Fall 5772/2011 JEWISH ACTION I 81

Vision and Valor:An Illustrated Historyof the TalmudBy Berel WeinMaggid BooksJerusalem, 2010 255 pages + xiv

Reviewed by Hillel Goldberg

Ican dream. In theory, someday I’ll visitthe Arch of Titus in Rome to see a de-piction of Roman soldiers carrying lootedartifacts from the Jerusalem Temple; I’llvisit the tomb of Shammai (Hillel’s col-league) on Mount Meron in Israel; I’llvisit the State Hermitage Museum in St.Petersburg to see the bust of the RomanEmperor Tiberius; and I’ll visit the British Museum to seethe bust of Vespasian, the Roman emperor who destroyedmuch of Judea before the destruction of the Templein Jerusalem.

Dream? Actually, not. I do not even need to make the visits. I hold in front of me

beautiful, illustrated histories of the Mishnah and the Tal-mud, the main works in the canon of Jewish law. I have be-fore me a seemingly countless array of photos of coins,sarcophagi, busts, archaeological excavations and tombs.They’re all in The Oral Law of Sinai and Vision and Valor, thenewest books by a worldwide master of the spoken word,Rabbi Berel Wein, who has sold some one million tapes anddisks on Jewish history.

Later in his fruitful career, Rabbi Wein turned to the writ-ten word. His new books’ pictures are but the bonus in thebargain. Rabbi Wein brings his vivid grasp of history to theMishnah and the Talmud, specifically to the lives of its sageswho lived in tumultuous times and made monumental deci-sions that directly affected the shape of Judaism and Jewishhistory for all subsequent generations—including our own.

“What caused this critical change of mood from harmonyand cooperation to strife and contention in Yavneh?” the au-thor asks at one point in the first volume. I cite the sentencerandomly to illustrate that while the author’s respect for thesages is without end, this is an honest book. Rabbi Weinhides nothing. The struggles both within and between thesages, and their tricky and often devastating relations withforeign sovereigns, all find their way into Rabbi Wein’sprimers on the Mishnah and Talmud.

He combines the literary and the historical. How andwhy the Mishnah and the Talmud were written—a revolu-tionary concept for a law that had been conveyed orally forcenturies—is combined with realia, the historical conditionsand diverse personalities of the sages.

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The Oral Law of Sinai:An Illustrated Historyof the Mishnah By Berel WeinJossey-BassSan Francisco, 2008208 pages

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, executive editor of the Intermountain JewishNews, is a contributing editor of Jewish Action.

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82 I JEWISH ACTION Fall 5772/2011

The relevance of Rabbi Wein’s discussions veritablyjumps from his pages.

Besides the fact that the Mishnah and the Talmud, as thecentral repositories of Jewish wisdom after the Torah, are in-trinsically relevant, the painful issues that confronted theJewish community in those times are relevant in our own.For example, how strongly could the Jewish intellectual andspiritual leadership of Mishnaic times confront the Romanrulers of Palestine? Plug in a few name changes—Netanyahufor Yehoshua ben Chananya, for example—and one sees thereflection of ancient struggles in such contemporary ques-tions as: Can, or should, Israel act against Iran independentlyof the United States?

Another example: How do survivors of catastrophe re-build a Jewish community? Before the era of the Holocaust,the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE by the Romanswas history’s worst persecution of the Jews. The Romanskilled some one million Jews in their conquest of Palestine. Afocused study of the struggles in the ancient period ringswith relevance today.

To grasp Rabbi Wein’s achievement, one needs to knowthat there exist no organized records or documents of thekind from which one could construct the Jewish history ofan ancient or medieval period. Until the time of Azariah deiRossi a little less than 500 years ago, Jews did not generallythink historically; they kept few records with an eye to his-tory. They kept travelogues, receipts, manifests, poems,Torah thoughts, ethical wills; but what we now call diplo-matic, political and social history were foreign to theJewish mind.

This means that to write his history, Rabbi Wein had topull together all manner of stray, contemporaneous observa-tions, and extract nuggets of historical significance fromlegal documents (the Mishnah and Talmud are legal docu-ments par excellence) and from extra-Jewish historicalrecords. What might seem like a straightforward literaryagenda really requires a very wide knowledge.

In the end, Rabbi Wein has given us a very readable, evenenjoyable, history of the Mishnah and Talmud. Fascinatingpersonalities populate its academies. Tragic personal stories,heart-rending negotiations with anti-Jewish sovereigns, su-perb minds, but also quirky ones, populate his books.

It doesn’t hurt that Rabbi Wein puts matters into per-spective with a plethora of beautiful visual aids. Besides pho-tos and art, he supplies precise, clear timelines of both theMishnaic and the Talmudic sages and a handy table of all ofthe Mishnaic tractates, the way they are classified into six“orders,” the number of chapters in each tractate, and whichtractates were commented on by the Babylonian andJerusalem Talmuds, and which were not.

Whatever you do, don’t miss the controversy at the endof the volume on the Mishnah over Rabbi Meir and his wifeBruriah, or the modesty and suffering of the main formula-tor of the Mishnah, Rabbi Judah the Prince. He was thetowering scholar of his day: forgiving, loyal, outreaching,humble and wealthy to boot, but he suffered greatly. Writesthe author:

“Though we may not fathom the Heavenly ledger, ac-cording to the Talmud, Rabbi Judah’s suffering and holi-

ness protected the Jewish people, so that no woman died inchildbirth or miscarried during the 13 years of his agoniz-ing illnesses.”

The Jewish people ever since has regarded Rabbi Judahthe Prince as a seminal figure in all of Jewish history. Yet thisopinion was not shared by the widow of the son of the fa-mous founder of mysticism, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, whorebuffed Rabbi Judah’s proposal to marry her with a rhetori-cal question: “A vessel that served in holiness should now beasked to serve the mundane?”

We have, then, in Rabbi Wein’s two volumes, vision andvalor, but also the humanity, honesty, and bluntness of theTalmud itself.

A personal postscript: I think hard before I give a Bar orBat Mitzvah present. I always give a book or a book set, butwhich one? A sefer, and if so, a simple one or a sophisticatedone—to challenge a Bar Mitzvah boy for the future? I havesome stock favorites, again, depending on the background ofthe celebrant, but recently I was stumped. A sefer, a book ofstories, a work by the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan—whatever Icame up with didn’t fit this particular Bat Mitzvah girl, abeautiful combination of innocence and intelligence. Then, Isaw Rabbi Wein’s volumes. They solved my problem per-fectly. They reflect the innocence of the Divine love affairwith the Jewish people, and the intelligence of the readerwho lives in this world and takes a very different kind of in-spiration from the unadorned facts of Jewish history.

Not to mention these two volumes take me to Romeand Mount Meron, to St. Petersburg and London. Trave-logue, indeed! g

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