are so many laws that were uncovered by future generations.

It was obvious to the author it was only clarified later with deep penetrating study.

For hundreds of years, before the advent of the Talmud,

the Mishnah was the principal book and work studied to understand the oral Torah.

And then came the era of the Talmud.

The sages that followed the Mishnah,

everyone taught and everyone understood and everyone clarified the Mishnah

and everyone deduced and expounded upon the Mishnah.

And over the course of the many years and generations,

many more teachings were developed on top of the Mishnah.

And at a certain point,

there were sages that decided to organize all of those teachings

and expoundings of the Mishnah into a standalone work known as the Talmud.

And the two sages that most embody this era,

the end of the Mishnah are Ravenna and Ravashi.

Ravashi is to Talmud,

what Ravager the Prince is to Mishnah.

He is the principal architect of the Talmud.

And he did to the Talmud, to the elaboration of the Mishnah,

what Ravager the Prince did to the Mishnah itself.

Ravager the Prince, he collected, he organized, he canonized,

he codified all the teachings from Moshe to his point.

Ravashi did the same thing, he collected and canonized,

and organized all the teachings from Ravager the Prince,

up to his point, and organized it, and presented it, and assembled it,

took all the words of the sages, all the insights of the various sages

over the various generations, the sages who penetrated the depths of the Mishnah.

All the explanations, everything that was expounded upon the Mishnah,

all the laws that were deduced from the Mishnah, he collected them,

he organized them, he clarified them, and he canonized them

with great skill and wisdom, and he wrote the Babylonian Talmud.

What's the purpose of the Talmud?

What's the goal of the Talmud?

So again, Ramam tells us there are four distinct goals in writing the Talmud.

The first goal, the principal goal, we already spoke about this,

to explain the Mishnah.

Every teaching of the Talmud is always based upon a Mishnah.

The boots of Talmud are elaborations on the boots of Mishnah.

So for example, the first book in Mishnah is the Book of Brachos,

which means blessings.

You have a Book of Brachos in the Mishnah, and you have the Book of Brachos in the Talmud,

because the Talmud is the elaboration, the explanation,

the further analysis, the unpacking of the Mishnah.

The Mishnah is written very succinctly.

To unpack it all, we have the Talmud.

To explain what the Mishnah is talking about,

that's what the Talmud does.

Moreover, all the disputes that may have arisen,

since the writing of the Mishnah,

to record them, to document them, to explain them,

to explain the various arguments of either side.

There was a dispute that arose in a given Mishnah.

Rabbi Etz says one thing, Rabbi, why is this something else?

And what's the argument?

And what was the debate?

And what were the proofs?

What's the evidence?

And which side, the Talmud tells us, which side is favored?

Which side is more accurate?

The elaboration and the explanation of the Mishnah,

that's the first and principal goal of the Talmud.

The second goal is to render halachic rulings.

Suppose there is a dispute.

In the words of the Mishnah,

in the explanation of the Mishnah,

in the new laws deduced from the Mishnah.

Which opinion is going to be the one that we follow?

We have great sages.

You and I can't come and say,

oh, I think that this sage makes more sense,

and therefore I'm going to follow that really.

We don't have that ability to do that.

We're not in the same stratosphere as these sages.

The Talmud itself took upon itself the test

of identifying which one of the sages is the halachic ruling following

and which one is not.

Both of them, by the way, are included.

You'll see both positions, even multiple positions,

more than two,

that are presented and debated in the dialogue of the Talmud.

But the Talmud will invariably come with a conclusion

which one of the various different opinions is the halacha.

Not to make this a little bit more complicated.

The Talmud does that,

but it doesn't always tell you that it's doing it.

It doesn't always tell you where it's doing it.

So you can have a dispute,

various different opinions in Hanna-Sanamishnah,

and the bottom line is,

we don't know,

it doesn't say in that same page of Talmud,

what the law is?

You'll have to know all of Talmud to know

if there's some sort of rule, for example.

Is there a rule that you can follow to identify

which one of these stages is the halacha?

Or is this some sort of part of the Talmud the whole ocean?

And sometimes the answer to your question will not be found

where the principal discussion of that question is presented in the Talmud.

That's why you need to have great, great stages to know it all

and to be able to identify where the halacha is rendered in the Talmud.

But that's the second goal.

Go number one to explain the mission.

Go number two is to explain the halacha.

Go number three.

The third goal of Talmud is to write and record all the new insights.

All the novel matters that all the stages

from every generation deduced from the mission.

And not just to say what they said,

but how they deduced it from the mission.

What are their proofs on what basis

did they have these new insights?

So we have new laws deduced from the mission.

Clarified from the mission.

And new decrees and edicts that were enacted from the time of the mission

from the time of RPG to the prince until the time of the end of the Talmud

until the time of Ravashi, the architect of the Talmud.

That's the third goal.

And the fourth goal.

That is to codify the agaric teachings taught by the sages.

Now what does this mean?

There are two styles, two structures throughout the Talmud.

There's one known as halacha, also known as smightsa,

which is the Arabic name.

And one known as agadita or hagada.

And they're almost opposite in how they're presented

and how they're designed.

When you see a discussion in a matter of law,

it'll always be very, very clear what the intention of the Talmud is.

No, it may be hard to follow because it's written with great depth.

And you really need to have a lot of training before you jump into it.

And even once you jump into it, you have to really understand.

You have to really bring every part of yourself to the study.

But you know, with the goals, we have a mission with a law.

Well, where does this law apply?

And in what case are we talking about?

And what are the various different offshoot discussions that can arise?

And different opinions, different proofs.

And this proof and that proof and the rebuttals of the proof and so on.

And it gets very, very complicated.

But at least you know what the subject matter is.

And the goal is to understand it and to turn over every stone

until you know exactly what the bottom line is.

It's hard, but it's overt.

It's clear.

There's a completely different style and structure found in a Talmud.

Where there's no debate.

There's no dialogue.

And it's not clear at all.

These are agatic teachings, non-halachic teachings.

Teachings are related to ethics, to theology, to philosophy.

And those are presented in almost the opposite way.

A parable, a humbly, an analogy, a story, an apparent exaggeration.

Something that you read, it's clear it's not literal.

It can't be literal.

What's this?

You have alachic teachings, very direct, very clear, very logical.

It's incapable of being misinterpreted.

It means misinterpreted.

You cannot understand it because you're not smart enough.

That's fine.

But at least the subject matter and the objective is to reveal, reveal, reveal.

And then there's a whole different system.

The non-halachic portions of the Talmud.

And the whole intention is to conceal, conceal, conceal.

And that's the fourth objective of the Talmud.

To include all those teachings that are a non-halachic matters.

And there's a whole little essay here.

Many essay in his mega essay about that section of Talmud.

Those types of teachings in the Talmud.

It's very important when you read that in the Talmud.

And it doesn't make sense to you and it's written so differently.

And you read it and you don't see any insight.

Do not disregard those teachings in the Talmud.

Don't think it's not beneficial.

It has no value.

That's where our sages embedded,

hid, concealed, all the secrets, all the insights,

all the riddles and wonders and most precious and cherished secrets are found there.

But you have to really understand how to understand it.

And you might need a lot of prerequisites to understand it.

Those teachings, when you have everything that you need to appreciate it

and you have the intelligent perspective to understand it,

you'll understand all the secrets

and there's no good that can rival the good of the secrets that you're going to learn.

You'll understand from them Godly matters.

And you'll understand from them the true matters that men of wisdom conceal and hide

and do not want to reveal all the secrets, all the service of all the philosophers

and all the generations are all found there.

Concealed, masked, behind the veneer of a story, of an analogy,

of some statement, of some illusion, of some hint, of some parable,

of some exaggeration, and you read it at service level, you understand zero.

If you approach those teachings with a superficial perspective,

you will be very disappointed.

You'll find matters that seem to be distant from the intelligence

and seem to not carry any benefit.

Rome's telling us here,

included in the top of the fourth goal of the Talmud

are all these agatic teachings

that are deliberately written and designed in a way

that they could be very easily misinterpreted

and could very easily be disregarded as being not valuable.

The halachic teachings are designed to be understood.

Every stone will be unturned to reveal the truth.

Now, that's true for the halachic teachings.

The teachings of the agatic nature, it's almost the opposite.

They're designed with being completely susceptible to be misunderstood.

Only with great, great effort and great, great understanding of all the different preconditions,

the prerequisites only then can their true meaning be derived.

Only with great effort can those riddles be decrypted?

Can those secrets be revealed?

Can those great insights be unraveled and understood?

With two types of teachings,

and again, if you open the Talmud and you find two teachings that are right next to each other

and you don't even have like a different font,

that's the exact same words of the body of the Talmud,

and it's a completely different style.

Why were these parts of the Talmud designed in this manner?

Ramses, I'll tell you why.

The first reason is because this will help sharpen the intelligence

and awaken and open the heart of the students.

Well, something is a riddle, it's a mystery.

It's something which is encrypted.

There's something beneath the service and you know it,

but it's totally unfathomable to you.

You have to work really, really hard to understand to crack that code.

By doing that, you sharpen your mind and you learn to open your heart,

and that's very valuable.

Moreover, a second reason why the Talmud is,

or the agatic teachings of the Talmud are concealed,

it's to make it blind to the eyes of the fool.

Just like when you write something which is encrypted,

someone who reads it looks like gibberish unless you know the secret,

unless you know the code of how to unpack it.

These teachings will appear to be gibberish to fools.

They don't deserve any connection with these magnificent secrets.

And if they were to be told those secrets,

they wouldn't even appreciate them.

And they would ridicule them because of their foolishness.

That's why our sages don't reveal those secrets.

The fools don't have enough intelligence enough insight enough understanding

and open heart a sharp mind to understand it.

And even the sages themselves,

we think of these sages as giants, titans.

They themselves wouldn't teach their colleagues these secrets.

What are we? We're nothing compared to those sages.

He records a very, very amusing story in the Talmud.

There were two sages that each one that was an expert in one domain of the Sotaraka.

One of them was an expert in mysebrecious, the act of Genesis,

which is a codename for one domain of all the secrets.

And the other one was an expert in the other domain of all the secrets,

known as Mysebrecava, the act of the chariot.

So think of it as Genesis, chapter 1, and Ezekiel, chapter 1.

These are the two codenames for all the Kabbalistic, arcane, Sotaraka secrets.

So the minute deal, these two say this minute deal,

I'll teach you what I know. You teach me what you know.

That's fair. I will both become experts in both of these domains.

So they agreed and the sage who knew the act of Genesis.

So he taught him all the secrets of the act of Genesis.

Is it okay now? It's your turn to teach me.

Sorry, bud. Too late. I'm not teaching you those secrets.

That's what Talmud tells us.

It would be a big mistake, first I think, that this great sage had an evil heart

and wanted to deny wisdom to his friend.

God forbid to make that claim accusation against the sage.

And we can imagine a claim that he wanted to withhold it from him

so he could lord or I know more than you know.

I could have supremacy of you because I know more.

And then you told me your secret, but I didn't tell you mine.

These are characteristics we would never or choose our sages of having.

So why did he withhold teaching those secrets to his friend?

Because he determined that he was worthy of learning those secrets.

But his friend was not worthy of learning his secrets.

Even great sages, not all of them are worthy.

And they had to make determinations who was worthy, who was not worthy.

And the Ramam sites the very famous verse in Song of Songs,

Devash Vechalav, honey and milk underneath your tongue.

There are things that are very sweet, very desirable, very enjoyable.

There are honey, there are milk, but they must be under your tongue.

They must be hidden. They're not on top of your tongue.

You don't share them.

If you do share them, it's only via hints, illusions.

And a person who wants to understand has to pray that God removes the mask of foolishness from their heart.

And make sure they know all the introductory materials, all the prerequisites.

And maybe they might won't doubt them with the wisdom to understand what those hints mean, what those illusions mean.

As David prayed,

Gal, a knife, I beat in the philosophy of saitha, uncover my eyes.

And let me see the wonders of your Torah.

And if God does uncover your eyes.

And God does show you what you are worthy to understand.

It's appropriate for you to hide it.

Hide it within yourself.

Underneath your tongue, do not share it.

And if you do want to share it, do it only via hint or illusion.

And only to someone who has complete intellect.

And someone who's renowned in their pursuit of truth.

And someone who bears all the good and proper character traits and understanding.

These secrets must forever remain secrets.

And therefore they must be hidden and concealed.

And when the Talmud wanted to share their secrets, they hid them and they concealed them.

And all the fools who read it don't understand anything.

And all the great stages who read it.

Each one according to their intelligence and their worthiness to understand these subjects,

understands deeper and deeper.

You don't spell these out to the fools.

These secrets are addressed at length in the Talmud.

In the agatic portions of the Talmud.

But they're hidden behind the mast, behind the veneer.

Of stories, of homilies, of parables and the light.

And then he adds another reason.

Another reason why the agata is concealed.

Because if you have a deep secret.

And you want to give people to have a little bit of association with it.

They're starting off their career.

They're a young student.

They're a child.

They can understand the parable.

They can understand the story, the riddle.

And then maybe when they mature.

And they develop themselves.

And their intelligence grows.

And their knowledge grows.

And their heart opens.

All those riddles began to make sense.

They all click.

They all fall into place.

And thus it's a stepping stone towards understanding true wisdom.

For this reason, the sages organized their words in homilies and allusions.

So if you open up the Talmud, says the Ramam, you open up the Talmud.

And you see a teaching.

And you don't understand it.

Don't say, oh, this teaching makes no sense.

God forbid.

You say instead, my mind, my intellect, is weak, is underdeveloped.

And that's why I don't understand it.

Point inwardly to your own lack of understanding.

And it's okay, it's not an insult.

Not all minds are created equal since the Ramam.

Just as people have different temperaments.

People have different understandings.

And some people have a more developed mind.

And some people have a mind that's not quite actualized.

Don't say, the teaching is foolish.

Say, I need some work until I'm ready to understand it.

And he gives this beautiful analogy.

There was a bright person.

He was a physician.

He knew arithmetic and music and physics.

And he's bright.

But he knows nothing about astronomy or geometry.

He can be intelligent in one area.

And it's hard for him to understand matters that are outside of his domain of expertise.

And the Ram says, this person is trying to...

He's having a discussion about measuring the circumference of the Sun.

How could you possibly measure the circumference of the Sun?

It's just a small little speck in this guy.

You can be very bright, very intelligent.

And you can be an expert in many domains, many disciplines.

But because you are lacking in some domains,

you will think it's absurd that you could calculate the circumference of the Sun.

How's the puzzle so far away?

I could really see the whole thing.

It's so small.

How could anyone possibly measure it?

But, says the Ram.

If you would learn geometry and learn all of its theorems,

and study the authoritative text on the subject,

he calls this book a book by Talamai.

Al Maghesti.

I'm sure it's a riveting read.

If he would train himself with all the disciplines needed to understand this area of wisdom,

he will be as convinced that we can know the circumference of the Sun

as he is convinced that we know that the Sun exists.

And if this reality is true with the sciences,

imagine how much more true it is when it comes to the most difficult subjects of the mole,

the theological questions, the understanding of God and His ways and His deeds.

If you don't have the background, if you don't have the necessary prerequisites,

you're doomed.

See, you read a teaching in the Talmud,

and it's baffling, and it's unfathomable, and it's peculiar,

and it makes no sense.

Don't dismiss it.

You need to have more understanding.

You are ignorant in what it takes to understand it.

That's okay.

But don't disregard it.

Even the sages of the times in the Talmud,

they were very brilliant, and they were very diligent,

and they would embrace the intellectual and spiritual,

and they would push themselves away from anything carnal or physical.

They view themselves as being inferior to the sages that preceded them.

The Talmud itself says, like,

us, we're nothing compared to the earlier generations.

The hearts of the earlier generations were as open as wide as vast as an auditorium,

and our hearts are as open as a pinnacle.

These are statements from the sages of the Talmud,

and their hearts were way more open than ours.

We are much more inferior to them in intelligence and wisdom.

God forbid we ever ridicule the words of the sages.

And he mentions what the Talmud says of someone God forbid

were to ridicule the words of the sages.

They have a very, very severe punishment.

That is the fourth purpose of the Talmud.

To codify and to write the aggadic portions,

those secrets of the Torah that are only hinted to,

with allusions and stories and parables.

After the Talmud was written, after of Ashi finished his work on the Talmud,

all the sages lauded the Talmud.

It became undeniable that the spirit of God was within him.

The Ramtazas, not all words of Mishnah, have a parallel work of Talmud.

If there are sixty, sixty-one, sixty-three depends on account.

But of Mishnah, there are only thirty-five buts of Talmud.

In the order of Zirahim, Zirahim is the agricultural laws.

You only find one book of Talmud.

Book of Brahmos.

In the order of Moeid, you find all buts of Mishnah have a book of Talmud,

with the exception of the book of Stullam.

In the order of Nasim, women, you find all buts of Mishnah have a book of Talmud.

That's parallel to it.

In the order of Nizikim of Damages, you find all butsides for Ideas and Avos.

In the order of Katsim, you find all buts of Midos and Kinim.

In the last order, the order of Taharos, you only find Book of Mida.

It's the only one of those twelve books of Mishnah that have an accompanying book of Talmud.

In the Talzas, there was the Babylonian Talmud.

And there was the Jerusalem Talmud that was done by Rabbi Yohanan.

And in the Jerusalem Talmud, you find actually more buts of Talmud written upon the Mishnah.

You actually find five full orders of Mishnah covered by the Talmud,

meaning the order of agriculture of Zirahim,

and of Katsim as well, are included in the Jerusalem Talmud even though today we don't have.

We know that it exists, but we don't have the Jerusalem Talmud version on the order of Katsim of the sacrificial laws.

So if you want to understand Taharos, and there's no Talmud, not a Jerusalem Talmud, not a Babylonian Talmud,

what do you do?

You have to go to the Tosefta.

Remember the recall that there were the post-Mishnah at worst at Tosefta and the various bresos.

And the collected teachings throughout that were scattered throughout the rest of the Talmud,

that's how you will understand it.

There are more continues.

After the Talmud, everyone just studied the Talmud.

That became the canon.

You're going to add nor subtract from the Talmud.

And in the period of the Gaonim, the Gaonim, they did not write complete explanations.

There isn't an equivalent work following the Talmud.

On the Talmud itself, he writes that the Gaonim, which is the period that follows the Talmudic era,

some of them wanted to write it, but they lived short lives.

Some of them were busy with other things.

And some did write works.

Some in Hebrew, some in Arabic, the Halakhas, Gadolos, Halakhas, Kitanos, Halakhas, Pseukas.

These are various different works that try to organize and cut off the laws of the Talmud.

And then you have the words of the riff of Rabbi Yitzhak Al-Fassi, and the Ramam writes about him with such reverence.

These words, the words of the riff of Al-Fassi, which by the way you'll find in every version of Talmud towards the back.

You'll find a commentary of the riff of Al-Fassi.

And he says there was no mistakes.

There were no mistakes in the writings of Al-Fassi.

There were only ten mistakes.

His words are flawless.

I have found fewer than ten mistakes.

However, each of these teachings had its merits.

And now it's our turn.

And the Ramam is kind of introducing what his role is to play.

His role is to play, is to study all the works of the preceding generations.

And the Ramam says, I've collected and organized all the teachings from the riff Al-Fassi.

And my father, who was his principal teacher, in the great Ibn Magash, the re Magash, one of the great stages of that era.

And he writes about him again with such amazing praise that his teaching was so deep and so profound.

There's no one like him. He's completely unparalleled.

And the Ramam says, I have assembled the laws on these halachos.

And I'm going to write a commentary on them all.

And up to this point, the Ramam is now, he's in his 20s by the way, and he's writing these words.

Ram will live the long life and he'll end up doing all the things that he's sent up to do.

But up to this point, I've written a commentary on three orders of Mishnah and Talmud.

And I'm going to write more. And I'm also writing a commentary on the book of Hulun because that's very important.

And the Ramam then continues to detail more about what his work on the Mishnah is going to be.

We have about one more, I would say, one more discussion to finish the Ramam's introduction to Mishnah.

For those of you all who are counting, this is our tenth installment on this subject.

And today we learned all about what the Mishnah was about and what the Talmud is about.

And how the Mishnah and Talmud are connected.

And the four different purposes of the Talmud.

And how the Mishnah was such depth and profundity and precision and succinctness, which is a plus.

But also for us who come subsequently, we have a lot of work to do to unpack and understand the Mishnah.

Please don't next time we will finish this introduction.

And we're going to see about how the Ramam frames his work as the commentary to Mishnah.

And then please that will continue in our study and investigation and immersion into various other areas of Torah philosophy,

Torah theology, Torah eschatology.

Please don't, with the help of the money.

Maybe this is rabbi.

We'll be at jimbo.com.

I look forward to your questions and comments and your feedback.