Talmud

"I had never seen the Talmud. It was very interesting. Its got big pages, and in a little square in the corner of the page is the original Talmud, and then in a sort of L-shaped margin, all around this square, are commentaries written by different people. The Talmud has evolved, and everything has been discussed again and again, all very carefully, in a medieval kind of reasoning. ... The Talmud is a wonderful book, a great, big potpourri of things: trivial questions, and difficult questions—for example, problems of teachers, and how to teach—and then some trivia again, and so on."

"The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness; carefulness into vigorousness; vigorousness into guiltlessness; guiltlessness into abstemiousness; abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness."

"A person who understands the law but who is far from the love of God is like a bank official who has the keys for the inside of the building but not the key for the front door."

"Jews dont read the Bible literally. We read it through the lens of generations of interpretations and acknowledge the evolution of human understanding of God. The Talmudic image of God is vastly different from the image of God presented in the Bible."

"Without the Talmud, we would not be able to understand passages in the Bible. ... God has handed this authority to the sages and tradition is a necessity as well as scripture. ... Anyone who does not study the Talmud cannot understand Scripture."