Six Memos from the Last Millennium - 9781477307342

Six Memos from the Last MillenniumA Novelist Reads the Talmud\nAuthor(s): Joseph Skibell\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Texas Press, United States\nImprint: University of Texas Press\nISBN-13: 9781477307342, 978-1477307342\nSynopsis\nA thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brothers and her husbands egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. Comprised of the Mishnah, the oral law of the Torah, and the Gemara, a multigenerational metacommentary on the Mishnah dating from between 3950 and [tel] and 475 CE), the Talmud presents a formidable challenge to understand without scholarly training and study. But what if one approaches it as a collection of tales with surprising relevance .