Rabbi Labors at Daunting Task: Translating the Entire Talmud

“For me it was not anything like a conversion,” the rabbi said, lighting his pipe. He is perched on the edge of a couch in the sitting room of a Washington townhouse.

“In college I studied mathematics,” he continued. “There is a theorem in plane geometry. It is called Desarges Theorem. You can’t prove it. It is very obvious, but you can’t prove it by any means.

“Now, when you go to three-dimensional geometry you can prove it. You have to have a point in a third dimension in order to solve the problem in the two-dimensional space.”

Smoke drifts through a shaft of late afternoon sunlight. A square of light glances off the tips of his old black loafers. “In many ways, it seems to me that we are facing constantly problems that you can’t solve in the dimensions of the existence of humans,” he said. “If we don’t have an extra dimension, these problems are unsolvable.”

Felt Absence in His Life

Adin Steinsaltz read Marx before the Torah and Freud before the Talmud. Growing up in his native Jerusalem, he used to beat up religious boys for sport. Steinsaltz planned a career as a mathematician or a physicist, but in his mid-teens the young Socialist felt an absence in his life. In seeking to fill it, he turned to Orthodoxy and began a significant religious journey.

For almost a quarter of a century, Steinsaltz, 50, has labored at the monumental task of translating the Talmud--the massive repository of Jewish civil and religious law--into modern Hebrew and, eventually, English.

The Talmud, compiled in arcane shorthands of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, contains neither vowels nor punctuation and is accessible to only the most studious readers.

The Babylonian Talmud, collected in 36 volumes, has not been translated into Hebrew in its entirety since the 11th Century, when the task was completed by Rabbi Solomon bar Isaac Rashi, the greatest of all Talmudic scholars.

But English editions of the Talmud do not contain the essential commentaries of Rashi and his disciples. And the obscure Jerusalem (or Palestinian) Talmud has never been successfully translated for a mass audience.

“I think it is the most essential part of our culture,” said Steinsaltz, who recently spent three weeks in Washington as a visiting scholar at the Foundation for Jewish Studies. “And it comes from such a different form of thinking that it needs a better translation. I think the lack of it is harming our own people, because it is something that is part of their existence and the lack of it deprives them of something they should know.”

The rabbi and his assistants have published 20 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud in Hebrew and expect to complete the project within 15 years. More than 1 million copies are in circulation in Israel and America. Only one volume of the Jerusalem text has appeared, but its first printing sold out in days.

The rabbi’s efforts have already won him the 1988 Israel Prize, his nation’s highest honor. Completing the translations, some scholars say, would earn him a place in Jewish history beside Rashi, the French vintner whose commentary is regarded as the most lucid ever written, and Maimonides, the other preeminent Talmudic sage of the Middle Ages.

A Semi-Standard Text

“His (translation) will become a semi-standard text to be used by all but those who want to brag that they don’t need it,” said Michael Berenbaum, a consultant at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who teaches theology at Georgetown University in Washington. “As long as you can read Hebrew you can essentially master the Talmud on your own with a master pedagogue.”

But Steinsaltz is more than just a translator and pedagogue. He has written a slim, widely praised volume of mysticism called “The Thirteen Petalled Rose,” an unpublished detective novel, “Teshuva,” a guide for the newly observant Jew and essays on zoology.

“Every generation of Jews has had a representative figure, someone who embodied Judaism to the Gentiles,” Berenbaum said. “Two generations ago it was Martin Buber. In the ‘60s it was Abraham Joshua Heschel, who walked with Martin Luther King. In the American scene it’s Elie Wiesel. In a sense Steinsaltz is one of the few we have in Israel.”

The rabbi wears a blue shirt that bunches up at the shoulders and gray slacks that gather at his knees. The conversation is about what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” The question is, what would move the modern individual to believe in God.

“In a strange way, I don’t know if this is such a difficult question,” he said. “The essential way that we come to leap is more or less obvious. This leap of faith comes more from things we deeply experience rather than a theological or even a philosophical reason.”

Knowledge of the Talmud is difficult to come by. The text was compiled in the first 500 years of the Common Era or what Christians call anno Domini (AD). It is the record of debates between Jewish sages in various rabbinical academies attempting to discern how Mosaic law should be applied in changing times. The subjects range from how best to offer prayer and sacrifice to rulings on criminal, dietary and matrimonial laws.

“What you feel reading the Talmud is this constant feeling of the struggle of the minds,” said Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman, president of the Foundation for Jewish Studies, “as though you are sitting in the back row listening to dozens of sages. The text is filled with deviations. They would start out with kidnaping and end up with narcotics smuggling, as an example.

“What it lacks is the systematic, straightforward, law-books format. What you have is a forest with all sorts of exotic plants and a few stinkweeds.”

The Talmud has four basic parts. The first is the Mishna, a shorthand record of Jewish law written in Hebrew. A paragraph of Mishna might be followed by 8 or 10 pages of Gemara (completion), a rabbinical discussion of the Mishna, written in Aramaic, that took place over several hundred years.

Adds Own Commentaries

In the right margin of each page stands the commentary of Rashi. In the left margin runs the Tosafot, an elaboration of Rashi’s pithy observations by his descendants and disciples. A page of the Talmud may also contain an array of notations, medieval commentaries and scriptural citations. In the Steinsaltz Talmud, the rabbi’s own notes and commentary have been added.

“I think the genius is more in presentation and sifting through what has gone before rather than in radical interpretation,” said Rabbi Rod Glogower of Kesher Israel Synagogue. “He has not displaced the old commentaries, he’s supplementing them.”

Steinsaltz said the Talmud has never been completed officially. “Every day, every hour, scholars find new subjects to study and new points of view,” he wrote in his primer, “The Essential Talmud.” In learning Torah--the first five books of the Bible--and Talmud, the student is “thinking the thoughts along with God.”

He then moves into dispelling the notion that science disproves the existence of God.

“I’m kind of a scientist, that was my university training,” he said. “The fact is that science, if it is anything, is entirely by definition independent from these questions. What created the movement against religion was mostly what people called the soft sciences, and the soft sciences are in many ways theological statements and not sciences.

“Psychology, anthropology, sociology, those are the things that always clash. You have far less or no clash with any of the hard sciences.” He seems to be enjoying a private laugh about this. Sarah, his wife of 23 years, is a psychologist.

“Love is an important ingredient in what I call the secular religion, but love is a game almost by definition,” he said. “Even love becomes shallow, because if you don’t have wings and you don’t go to the depths, whatever you do is small. I once put it, ‘When you are a person without the heavens, you also have very little Earth.’

“Now what is the basic notion of calculus? The basic notion goes that you can’t solve a differential equation because a certain thing is stretched to the infinite. You see, in a strange way, calculus is built on a search for the infinite. Now you don’t reach the infinite, but this search for the infinite is the way to solve the problem.”

But what if one were to concentrate on the here and now and devote one’s self to making others as comfortable as possible. Is there no redemption in that?

“That is what people do,” the rabbi said. “We have experienced this very much in Israel, but you have it all over the Third World. There are people from backward countries but they have a very rich culture and are Westernized, and they lose their culture and they lose their grace and they lose their enjoyment of life.”

Active in Politics

In Israel, Steinsaltz immerses himself in both religious and political issues. Before beginning the Talmud project, Steinsaltz led an unsuccessful attempt to found a neo-Hassidic community in the Negev desert.

Steinsaltz has followers in the Israeli peace movement as well as in the Likud Party. He has also met in semi-secret sessions with Palestinian intellectuals. On this visit, he refused to discuss Israel’s troubles on the West Bank and Gaza because, he said, whenever he talks politics he offends those he wishes to comfort, and vice versa.

The rabbi visits America frequently, but said he is not particularly comfortable here. “I don’t take to it,” he said. “Most of the people that I’ve met are people I like very much, but the general atmosphere is of a country founded on money, fun and chewing gum.

“I feel that there is a lack of culture. Not only in some Godforsaken village somewhere, but even in New York, even among the intellectuals, the New York intellectuals. It is superficial intellectualism. It is not understanding, not profound. I find that something is lacking spiritually. I would say that the real god is comfort.”

Some of Steinsaltz’s sharpest critics are American Judaic scholars. “He is essentially uninformed on the last 200 years of Judaic scholarship,” said Jacob Neusner, a professor at Brown University.

‘He Is a Popularizer’

Neusner has also translated the Talmud into English for an academic audience. “He (Steinsaltz) claims to be a traditionalist,” Neusner said, “but he has not contributed to the traditional system of learning, either. Neither in modern scholarship nor traditional scholarship is he a figure of any standing whatsoever. I underline that. What he is is a popularizer.”

While acknowledging that popularizing the Talmud is a worthy endeavor, Neusner added, “The claims made on his behalf are an offense to Jewish learning. To say the man is the greatest scholar since Rashi is breathtaking. It is as if someone said a Catholic thinker was the greatest theologian since Aquinas.”

Steinsaltz refuses to evaluate his accomplishment, in part because it is not yet completed, in part because he thinks the verdict will be made by future generations.