Word: talmud
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...battered leatherbound Talmud that Herman Wouk reads every morning provides instruction for almost everything in life. It failed him, however, when he faced something he had never before attempted: writing a television script. After turning out eight hefty novels and several plays, Wouk found that adapting The Winds of War to the small screen was something he could learn only by doing. Not even his five-year stint of writing radio gags for Comedian Fred Allen in the 1930s prepared him for the task, except that then, as now, he was writing for someone else. "I've come full...
...dictums about food, home furnishings and the proper cowing of a child. She has a deep-freeze heart, and Jake had been stored there until he could be thawed out by externally approved success at the newspaper. For Jake's mother and father, the Times is the Talmud...
Diagonally across Seventh Avenue from the hulking home of the Knicks, Rangers, and, for a week, the Democratic National Committee, sits a blind Jew reading the Talmud (ancient biblical interpretations) in braille. He wears no sunglasses and shamelessly allows his empty eyes to wander over the shuffling stream of pedestrians. Every few minutes a passerby drops some coins in the old Jew's plastic dish, and he nods, mumbling a thank you. But his crudely lettered sign does not beg for charity; it states simply, "Blind Man's Newsstand." For 30 cents you do more than ease your conscience...
Justice is something the community prefers to handle itself. Disputes are arbitrated by a panel of the Diamond Dealers Club composed of three or more men whose logic has been sharpened by intense study of the Talmud, the volumes of Jewish law. The decisions of these scholars, who act like the Jewish religious courts that existed in Europe hundreds of years ago, are law to those in the diamond trade...
...upwardly mobile and socially inecure believed as fervently as The Four Hundred that there existed somewhere?in the mind of God, perhaps, or the graven tablets of Emily Post?an absolute standard of The Correct. All contingencies were covered in this elaborate system of law, as refined as the Talmud and sometimes as difficult to interpret. But trying to cultivate manners today is like buying a house in Grosse Pointe and discovering that the previous tenants were the Symbionese Liberation Army: the place is a mess. The old fixtures don't work; the walls are smeared with ego; the foundation...