Take, for instance, the story of Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the Temple. In Matthew 21:12, we read about how Jesus violently overturned the tables of the money-changers doing business on Temple grounds, rebuking them with the famous words: “It is written, my house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” This episode from the New Testament vividly frames the contest between Christianity and Judaism as a contrast of values—worldly Jews, obsessed with money and indifferent to holiness, are rebuked by Jesus, who cares only about purity of heart. It is such a famous story that I imagine many American Jews are familiar with it, even if they’ve never read the Gospels. But how many of us, I wonder, could explain what the money-changers were doing in the Temple in the first place? Were these people merely profiteers, defiling the Holy Temple, as we might assume—or were they actually serving a sacred purpose themselves? We know the Christian version of this story, but what is the Jewish version?I had a similar experience, back as an undergraduate, when I started working with the Mishnah (in the Danby translation) for a research project.
It is partly in order to be able to answer such questions that I have been reading Daf Yomi. The Talmud is a text much maligned in Western culture, both in its Christian and post-Christian phases. In English, the very word “talmudic” is pejorative, implying a needless and possibly corrupt complexity. Actually reading the Talmud, however, has allowed me to begin to understand why the rabbis thought and legislated as they did—to grasp the logic and the spirituality that guided their work. It helps me to see Judaism in its own historical terms instead of non-Jewish ones.
Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.