Word: talmudic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...theater, is the dramatic equivalent of dozing off. To begin with, the story does not lend itself to a willing suspension of disbelief. The setting is a Polish ghetto town about a century ago. Yentl (Tovah Feldshuh) is an extremely bright girl who relishes reading and discussing the Talmud and the Torah with her learned father. It is strictly taboo for a Jewish woman to be studying these sacred texts. Yentl is precocious and prone to dispute with her elders, like the young Jesus...
...Jews. His concern is a basic, agonizing one for any believer: How do you preserve faith in the Bible in a world that seems increasingly faithless? For Protestants it is an especially poignant question. Besides the Scriptures, Roman Catholics have the authority of tradition, Jews the guidance of the Talmud. But Protestantism bases its faith on the Bible alone. Its truth is essential; if the Bible falls, faith topples...
...Bible's first five books, the Pentateuch or Torah ("teachings"), had probably been canonized by Jews as the core of their sacred writings by the 5th century B.C. But even before that, there was growing up along with the Scriptures a body of oral interpretation eventually codified in the Talmud. It includes legal judgments known as halakhah and pious elaborations of biblical stories known as aggadah. Even in matters of law, however, the rabbis were not literalists. An "eye for an eye," for example, was not construed strictly (as it was in the Hammurabic Code). Instead, monetary compensation was deemed...
...world in itself-the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidim, who practice their mystical, joyous brand of Jewish Orthodoxy in a close-knit community in Brooklyn. The bearded, black-frocked Lubavitchers are followed on their way through their daily life-pausing to pray in a delicatessen, arguing fine points of the Talmud in a yeshiva, gathering for a discourse from their revered leader, Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, in the synagogue. But there are also splendid celebrations. A bris-the ceremony of circumcision-is majestic and moving. And a rollicking, dancing wedding party, the beards flying as the festive crowd reels to Hasidic tunes...
...Syrian village of Maloula, most of whose 1,000 inhabitants are Christian. The roots of their everyday speech go back at least to the 10th century B.C.; Aramaic was the language of parts of the Old Testament books of Daniel and Ezra, much of the Jerusalem Talmud and of the common people at the time of Christ, when Hebrew was used principally by the upper classes. Maloula, isolated in the hills, held out for centuries against both the Moslem religion and the Arabic tongue. The isolation has now been broken by a nearby superhighway, but the village still evokes...