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In this week’s Talmud study, Jewishness is not just moral and theological matters. It is a way of life.

This week, Talmudic rabbis seek righteousness in the Bible’s tales of vice, weakness, and human frailty

This week, deduction and analogy propel the Talmud from the mundane to the miraculous

This week’s Talmud study reveals legal debates that refine the limits and nature of inherently abstract concepts

When new inventions made widespread sinning the norm, ancient rabbis adapted. The Talmud’s God approved.

The origin of a famous anecdote shines light on the compromises of Conservative and Reform Judaism

A Talmudic discussion of Hanukkah and Sabbath candles leads to a lesson in the sacred and profane

Study of the Talmud’s second tractate reveals how the rabbis stuck to logic and made it sacred

The last chapter of the first tractate brings modern readers back to sex, bowel movements, and thunder

This week’s Daf Yomi considers—with Chaucerian verve—whether a rabbinic elite spoke for the Jewish people

One Talmudic rabbi’s prayers work, while others’ fall on deaf ears. Is humility more pleasing to God than pomp?

A coup at the rabbinic academy deposes Gamliel and unleashes a torrent of questions

In this week’s Talmud reading, the soul addresses God, but the body has its own agenda

This week’s Daf Yomi reframes the debate over the primacy of force or scholarship in Jewish values

Sages in a superstitious age accepted the existence of invisible devils and the use of magic to render them visible