#gemara

- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 75a

"This passage, one of the most misunderstood in the Talmud, has led more than a few people to conclude that the sages were so puritanical that they deemed it preferable that an unmarried man die rather than converse with an unmarried woman.

However, this narrative has little to do with illicit sexual behavior; it really concerns emotional blackmail. Imagine the societal damage that would ensure if whenever one person's will was thwarted by another, the rejected party said he [or she] would die if the other party did not grant whatever he or she wished. Ultimately, the fact that this man is obsessed with this woman is his problem, and his alone (the Talmud provides no indication that the woman had led him on); thus, he is not entitled to make demands of her. As Hyam Maccoby insightfully notes: "What the story is really telling us is that no woman is required to sacrifice her status or dignity for the sake of a madman."

What makes this case so unusual is the doctors' claim that the man's life is at stake. Normally, when such a diagnosis is made, Jewish law permits a whole range of otherwise forbidden activities. For example, if the doctors had said the man must eat unkosher food lest he die, the Rabbis would have permitted it. But Jewish law never permits imposing unreasonable demands on others, even when a life is at stake. Thus, if the same man should insist that his cure is conditional on other people's eating unkosher food, this would not be permitted. Standards of behavior in Jewish life cannot be determined by the insane or the intransigent."

there are three things worth noting about rashi:

it's thought his daughters were fairly educated to the point that there's an urban legend about someone saying the reason it's ok to wear tefillin is that rashi's daughters wore tefillin

at the time of course it was not socially acceptable for women to put their names on things

rashi got an INSANE (like, physically impossible, someone's done the calculations) amount done

so we have a guy who does a ridiculous amount and his daughters who were allegedly very smart but couldn't have published at the time.

by Joshua Hoffman

The Torah isn’t a history book, a physics book, or a storybook.

It is torat chaim — literally “instructions for living” in Hebrew.

“The more Torah you know,” said the late, great Rabbi Noah Weinberg, “the more fulfilled you become. Every word, every phrase contains a message for how to maximize pleasure in life. Look for the deeper message — the wisdom within — and you will reap immense rewards.”1

In the Torah, the basics are laid out in writing, but the rest must be learned orally, know as the Mishnah.

“When an engineer has a problem, he looks up logarithm tables. A lawyer refers to case studies. A doctor has medical journals,” said Rabbi Weinberg. “A Jew has the Mishnah.”

The Mishnah refers to the later works of the rabbinic period — most prominently the Mishnah and the Gemara, jointly known as the Talmud — which explain and expound upon the statutes recorded in the Written Torah.

So, how much do you really know about the Torah?

Enjoy these five surprising facts:

1) Four Levels of Understanding

Rabbi Noah Weinberg once said that a single word in Torah can yield multi-layered understandings — “if you know how to apply the right tools.” This isn’t metaphor. It’s methodology.

The Torah is written in a code, not a secret one, but a multi-dimensional one. Jewish tradition teaches that the Torah operates on four primary interpretive levels:

P’shat (פשט): The simple, literal meaning of the text. What is the Torah saying at face value? This is the level explained by commentators like Rashi, who wrote in 12th-century France but saw his work as clarifying what the Torah meant all along.

Drush (דרש): The homiletic level, found in Midrash and Talmud. It explores how verses teach moral, ethical, or spiritual lessons — often reading between the lines to discover deeper patterns.

Remez (רמז): Literally “hint.” This level uncovers subtler meanings — using Hebrew wordplay, gematria (numerical values), or alternate pronunciations to surface ideas hidden in plain sight. One reason the Torah scroll has no vowels or punctuation is to make these alternate readings possible.

Sod (סוד): The secret, mystical level. This is the realm of Kabbalah, of the Zohar, of cosmic structures and divine energies encoded in the language of the Torah itself. It doesn’t contradict the other layers — it reveals what they were whispering all along.

Together, these four levels form the acronym PaRDeS (פרדס) — which means “orchard” in Hebrew.

It’s a stunning metaphor. The Torah is not a textbook. It’s an orchard, a place of sweetness, beauty, shade, and sustenance. But like any orchard, you don’t get the fruit unless you’re willing to walk through it, get your hands dirty, and reach.