I've done my waiting, 15 years of it

retrieval team for objects in the backseat

custodian of the parking garage tickets

"All clear my way"

en-route dining concierge

This will hopefully be an ever growing list. If you have any Talmud study resources you like (online or in print), please send them to me and I’ll update accordingly!

The most important resource for study is community, so if you have a local synagogue, check if they have study group

Free Online Resources

Sefaria Mishnah — reading the Mishnah first can make the Gemara easier

Sefaria Talmud — the go-to free online translation. I believe it uses the Koren translation

Daf Yomi — daily image of the day’s daf with audio of it being read (not translated as far I can tell)

New addition! Hadran Courses — Absolutely top notch courses to give you the tools to study Talmud. Cannot recommend this enough.

Books

Your local Shul’s library probably has a copy of these or similar books! They are far from the only books on these topics

Reference Guide to the Talmud by Rabbi Steinsaltz

I love this book. It has the answers for almost every question a beginner could ask, from how a page of Talmud is laid out to the basics of Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic

The Practical Talmud Dictionary by Yitzhak Frank

Not a comprehensive dictionary of Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic, but it has a lot and is simple to use

Grammar for Gemara & Targum Onkelos: An Introduction to Aramaic by Yitzhak Frank

Sister text to The Practical Talmud Dictionary. Good for beginners with at least some knowledge of Hebrew

Everyman’s Talmud by Abraham Cohen

Basic overview of topics covered in the Talmud. Very dense

The Essential Talmud by Rabbi Steinsaltz

I highly recommend Rabbi Dr. Joshua Kulp's Daf Shevui commentary. You can have it up side by side with the Talmud itself on Sefaria.

It's a "21st-century English commentary meant to be accessible for beginners by Dr. Joshua Kulp, rosh yeshiva of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem."

it isn't available for every tractate yet - I believe it's still being written - but it's an excellent resource to use for the tractates that have it.

So far, those are tractates Sukkah, Megillah, Ketubot, Kiddushin, and Avodah Zarah.

On Sefara, you can check if a given Talmud passage has Daf Shevui commentary available by clicking on Commentary on the resources panel on the right of the screen. It's under the Related Texts heading.

Sefaria also has Jastrow's introductions to each tractate and chapter within each tractate, as well as a summary of each chapter, at the start of the tractate and chapter. These are also accessible from the Related Texts section of the resource panel, and unlike the Daf Shevui commentary, are available for the entire Talmud, as far as I can tell.

Also, as a note, Sefaria defaults to the Koren-Steinsaltz translation of the Talmud, but there are other translations available on the site. You can see what other translations are available for a given text by clicking Translations in the resource panel. Many texts, including the Talmud, have translations available in languages other than English, including German and Portuguese.

Sefaria also provides images to pages from written versions of the texts on the site in the resource panel, in the Resources secton. The name they give this is Manuscripts.

Depending on the size and amount of coral you eat, eating coral wouldn’t be bad for you. Are you swallowing large enough chunks to cause intestinal blockages? or grinding it up and using it as an additive? People use coral as a source of calcium in vitamins.

But yeah, it all goes back to "seems easier to just use regular ol' marble dust.

...related important question: are we sure that coral is considered alive, and an animal of any kind, like, halakhically speaking?

I mean:

Coral doesn't bleed (which is the important part about eating a still living animal)

They don't have lungs or gills

They generally don't move? (I guess corallimorphs can...kinda crawl? But otherwise no they don't move).

How is coral really different from like, fungi above water? Sure it can be a collective mass (mushrooms and their mycellium colonies!), but it's not capable of bleeding, and it doesn't have lungs or gills, and it doesn't really move. It just kinda...spreads.

No because fungi are bottom feeders of the ground and yet mushrooms are kosher.

The issue is whether or not these are creatures according to Torah. From Leviticus 11:

These you may eat of all that live in water: anything in water, whether in the seas or in the streams, that has fins and scales—these you may eat.

But anything in the seas or in the streams that has no fins and scales, among all the swarming things of the water and among all the other living creatures that are in the water—they are an abomination for you

and an abomination for you they shall remain: you shall not eat of their flesh and you shall abominate their carcasses.

Everything in water that has no fins and scales shall be an abomination for you.

Now, I am going to reference Bible hub here mostly because they have a nice Strong's Hebrew concordance feature that sefaria doesn't have that is easy to copy and paste from.

But basically I would argue that the important words we have to distinguish here are:

the teeming

שֶׁ֣רֶץ (še·reṣ)

Noun - masculine singular construct

Strong's 8318: A swarm, active mass of minute animals

life

הַחַיָּ֖ה (ha·ḥay·yāh)

Article | Adjective - feminine singular

Strong's 2416: Alive, raw, fresh, strong, life

and creatures

נֶ֥פֶשׁ (ne·p̄eš)

Noun - feminine singular

Strong's 5315: A soul, living being, life, self, person, desire, passion, appetite, emotion

So. Is coral an active (teeming) mass of minute animals? Well. It is a living colony in the same way that mushrooms are colonies of living things. But other things that swarm or teem are like... krill. shrimp. Locusts. Flies. Ants.

Y'know, stuff that moves. Swarms. Coral doesn't teem or swarm. It's static.

Which leaves us with living and creatures.

I would argue again that "living" implies regular movement — for example, you can have living waters. (Same root word for mayyim chayyim).

But also the other terms which appear beside the root word for life/living over and over again are basically:

Creeping, moving (Strong's 7430 רָמַשׂ ramas)

Flesh (Strong's 1320 בָּשָׂר basar)

Flying or soaring (5774 עוּף)

Having a soul (or literal breath) (5315, נֶפֶשׁ)

And nefesh is of course, also the last one in that list!

So is coral alive in the way Torah usually means things are living beings? Well, coral doesn't creep or move. It also doesn't have blood (which, arguably, means it can't have a carcass. It sort of has bones! But no carcass). It...MIGHT have flesh? I'm sort of unclear about this.

It can't fly or soar.

Which leaves us with:

Do corals have flesh? and,

do corals have souls? And if not metaphorically souls, do they have breath?

Well, coral do respirate. But so do plants. And neither of them have lungs. Also according to @montereybayaquarium's website coral get oxygen from algae? (Don't worry Monterey bay aquarium no one is actually going to eat the coral, this is all hypothetical)

Coral reefs get their bright colors from the algae — called zooxanthellae — living in their tissues. The zooanthellae provide the coral polyps with oxygen and nutrients produced from photosynthesis. In return, the coral polyps provide zooanthellae with carbon dioxide (a byproduct of the polyps’ “breathing” oxygen) and shelter.

Coral polyps can have mouths, but they don't really breathe with lungs. So I'm not sure they have that kind of nefesh (breath of life). And corals are like, a bunch of skeletal base material with living polyps on the top. But are they fleshy? But all their color comes from the algae living in them.

For this I go back to the presence of blood being a big factor, because again, mushrooms have flesh but don't have blood, and so halakhically...that fungi is a plant.

Also apparently Octocorals don't have those exoskeletons? So at that point how would we know something is an octocoral versus like...a seaweed?

I think either seaweed isn't meant to be kosher, or actually corals are kosher because seaweed is. Oysters have gills and hearts. Scallops have a gajillion eyes. Really easy to see those aren't plants.

Basically if you look at a coral does it have a breath and soul, does it fly or creep, does it bleed, does it have flesh, does it move around in general? Could it possibly be a plant, halakhically speaking? (Not by scientific taxonomy!) Would bronze age folks look at it and go "yeah, that's a plant."? Also important: what IS a plant? Halakhically?

that's right

Inside of a Zeiss Ikon shutter