Interpreting the Aggada: Notes on a Talmud Blogging Project
Over the past two and a half years, I’ve been writing daily posts on the Babylonian Talmud. The project now spans over 500 posts covering all 36 tractates.1 This piece is an attempt to describe what I’m doing and why.
Outline
Intro
Why Aggada
The Basic Approach
Method and Sources
Style
Scale and Pace
A Note on Format
Major Themes in Aggadah
Lists and taxonomies
Rabbinic biography and anecdote
Rabbinic social dynamics
Medical and scientific material
Demons and the supernatural
Theodicy and divine justice
Dreams and their interpretation
Biblical narrative through rabbinic eyes
Messiah and eschatology
Afterlife geography
Death, mourning, and the afterlife
Cosmology and celestial phenomena
Foreign Empires and Persecution
Why Aggada
Halakha has its commentators: Rashi, Tosafot, the nosei keilim on the Shulchan Arukh, the daf yomi industry. Aggada is comparatively underserved, at least in accessible English-language formats. The stories and theological passages are often treated as entertainment or as embarrassments to be explained away.
I think the aggada deserves serious, sustained attention on its own terms. These texts encode rabbinic thinking about God, fate, suffering, demons, dreams, the body, death, and what it means to live as a Jew in a dangerous and mysterious world. They’re strange and sometimes disturbing. They reward close reading.
That’s the project: one sugya at a time, working through the Bavli’s narrative and homiletical material with care and without apology.
The Basic Approach
My focus is the aggadic material in the Bavli: the narratives, homilies, dream interpretations, medical advice, demonology, theodicy, and everything else that isn’t strictly halakhic. This isn’t a daf yomi blog. I mostly skip the legal discussions and Stammaitic shakla ve’tarya and zero in on the stories, homiletic interpretations, and theological passages.
Each post treats a discrete sugya. I present the Aramaic or Hebrew text alongside an English translation (usually based on Sefaria, with my own modifications), and then work through the passage section by section. For longer sugyot, I break the analysis into multi-part series; some run to three or four installments.
The structure is consistent: an outline at the top, then the passage with citation, then the text and translation in parallel.
Method and Sources
I work primarily from the Sefaria text and translation (ed. Steinsaltz). The footnotes in my posts typically include:
Wikipedia links for geographical, historical, and scientific context. If I mention the hot springs of Tiberias or the province of Asia, I link out so readers can situate these references.
Hebrew Wikipedia for context relating to halacha, and place names in Eretz Yisrael.
Cross-references to my own earlier posts. The corpus is now large enough that internal linking is useful. A post on Bar-Haddaya can point back to earlier pieces on dream interpretation; a post on demons can reference the material on pairs (zugot) and witchcraft.
Etymological notes on Greek, Latin, and other loanwords in rabbinic vocabulary. The Talmud contains a significant number of borrowed terms, and tracing these illuminates the cultural world of the rabbis.
I don’t engage extensively with academic secondary literature in the posts themselves, though that scholarship informs my readings. The blog is meant to be accessible to educated readers interested in classical Jewish texts.
Style
This project is not devotional commentary. I don’t approach the texts with the assumption that they must be reconciled with modern values or shown to contain timeless wisdom. Some passages are wise; others are strange, brutal, or simply puzzling. I try to describe what the text says and how it works.
It’s also not critical scholarship in the academic sense. I don’t do manuscript collation or systematic comparison with Yerushalmi parallels. The apparatus is light.
The organizational structure follows the traditional order of the tractates. Within each tractate, posts are keyed to specific dappim and passage references. The master index organizes everything by the six sedarim and their constituent tractates, from Berakhot through Niddah.
Scale and Pace
At the current rate—roughly a post per day—I’ve covered substantial portions of each tractate’s aggadic content. Some tractates are more aggada-heavy than others. Berakhot, with its extended material on prayer, dreams, blessings, and theodicy, generated dozens of posts. Tractates focused primarily on technical halakha yield fewer.
The index post that catalogs the Talmud-related material now runs to a substantial document in its own right. It functions as both table of contents and reference tool.
Whether this will eventually cover the entire Bavli’s aggadic corpus, I don’t know. The project has its own momentum. For now, the work continues tractate by tractate, sugya by sugya.
A Note on Format
The posts appear on Substack, which shapes certain choices. The newsletter format encourages self-contained pieces that work in email. The multi-part series model lets me break up longer treatments while maintaining narrative continuity across installments.
I use a consistent titling convention: a descriptive phrase followed by the Talmudic citation in parentheses. “Talmudic Theodicy: Moses’ Requests, Divine Responses, and the Mystery of Divine Justice (Berakhot 7a-b).” This helps with searchability and makes the citation immediately visible.
The bilingual presentation—Hebrew/Aramaic text with facing translation—is central to the project. I want readers to see the original language even if they can’t read it fluently.
Major Themes in Aggadah
Certain themes are common in aggadah:
Biblical narrative through rabbinic eyes
The Talmud constantly rereads biblical stories, filling gaps, resolving tensions, and defending the righteous. The sugya in Shabbat 55b-56a—”Whoever says that [X] sinned is mistaken”—offers revisionist readings of David, Solomon, and others. Elsewhere, Moses argues with God, Hezekiah clashes with Isaiah, Pharaoh’s daughter rescues the infant Moses with miraculous arm-extension, and Korah’s rebellion becomes a study in wealth and envy. These are interpretive interventions that reshape how biblical figures are understood.
Lists and taxonomies
The Talmud loves enumeration: ten things created at twilight on the sixth day, seven things concealed from human knowledge, eleven warnings about touching body parts with unwashed hands. I find these lists compelling as literary forms and as expressions of rabbinic systematizing impulses.
Rabbinic biography and anecdote
The lives of the sages themselves generate narrative. Hillel’s patience with provocateurs, R’ Akiva’s martyrdom, the deposition of Rabban Gamliel, Rav’s arrival in Babylonia—these stories construct a collective memory of the rabbinic past. There are major recurring figures across tractates: Abaye and Rava appear constantly, as do R’ Yohanan, Resh Lakish, and the major Tannaim.
Rabbinic social dynamics
The am ha’aretz passages in Pesachim 49b, where scholars express visceral hostility toward the unlearned, are uncomfortable reading. So are the hierarchies of seating, honor, and deference that pervade the literature. I present these without sanitizing them.
Messiah and eschatology
The Talmud’s messianic material is scattered but substantial. Sanhedrin contains extended discussions of the signs preceding the Messiah’s arrival, the “birthpangs of Messiah,” debates over whether the Messiah has a name (and what it might be), and R’ Yehoshua ben Levi’s encounter with the Messiah sitting among the poor and sick at the gates of Rome. These passages reveal a range of rabbinic attitudes toward messianic expectation—some eager, some skeptical, some resigned.
Foreign Empires and Persecution
The shadow of the Temple’s destruction falls across the aggada. R’ Shimon bar Yohai’s flight from the Romans (Shabbat 33b-34a) is a classic narrative of persecution, hiding, and return. Elsewhere we find grotesque portraits of Nebuchadnezzar, debates about Roman rule, and reflections on exile and diaspora. The Talmud’s relationship to empire—Sasanian Babylonia, Roman Eretz Yisrael—shapes much of its historical imagination.
Cosmology and celestial phenomena
The Talmud records debates between Jewish and non-Jewish scholars about the sun’s path at night and the structure of the heavens. Berakhot 58b-59a discusses comets and constellations; Shabbat 156a treats astrological influences on character based on birth timing. The rabbis took the heavens seriously as both physical reality and theological concern.
Death, mourning, and the afterlife
Moed Katan’s discussions of mourning practices, eulogies, and the treatment of the dead reveal both halakhic and aggadic dimensions of rabbinic thinking about mortality. The deaths of major figures—Moses in Sotah, R’ Yohanan’s colleagues in various tractates—generate extended narrative treatments. The Angel of Death appears as a character, sometimes making mistakes, sometimes outwitted.
Demons and the supernatural
The Talmud is populated with shedim, mazzikin, dangerous spirits in outhouses and under sorb trees. I find these passages fascinating not as curiosities but as windows into how the rabbis understood invisible causation and danger. The outhouse material in Berakhot 61b-62b is especially rich: rules about orientation, wiping, and protection against demons, all grounded in the practical realities of ancient sanitation.
Dreams and their interpretation
The extended sugya in Berakhot on dream symbolism (56a-57b) generated over a dozen posts. The Bar-Haddaya narrative—where a dream interpreter gives favorable readings to paying clients and dire ones to non-payers—is a remarkable text about the power of speech to shape reality. The same verses from Deuteronomy’s curses become blessings or disasters depending on who paid the fee.
Medical and scientific material
Talmudic medicine is its own world: eye salves, plant remedies, hygiene warnings, anatomical theories. I annotate these with historical and botanical context where I can identify the plants and treatments being discussed.
The master index of Talmud posts is available here. A separate index covers non-Talmud posts.
See also my discussion a few weeks ago, here (Jan 04, 2026), section “How I Analyze Aggadic Sugyot: A Methodological Overview”. My discussion there is related, but fairly orthogonal; it emphasizes different points.