Talmud

What seemed like an ages ago, I took a class at my Religious School regarding the Talmud and how it can be applied both when it was written and today. Today in Jewish History, we learned about the Talmud. The Mishna is the written version of the Oral law that Yehuddah HaNasi wrote down in 200 CE, and the Gemara is the first set of commentary done on the Mishna. Together, the Mishna and the Gemara make the Talmud. As we said today, all of the different Rabbis who commented on the Mishna have different interpretations of the oral law. In my class at my synagogue, it was really hard to connect with the examples that were given to reflect an issue revenant at the time the Talmud was first written down. When the examples were things such as, what do you do if your neighbors sheep dies or is injured when you’re borrowing it, it’s hard for us to decide because we have not been placed in similar situations. However, we then applied that same situation in a more modern form. The most equivalent version of this in modern times is to consider what should be done if you borrow a friends phone, and you break it while using it or return it a worse condition than you received it. Questions similar to these are made for us to question, and most of our answers were based off of the morals that we were raised on. Very often, we found out that all of our morals seemed to be related to Judaism in some way, but we also thought that many of the Rabbis interpretation seemed crazy, even for an ancient civilization. The main point of the eight week class, was to see how we interpreted Jewish laws and how relevant they still are to our everyday lives.