Understand in about 5 minutes
A selection of rabbinic wisdom, parable, and legend drawn from the Talmud, the Midrashim, and the Kabbala, gathered to let readers meet the inner life of classical Judaism in its own words.
Mind Map
Core Message
The editor's introduction insists there was no purely secular sphere for the rabbinic Jew. Sanitary rules, civil law, table manners, and prayer sit side by side, because the meanest function in life had to be brought into relation with the great Divine.
Much of the material is Agada: parable, anecdote, and legend told between legal arguments. Truth is carried by a fox at a riverbank or a man with two bunches of myrtle, rather than stated as abstract doctrine.
When a stranger asks Hillel for the whole law while standing on one leg, the answer is the golden rule. Charity, hospitality, and honest dealing recur throughout as the practical center of piety.
The sages search every word and letter of the Bible, drawing new meaning from each repetition. The Midrashim extend this into legendary commentary, and the Kabbala into mystical and numerical readings of the text.
Summary
This volume is an anthology, not a single book. Maurice H. Harris gathers translated extracts from three bodies of classical Jewish writing: the Talmud, the Midrashim, and the Kabbala, with closing sections of proverbs and notes on the fasts and festivals. Each part opens with a short introduction that places the material for a general reader.
The Talmud, Harris explains, grew from the idea that an oral law accompanied the written law given to Moses. Generations of rabbis searched Scripture with great thoroughness, deduced new rulings, and preserved the debates around them. The selections show two registers at once: the legal Halacha, exact and sometimes hair-splitting, and the homiletic Agada of stories, biography, folklore, and humor that breaks up the legal discussion.
The Midrashim section turns to legendary exposition of the Bible. These are figurative readings rather than literal ones, retelling and expanding episodes about Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Joseph, and others. The extracts often hang a vivid tale on a single odd word or pointing in the Hebrew, treating the text as a seedbed for narrative and moral lesson.
The Kabbala section introduces the mystical tradition. Harris distinguishes a symbolical Kabbala, with its rules of Gematria, Notricon, and Temurah for finding hidden senses in words and letters, from a real Kabbala concerned with the divine spheres, the names of God and the angels, and the secrets of creation. He illustrates the symbolical methods with playful English examples so the reader can see how they work.
The later pages collect proverbial sayings and traditions, then walk through Passover, Pentecost, the New Year, the Day of Atonement, and the other festivals. Read whole, the book is less an argument than a guided sampling. It tries to correct old caricatures of the Talmud by showing the wit, ethical seriousness, and imaginative range of the rabbinic mind across law, parable, and mysticism.
Key Concepts
The rabbinic tradition has two strands woven together: Halacha, the legal rulings and their debate, and Agada, the narrative, ethical, and folkloric material around them.
It explains the texture of the whole anthology. A page can move from an exact rule to a parable without warning, because the rabbis treated law and story as parts of one teaching.
Harris stresses that religion and state were one for the rabbinic Jew, so priestly law, civil law, and sanitary regulation appear in the same breath.
It guards against reading the Talmud as either pure scripture or pure legal code, and shows why the collection mixes the lofty and the everyday so freely.
Midrash is legendary, figurative commentary that draws expansive stories and lessons from small details of the biblical text, sometimes a single pointed word.
It models a way of reading where Scripture is never exhausted, and where imagination and interpretation are themselves acts of devotion.
Mental Models
Asked to teach the whole law while a man stands on one leg, Hillel reduces it to the golden rule and calls the rest commentary.
It offers a way to find the ethical core of a large tradition: name the one principle that organizes the rest, then treat the detail as its working out.
Rabbi Akiva compares Jews who would abandon study of the law to fish urged onto dry land: the danger of staying in the water is nothing next to the certain death of leaving it.
It is a model for weighing risks, choosing the peril native to your element over the false safety that removes you from the source of life.
Kabbalistic methods such as Gematria and Temurah treat each letter as a number or a swappable token, so a word can hide further meanings.
It shows a frame of mind that looks for a second, encoded layer beneath the surface of a text, useful to understand even where one does not adopt it.
Selected Quotes
Do not to others what you would not have others do to you.
Teach thy tongue to say, "I do not know."
Truth is heavy, therefore few care to carry it.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of Hebraic Literature, edited by Maurice H. Harris.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14368/pg14368.txt
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
An anthology of older rabbinic material; this Project Gutenberg text follows an edition issued by Tudor Publishing Co., New York, 1943.