Why This Text Matters | Talmud | James Redfield

Religious studies courses can feature a broad range and variety of texts, including anything from The Daodejing, to The Mishnah, to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, to Said’s Orientalism. The Marty Center partnered with the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program to design “Why This Text Matters” as a series of videos to help faculty prepare for courses, their students, and anyone generally curious about important texts in the study of religion. In the space of about 30 minutes, viewers can gain a deeper understanding of the context, themes, and significance of texts taught by experts at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

About the Text:
In this video, I introduce the Babylonian Talmud: a vast compendium of oral tradition in the form of commentary on a legal canon, the Mishnah, and edited at rabbinic academies in the Persian empire from the 5th to early 7th centuries. The Talmud bears twofold importance in Jewish culture: as a source of norms for what it means to be Jewish (regardless of whether or not one reads it at all), and as a literary work which, on the contrary, disciplines and forms any reader by teaching them how to see themselves as part of its textual universe. Both of these apparently opposed religious orientations cross paths throughout the work and its many chronological layers, which makes Talmud not a closed book but a potentially dynamic, chameleon-like reading experience.