The Oral Talmud

Episode 67: Sleight of Hand

“ Imagine you're reading some magician textbook, how to do magic… the magician is saying since he transferred the coin from his right hand to his left hand the coin disap

Episode 66: Rules of Interpretation

“This is a really great text to be learning because it shows that something as clear as day in the Torah doesn't mean what the words purport to mean. That doesn't stop th

Episode 65: Attractive Instability

“The process that made the eye for an eye a dead letter is exactly the same process that could be used to make the Leviticus against homosexuality a dead letter, and that

Episode 64: Showing Their Hand with Menachem Fisch

“ I'm always asked, 'You're obviously an anti-traditionalist, so why are you going back to the Talmud all the time?' An anti-traditionalist doesn't need an authoritative

Episode 63: Calculating Damages

“ When people say, ‘What makes something Jewish?’ A lot of times you're looking for some substantive answer to that, emphasizing the value of tikkun olam or whatever it m

Episode 62: The Rabbis and Gender with Gwynn Kessler

“[The Rabbis] show us, and texts from antiquity across the board show us,  that any silly political insistence that there are only two sexes and there always have been, i

Episode 61: Thinking Like a Jewish Lawyer

“  Even if you accept that we are nothing compared to Moses, nevertheless, we're sitting on the shoulders of Moses and everyone who sat on his shoulders. So we're actuall

Episode 60: The Bottom of the Toolbox

“ I'm really starting to land somewhere for me with this text. I think this is an instruction manual for how to apply that very radical and broad directive of prioritizin

Episode 59: Is Dignity Greater than Torah?

“It is preferable to break, violate a prohibition in the Torah, anything the Torah says don't do, you can actually go ahead and do it if by not doing it you would cause s

Episode 58: Living After the End of the World

“That's what Rabbi Yitzchak is saying, once the temple is destroyed, we are all in a state of unhealthy living, and our desires can only be satisfied in forbidden ways.”

Episode 57: The Lovesick Man

“ The issue here isn't sex. The issue here is objectification. So that can take place in a sexual context, but it can also take place in other contexts. So this potential

Episode 56: Children of Prophets

“ There's no question in my mind that retelling, reshaping the contours of the Jewish story is what you do. That's the most Jewish thing of all Jewish things.” - Benay La

Episode 55: The Wisdom of Crowds

“The rabbis ultimately see us being the Rabbi Akiva character, that everyone is an innovator, an upgrader, a potentially radical rewriter. That's the story that they're t

Episode 54: Who Owns Torah?

“ People who learn the tradition own that tradition and therefore can do with it what an owner can do with what an owner owns. If you own your house, you can knock down w

Episode 53: What's the Point?

“You’re really wasting your time, you’re doing the wrong thing if you think that your job is to receive the tradition, protect it, preserve it, and hand it off exactly as

Episode 52: Raw Material

“ God only gave you raw materials. God always wanted you to mess with this. The story of the wise servant who turns the flour into bread, you could equally imagine him tu

Episode 51: Reading Between the Lines

“One of the criteria for a good life is did you understand a thing from within a thing? One way we could translate that is, did you read between the lines? Did you dig de

Episode 50: Ultimate Questions

“You're not going to be judged on how much Torah you know. You're not going to be judged on other elements like how smart you were. You're going to be judged on did you m

Episode 49: Passover in the Talmud

“ People often take rites and rituals and they miss the point. It would be like if your doctor wrote you a prescription if you were sick, and then instead of taking the m

Episode 48: The Myth of Interpretation with Richard Primus

“ We have a Constitution that's almost impossible to amend but it must change to preserve the constant. And the mechanism for change is that we reinterpret it to keep it