Q&A: How Much Talmud Can You Learn
How Much Talmud Can You Learn
Question
Tell me, Rabbi, how much Talmud can a person learn? What’s so interesting there? We’ve seen a hundred, two hundred topics—so what now? You learn this one from here, and that one, and they disagree about this and that, and you can analyze it from this angle or that angle. It just seems like all kinds of people filling in slots, as if—I don’t get what the big deal is. And I’m asking about the Rabbi himself too: does it always stay interesting? Like, how do you not exhaust it and move on to something else? I don’t know. Thanks.
Answer
First of all, you don’t learn because it’s interesting, but because it’s a commandment / important.
But beyond that, I find it very interesting. Much more than other fields, about which one could also ask how people spend their whole lives dealing with them (the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Hasidism, history, mathematics, philosophy, biology). It’s more varied; it has connections that keep revealing themselves to you more and more over time. You can build fascinating structures that tie different areas together, and more. And of course it touches your life and the foundations of your thinking and conduct.
Discussion on Answer
Yossi, relax, soul, relax. Writing in everyday language is basic decency, in the fullest sense of the term. If that’s not polite, then many wonderful people I know are just common beasts. Not everyone has to write like Shakespeare in order to deserve a proper response from people in authority.
Everything is fine, friends. Relax. That’s a completely reasonable way to address me.
Dear Mr. Tzim!!!!
Before you learn Talmud—maybe כדאי to take a quick course in the laws of basic decency and manners.
“Tell me, Rabbi”—is that how one should speak to a rabbi? Especially when you’re asking his opinion, which shows you respect him.