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But Talmud study would be helpful even outside the yeshiva world, Steinsaltz believes. Replacing the Bible as the key book taught in Israel’s schools could help the Jewish state become a more balanced and stable society, he asserts. “The Talmud as a book has the enormous quality that the world needs now more than anything else: sanity,” he told The Times of Israel recently in his study, situated in a serene street of Jerusalem’s Nahlaot quarter.Related posts here and links.
“The Talmud is the book of sanity. And when you study it, it confers a certain amount of sanity,” posits Steinsaltz, suggesting that the most fanatical rabbis are rarely great Talmudists. After all, the Gemara consists mainly of logical and rational back-and-forth discussions about legal issues, aimed at arriving at a factual truth, he points out. What could be more sane than that?
“It was a big mistake to make the education in Israel based so much on the Bible,” Steinsaltz says, in between puffs of his pipe. “Because the Bible was written by prophets. If you read the Bible, you somehow become in your mind a little prophet. That’s the way in which Israelis speak to each other — they don’t have conversations, they all have complete and unlimited knowledge. Learning Talmud would bring a big change to the Israeli mind, because it deals with and is connected to dialectic.”