The Talmud is full of verbal formulas--words and phrases that are used repeatedly in certain situations. One of them is "ta shma," Aramaic for "come and hear," which is used when a rabbi quotes an earlier authority to settle a dispute about the law. Beyond its technical meaning, however, "come and hear" captures something important about the ethos of the Talmud, which always wants to widen the circle of discussion rather than close it off. That''s what I hope this book will do: help readers to come closer to the Talmud and hear some of the wise, complicated, and challenging things it has to say. The Talmud is difficult to describe in a way that''s both brief and meaningful. Usually, we approach unfamiliar books by likening them to ones we already know, but there is no book that resembles the Talmud--it is its own genre. Almost anything you could say about it requires qualification. It''s the most important Jewish text next to the Bible, but it''s nothing like the Bible; it''s the source of Jewish law, but it''s not a law code.

Jewish tradition gestures at the Talmud''s amorphousness and scale by comparing it to a sea. You can''t grasp the whole thing at once; you must dive in and start swimming. Still, it helps to start with a map. The Talmud is made up of two layers: the Mishna, which was written in Hebrew around the year 200 CE, and the Gemara, a commentary on the Mishna that was composed in Aramaic over the following three hundred years. On a standard Talmud page, the Hebrew text of the Mishna and the Aramaic text of the Gemara sit at the center. Each unit of the Mishna, referred to as "a mishna," is followed by a corresponding unit of Gemara that comments on it, known as a sugya. Often a few sentences of Mishna can give rise to many pages of Gemara. The standard pagination of the Talmud was established in the first printed edition, in the 1520s; a page number is followed by "a" or "b," to signify the front or back of the folio page.

(A daf is made up of both sides of a page.) The structure of the Mishna reflects its oral origins. Rather than simply stating the law, it records the teachings of various rabbinic authorities, known as tannaim, even when they conflict with one another. The view that has the force of law is usually stated first without attribution, or attributed to "the rabbis," while a dissenting view is attributed to the tanna who holds it. For instance, the Mishna records many disagreements between the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai, rival sages of the first century BCE. As a rule, the law follows the opinion of Hillel, but the opinion of Shammai is always recorded too. As the Mishna says, their disagreements were "for the sake of Heaven," so both views are sacred and deserving of study. In other ways, too, the Mishna is more like the record of a discussion among experts than a law code.

It doesn''t state abstract principles in a systematic fashion; rather, principles emerge from the analysis of concrete problems. Thus, tractate Shabbat doesn''t begin by stating that it is prohibited to transfer items between a public domain and a private domain on Shabbat. Rather, it imagines a situation in which someone in a public domain hand an item to someone in a private domain, or vice versa, and asks which of them is guilty of violating Shabbat. In Come and Hear, I hope to give some sense of the Talmud''s richness. The book follows the order of the tractates in the Daf Yomi cycle but makes no attempt to be comprehensive. Instead, I pay attention to particular arguments, episodes, and themes, to illuminate what the Talmud thinks about and how. Modern readers will find many things to object to in the logic and values of the Talmud--how could it be otherwise, with a text written more than 1,500 years ago? But my purpose here isn''t to register objections, even when I share them. It''s to enter into the Talmud''s world, with all its difference and difficulty, and share some of what I found there in the seven and half years of my Daf Yomi journey.