Green Great Dragons

In the Torah, the practices of Yom Kippur are laid out as they would be observed by a nomadic people with a centralized sacrificial system. In the Mishnah, they're recording the to-them-modern evolution of those practices as a people who settled in a certain location and built a large central temple in their biggest city to house the sacrificial system--but as they're writing it, the sacrificial system is coexisting with the system of verbal liturgical prayer, and they're encoding these practices in part to avoid losing them. That account would have been edited into cohesion in the 3rd century CE, at a time when they were facing the anxiety that their cultural practices might soon be lost.

The Talmud then takes the Mishnah and seeks to explain it, meaning that by the 5th-6th century they were again worried that comprehension of the Mishnah, where they recorded their interpretations of the earlier practices, might now be lost. In the Talmud they take the Mishnah line by line and discourse about it, and record the conversations they had including not only how to-them-modern people should be observing Yom Kippur, now in the full absence of any centralized system OR sacrificial worship at all, but also filling in the blanks of what the Mishnaic rabbis might have taken for granted about the worship they described, lest that information might soon be lost.

The medieval scribe who wrote the fragment we saw today might have been writing at a time when the most honored commentators on Torah and Talmud had living grandchildren. That scribe wrote out the text of the Talmud by hand, first the Mishnaic account of their soon-to-be-lost evolution of the lost Biblical practices, then the Talmudic description of their then-current practices and attempts to understand the lost Mishnaic practices, but already the commentaries of Rashi had been written, in 12th-century France, in which Rashi attempted to understand the Talmudic and Mishnaic and biblical descriptions, and filled in the blanks as he understood them, so that his readers would be able to envision the lost Talmudic practices. He wrote in Hebrew, because he was distributing his commentaries not just within France but around the Jewish world: there's evidence of Rashi's work being read in Yemen within the 12th century.

When the printing press was developed, the layout of a Talmud page that we take for granted today was encoded. It was developed so as to protect the texts on the page from water damage in order of priority: the Talmudic text in the center of the page, Rashi's commentaries next to the binding, his grandchildren's and later medieval commentators on the outside of the page, at greatest risk. This is in order of perceived sacredness: Rashi's commentary was by that point accepted as having a degree of importance that set it apart from other commentary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud#/media/File:Labeled_talmud.png Here's an annotated page of Talmud identifying the parts of the page that's understood as standard to this day. Many publications of this also include more recent commentary of a variety of eras and nationalities.

And this past September, this book came out, after more than a decade in progress. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-annotated-mishnah-9780192846143?cc=us&lang=en&#

They only covered the Mishnah, not the entire Talmud, in that time, despite having three editors and several other translators and commentators involved. 

Looked at from where I stood this afternoon, touching that sliced-up fragment of vellum, and realizing that the function of this new translation is to make the same text--the same text--understandable to us, now, lest comprehension be lost, or looked at otherwise, because turning it and turning it, turning it over and over to look at more facets and turning it over to the next generation and the next, that's what we do, that's what we're for, that's what this living culture is. And there's a tremendous sense of holiness, then, to witness that fragment, cut up and bound into the flyleaves of a Christian text but still legible to someone who knows how to read it.

And yet. 

I'm generally comfortable reading texts in Hebrew writing on parchment but I struggled with the handwriting. My mother could read it, with difficulty, because she got a Master's in it; my friend asked her how long ago and she pointed at me and said "that long ago." I'm almost 40.

The knowledge ebbs and flows in and out of any of us.