Aligned sentence by sentence
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R. Chiyya now sought to compose a work in which he would follow the traces of his teacher and clarify whatever was difficult in his teacher's words — this is the Tosefta. His purpose in it was to elucidate the Mishnah and to add cases that can be derived from the Mishnah, though only after considerable effort; he derived them so as to teach us how we too should derive and draw conclusions from the Mishnah.
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R. Oshaya did likewise. Rav too composed a *baraita* — namely the Sifra and the Sifrei — and many others composed such works besides these two, as we find them saying, "When R. So-and-so came, he brought a *baraita* in his hand." These *baraitot*, however, did not all come with the elegance of the Mishnah's language, nor with the precision of its meanings and the conciseness of its wording.
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For this reason the Mishnah was made the foundation and all those compositions are subordinate to it; it is the one held in highest esteem by the multitude, and in comparison with those other compositions, "the daughters saw it and called it blessed; the queens and concubines praised it" (Song 6:9).
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Now everyone who arose after him and after that illustrious assembly had as his sole aim to grasp the words of the Mishnah; generation after generation continued to study it and expound it, each scholar according to the measure of his learning and understanding. Over the course of the years there came to be disagreement in the interpretation of some of its *halakhot*; there was no group that did not study it, draw conclusions from it, and trace out inferences from it — until the time reached our master Rav Ashi, he and Ravina being the last of the sages of the Talmud.
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Rav Ashi devoted himself to compilation, and saw fit to do with the words of all who came after our holy master what our holy master had done with the words of all who came after Moses. So he gathered all the statements of those who had spoken, the analyses of those who had analyzed, and the interpretations of the interpreters; he verified the traditions and collected them, and grasped the whole in his learning by virtue of the breadth of soul and the love of knowledge God had granted him. Thus he compiled the Talmud, and made his purpose in it fourfold.
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The first is the interpretation of the Mishnah and of all that occurs in its ambiguous language by way of differing interpretations, the arguments each interpreter brings against his fellow, and the demonstration of which view is the truth — this is the first of his purposes. The second is the rendering of a decisive ruling in accordance with the view of one of the disputing parties whose disagreement arose over the text of the Mishnah, or over its interpretation, or over what is derived and inferred from it.
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The third is the conclusions that the scholars of each generation drew from the Mishnah, and the exhibiting of the principles and the proofs by which the Tannaim who discussed the Mishnah argued and on which they relied — so that from their words there became clear whatever became clear — together with the *gezerot* and *takkanot* that were enacted from the time of our holy master onward. The fourth is *derashot* suited to the meaning of any chapter in which a homily happened to occur.
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This fourth purpose — I mean the homily occurring in the Talmud — should not be supposed to be of low rank or of little benefit; on the contrary, it is of immense value, for the strange riddles and wondrous insights it comprises. For when you examine these *derashot* with an inner gaze, you grasp from them the most absolute good, beyond which there is no surpassing; there is disclosed in them divine meanings and the true realities of all that the people of knowledge speculate about and all that the philosophers across the ages have determined.
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But if you examine such a homily according to its surface, you will see in it a departure from reason beyond which there is no surpassing. The Sages framed them thus for wondrous reasons. One of these is to sharpen the minds of students; another is to blind those fools whose hearts have never been illumined — for were the truths laid plainly before them, they would turn away from them in proportion to the deficiency of their natures.
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Of such men they say, "Do we reveal the secret to them?", for their intellects have not been perfected enough to receive the truths as they are. The Sages, peace be upon them, would withhold the secrets of knowledge from one another.
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It is even reported that one of the Sages was once in the company of men who were proficient in the lore of *Ma'aseh Bereshit*, while he himself was proficient in the lore of *Ma'aseh Merkavah*. He said to them, "Teach me *Ma'aseh Bereshit* and I will teach you *Ma'aseh Merkavah*." They consented; but once they had taught him *Ma'aseh Bereshit* he refrained from teaching them *Ma'aseh Merkavah*.
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He did not do this — God forbid — out of stinginess with knowledge or a desire to lord it over them, for such traits are reproachable even in the basest of people, let alone in those great souls. He did it rather because he saw himself fit to receive what they possessed, but did not see them fit to receive what he possessed.
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He supported this aim by Solomon's words, "honey and milk are under your tongue" (Song 4:11), which the Sages, peace be upon them, interpreted to mean that delightful matters in which the soul takes pleasure — as the sense of taste delights in honey and milk — ought not be uttered nor brought forth from the tongue at all, this being the meaning of "under your tongue." For these meanings are not of the sort that is taught or studied in the assemblies of learning; rather they are gestured at in the books through hidden allusions.
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And when God removes the veil from the heart of whomever He wills, after that person has trained himself in the sciences, he grasps from them according to the measure of his mind. With respect to learning and inquiry undertaken with effort, nothing is left to a man but to devote himself wholly to God, to pray and supplicate to Him that He grant him understanding, guide him aright, and disclose to him the secrets treasured up in the texts of the scriptures — as we find David, peace be upon him, did, in his words, "Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of Your Torah" (Ps 119:18).
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So when God opens up to a man some of these matters — unlocking their treasure, as we said — and he then alludes to some of it, he does so only to one whose intellect is perfect and whose discernment is sound, as the Sages explained and made clear in many of the *ma'asiyyot* in the Talmud. For this reason it is not proper for a learned man to divulge what he knows of the secrets except to one who is his superior or his equal. For if he set such matters before an ignorant man, even if the man does not openly disparage him, he will not find them admirable. Therefore the wise man said, "Do not speak in the ears of a fool, for he will despise the prudence of your words" (Prov 23:9).
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Moreover, the instruction of the multitude is possible only by way of riddle and parable, so that it may reach even the women and the young children, until, when their intellects have matured, they come to know the meanings of those parables. To this meaning Solomon alluded in his words, "to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles" (Prov 1:6). For these reasons the Sages, peace be upon them, framed their words on divine matters in veiled fashion.
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Therefore, when something of their words reaches a man and his reason, in his own estimation, parts ways with it, he should not ascribe the deficiency to those words; rather he should ascribe the deficiency to his own reason. And whenever he sees one of their parables whose surface lies very far from his reason, he ought to be greatly grieved over his own reason, which does not grasp the intent — to the point that for him all the truths have come to lie at the utmost remove.
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For intellects differ as temperaments differ: just as one person's temperament is finer and nearer to the balance than another's, so too one person's intellect is more perfect and complete than another's. There is no doubt that the intellect of one who knows some sublime matter is not like the intellect of one who is ignorant of that matter, for the one is an intellect in actuality and the other an intellect in potentiality. Hence there are things which to some people are of the utmost clarity and plainness, and to others lie at the very limit of impossibility — each according to his rank in knowledge.
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Let me set you a clear illustration of this. Suppose we put to a man learned in medicine, arithmetic, and music, skilled in the natural sciences, sharp of mind and of fine natural endowment, but devoid of geometry and astronomy, the following question: "What do you say, sir, about a man who claims that the body of the sun — which we see as a small disk — is a spherical body whose magnitude is one hundred sixty-six and three-eighths times the magnitude of the sphere of the earth, and that the sphere of the earth, by which we measured, is a sphere whose circumference is twenty-four thousand miles, so that this man has arrived at knowing how many miles there are in the measure of the magnitude of the sphere of the sun?"
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Inevitably that sharp-minded man, expert in the sciences we mentioned, will find no place in himself by any means to accept this claim as true; all of it will be to him a matter beyond comprehension, and rational argument will, at first thought, present itself to him that this claim is false. How — he reasons — can a man standing on a single hand-span of the earth know the measure of its body, its circumference, and the surface-area of its expanse, unless he encompasses it as he encompasses the measurement of a single patch among the earth's patches?
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And how much more so the body of the sun in the heavens, when it is at so vast a distance from him that he cannot even see the body itself in truth, but perceives only its rays — and yet he arrives at a region he measures, and fixes its measure at three-eighths of a time? This is among the gravest of absurdities, and to such a man there is no doubt that this claim is impossible.
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But once he has trained himself in the books of geometry, and learned what is entailed in spherical figures and the like by way of proportions, and then moved on to the work composed for this very purpose and what is allied to it — I mean the science of astronomy, known as the book of the *Almagest* — this matter will become true for him and will become in his estimation a correct statement, beyond doubt, for which a demonstration has been established; and there will be no difference for him between the magnitude of the sun being this measure and the sun's existing at all.
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His intellect will move on to verify completely the very thing he had reckoned utterly remote, with a complete verification — and this, mind you, while we supposed the person before whom we set this question to be learned in other sciences, of fine mind and sharp nature, and the question we put to him to be one of the mathematical questions, which are among the ranks by which one ascends to the divine matters.
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How much more, then, will this be the case for one who has no learning at all, and has not trained himself in any path of the mathematical sciences — whose passage was rather from the intellect of his mother to the intellect of his wife! When you set before such a man one of the divine questions that lie treasured up in the *derashot*, there is no doubt that it will seem to him as remote as heaven from earth, and his mind will recoil entirely from grasping anything of it.
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For this reason we ought to hold a good belief regarding them, to reflect carefully upon them, and not rush to deem anything of them remote; rather, whenever something of them seems difficult to us, let us train ourselves in the sciences until we grasp their intent in that statement — if our intellects suffice to grasp it.
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For the Sages, peace be upon them, given the state they were in — their eagerness in inquiry, the excellence of their thought, their self-discipline, their handling of those great matters, and their casting off of this world and all that is in it — would ascribe the deficiency to themselves by comparison with those who preceded them. This is their saying, "The heart of the earlier ones was like the doorway of the entrance-hall, while that of the later ones is not even like the eye of a fine needle."
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How much more, then, are we — from whom, as we have been warned, learning and wisdom have departed: "Therefore, behold, I will again do a marvelous work among this people, a marvel and a wonder; the wisdom of its wise men shall perish, and the understanding of its prudent men shall be hidden" (Isa 29:14) — and how each one of us is singled out by four things: weakness of intellect, strength of appetite, sloth in the pursuit of learning, and zeal in the pursuit of this world, "the four wicked shepherds" — how shall we not ascribe the deficiency to ourselves by comparison with them?
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Because the Sages, peace be upon them, knew this purpose, and that all their words are pure kernel with no chaff in them, they urged it upon us and forbade the disparaging of it, saying, "Whoever scoffs at the words of the Sages is sentenced to boiling excrement" (BT Eruvin 21b); and there is no boiling excrement greater than the ignorance that drives a man to scoff. Therefore you will never find one who reviles their words except a man pursuing appetite, preferring the things of sense, one whose heart has not been illumined by any of the dazzling lights.
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And because they knew the truth of their words, they spent their lifetimes upon them, and commanded that we devote ourselves to them by night and at the ends of the day, and made this the supreme goal, just as it is, saying, "The Holy One, blessed be He, has nothing in His world but the four cubits of *halakhah*" (BT Berakhot 8a).
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Consider this statement: if you examine it according to its surface, you will see it as utterly far from the truth — as though the four cubits of *halakhah* alone were the goal, and all the other sciences and forms of knowledge were cast aside, and as though in the days of Shem and Ever and those after them, when there was as yet no *halakhah*, there was undoubtedly nothing in the world for God!
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But if you examine this statement with an inner gaze, you will see in it wondrous wisdom, and find that it comprehends a great matter of intelligibles. I shall explain it to you, so that it may serve as a model for the rest of what comes before you; consider it as you ought.
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Know that the ancients inquired — a wondrous inquiry, in keeping with the learning and excellence of thought that were theirs — and it became established for them that every existent must have some end for whose sake it came into being, for nothing was created in vain. When this universal proposition became established for them, they set about analyzing the whole of existence, in order to know the end of each and every species.
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They saw that every artificial existent has a known end requiring no inquiry, since its maker does not make it unless its end is already conceived in his mind. For example, I say: the saw the smith made only after thinking how he might separate the continuity of this wood; he conceived in his mind the form of the saw and set to making it in order to saw with it — so the end of the saw is to saw with it. Likewise the end of the adze is to plane with it, and the needle to join cloth to cloth with it; and so for all things brought into being through artifice.
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But as for what the divine craftsmanship and natural wisdom brought into being — such as the kinds of fruit, the kinds of herb, the kinds of mineral, the kinds of stone, and the kinds of animal — some of these have an end perceptible through slight inquiry, some have an end attainable through more inquiry, and some have an end so subtle and hidden that it cannot be known at all save by prophecy or by divination, but never by scientific inquiry.
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For it is not within a man's power to inquire and then report for what purpose nature brought into being one ant with wings and another without, and for what purpose it also brought into being one worm with many legs and another with fewer legs, and what the end of this worm and this ant might be. As for matters greater than these and more manifest in their action, the people of knowledge differ in knowing their ends — so that the more learned a man is, the keener in eagerness and the sharper in mind, the more of an end he knows.
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Therefore, when God granted Solomon the wisdom He had promised him, he knew of the ends of these species what it is possible for a man, insofar as he is a man, to know, and he discoursed upon the ends of the trees, the herbs, and the kinds of animal — as the scripture says, "And he spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall; he spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of creeping things, and of fishes" (1 Kgs 5:13). This was a testimony that there was in him a divine power, for it says thereafter, "And there came of all peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon," etc. (1 Kgs 5:14).
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In sum, all the existents beneath the sphere of the moon were brought into being for the sake of man alone. Thus, among the kinds of animal, some are for his nourishment, such as sheep and cattle and the like; some are for some benefit other than nourishment, such as the donkey, for transporting upon it what he cannot transport by hand, and the horse, for traversing a long distance in a short time upon it; and some are kinds for which we know no benefit, yet in them are benefits for man of which he is unaware.
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So too with fruit: some is for his nourishment, some for healing him of his ailments; and likewise the herbs, and so all the species. And whatever you find among animal or plant that, by your reckoning, has no benefit and does not nourish — this is owing to the weakness of our knowledge. For every herb, every fruit, and every kind of animal, from the elephant to the worm, must contain some benefit for man.
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Your proof of this is that in each and every generation there appears a benefit of an herb or of kinds of fruit that had not appeared to those who came before, and great benefits are derived from them. No one person is able to encompass the benefits of all the plants of the earth; rather this appears through experience over the passage of the generations.
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Perhaps you will say: Then why were the deadly poisons created — such as the *bīsh* and the bloodweed, in which is a man's destruction, not his benefit?
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You must know that in these too are benefits. For though they kill when eaten, they do not kill when applied to the surface of the body; and once it is clear to you that the great benefit to man lies in deadly poison, then enough said about what is less than that.
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So when they found the end of all these to be the existence of man, it followed that we must also inquire why man was brought into being and what his end is.
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When they prolonged their inquiry into this, they found that man has very many activities — for all the kinds of animal and tree have only a single activity, or two, and a single end. Thus we see that the palm has no activity except the bearing of dates, and likewise the rest of the fruits; and likewise among animals we find one that only weaves, like the spider, one that builds, like the swallow, and one that stores up, like the ant.
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But man performs many varied activities. So they probed all his activities, one by one, to learn what his end is from among these activities, and they found that his end is one single activity, while the rest of his activities are only for the perpetuation of his existence so that this single activity may be perfected in him — namely, the conceiving of intelligibles and the knowing of the truths as they are.
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For it is impossible that the end of man should be to eat, drink, copulate, build a wall, or become a king, since all these are accidents befalling him that add nothing to his essence; moreover he shares in all these activities with the other kinds of animal.
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It is rather knowledge that adds to his essence and transfers him from a base state to a sublime one — for he was a man in potentiality and becomes a man in actuality.
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Before he knows, a man is but like the beasts, since man is distinguished from the other kinds of animal only by speech-reason; for he is a rational animal, by "reason" meaning the conceiving of intelligibles, the greatest intelligible being the conceiving of the oneness of God, exalted and mighty, and what is connected with it of the divine matters. For the rest of the sciences serve only to train oneself by them until one arrives at divine knowledge; and discourse on this aim, to do it justice, would grow very long.
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Yet along with the conceiving of intelligibles comes the necessity of casting off excess in bodily pleasures. For the first intelligible one conceives is that the ruin of the soul lies in the well-being of the body, and the well-being of the soul lies in the ruin of the body.
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For when a man pursues appetites, prefers the objects of sense, and presses his intellect into the service of his appetite, he becomes like the beasts and cattle that imagine nothing but eating, drinking, and copulating; then the divine power — I mean the intellect — does not become manifest in him, and he becomes at that point a severed matter swimming in the sea of *hyle*.
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Thus it becomes established from these premises that the end of our world and what is in it is a learned, good man. So when there is realized in a person of the human species learning and action — by "learning" I mean conceiving the truths as they are and grasping all that a man can possibly grasp, and by "action" I mean balance in natural matters, the casting off of immersion in them, taking of them only what sustains the body and improves the character as a whole — a person who comes to this state is the goal.
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This is a meaning known not by the prophets alone; rather the learned of the past nations, who neither saw the prophets nor heard their wisdom, knew it too: that a man is a complete man only when he has combined learning and action.
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It is enough for you to cite the saying of the one preeminent in philosophy: "God's purpose for us is that we be noble and good." For when a person is learned and noble yet a pursuer of appetites, he is not truly learned, since the beginning of learning is to take of bodily pleasures only what sustains the body.
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In our commentary on tractate Avot we shall do this aim full justice and explain it as is fitting and required.
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Thus too we find the prophet reproaching one who claimed to have learning while transgressing the Law and pursuing the appetites of his soul — this is his saying, "How can you say, 'We are wise, and the Torah of the Lord is with us,'" etc. (Jer 8:8).
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Likewise, if a person is also devout and ascetic, casting off pleasures except what sustains the body, walking the balanced course in all the paths of nature, having attained all the virtues of character — yet has no learning — he too is imperfect, though more complete than the first; for his action is not grounded in truth and certainty.
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Therefore the Sages, peace be upon them, say, "An ignorant man cannot be sin-fearing," as we explained.
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So whoever says of an *am ha'aretz* that he is pious belies the Sages, who pronounced decisively on this, and belies reason as well.
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Therefore you find the commandment throughout the whole Torah, "and you shall teach," and only afterward "to do them" (cf. Deut 5:1, 11:19) — learning before action, because through learning one arrives at action, whereas action does not lead to learning. This is their saying, peace be upon them, "Study leads to action" (BT Kiddushin 40b).
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One question still remains here, namely that an objector might say: You have claimed that the divine wisdom brought nothing into being in vain, that of all creatures beneath the sphere of the moon man is the noblest, and that the end of the human species is the conceiving of intelligibles.
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Why then did God bring into being all those people who do not conceive any intelligible? For we find most people devoid of learning and pursuing the appetites, while the learned, ascetic person is anomalous and rare, found only as a single individual in an age.
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The answer is that all those others exist for two reasons. The first is to be of service to that single one.
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For if all people were seekers of learning and philosophers, the world would be ruined and would perish, and the human species would be cut off from it in the briefest time — for man is very needy, requiring many things; he would have to learn plowing, reaping, threshing, grinding, cooking, and the making of the tools for all these, in order to complete his nourishment, and likewise he would have to learn spinning and weaving to weave what he wears, and building to build where he may shelter, and the making of the tools for all these.
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The lifespan of Methuselah would not suffice for learning these crafts that man necessarily requires the whole of in order to survive — and when, then, would such a person acquire wisdom and gain learning?
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So all these were brought into being to carry out the labors needed in the city, so that the learned man might find them ready for himself; thus the earth is settled and wisdom comes to be.
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How fine is the saying of him who said, "Were it not for the mad, the world would be ruined" — for what madness could there be more than that a man weak of soul and deranged of constitution should travel from the start of the second clime to the start of the sixth, cross the seas in winter and the desert in the heats of summer, and expose himself alone to wild beasts and vermin, in the hope of earning a dinar?
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And when he has gathered those dinars — for which he risked his three souls all told — he sets about apportioning them to craftsmen to build a firm foundation deep in the earth with lime and stone, in order to raise upon it a wall that will stand a hundred years, while he knows full well that there does not remain of his lifespan enough to wear out even a wall of papyrus!
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What madness is greater than this? And likewise all the pleasures and appetites of this world are pure madness — for the settling of the earth. Therefore the Sages, peace be upon them, name one who has no learning *am ha'aretz*, that is, they exist only for the settling of the earth (*amarat ha'aretz*); for this reason they ascribed them to it.
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Perhaps someone will say: but we see a foolish, ignorant man going easily through the world without toil, while another serves him and tends to his affairs — indeed, it often happens that the one tending the affairs of another is a learned man.
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The matter is not as the one who supposes this imagines. For that ignorant man goes easily precisely because he too is serving the person who is the Creator's purpose; for in his ease and the abundance of his wealth or kingship, he commands his servants to build a lofty palace or to plant a great vineyard, as kings do and those who imitate kings.
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That palace will then be prepared for some excellent man who comes in the future course of the ages, who one day takes shade beneath one of the walls of that palace, and thereby is saved from perishing; and from that vineyard there will one day be taken a measure of wine from which an antidote is made, by which is saved a complete man whom a viper has bitten.
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Such are the dispositions of God, exalted and mighty, and His wisdom, by which He has set nature in service: "counsels from afar, faithfulness and truth" (Isa 25:1).
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This is a purpose the Sages, peace be upon them, have explained: they said that Ben Zoma would stand upon the Temple Mount and see Israel going up, and would say, "Blessed is He who created all these to serve me" (cf. BT Berakhot 58a) — for he, peace be upon him, was the unique one of his age.
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The second reason for the bringing into being of one who has no learning is that the people of learning are very few — this being something necessitated by the divine wisdom.
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And one does not say, regarding what is necessitated by the first wisdom, "Why was this necessitated?" — just as one does not say why the spheres are nine, the planets seven, and the elements four; for these and their like were necessitated in the first existence.
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You see that the Sages, peace be upon them, have explained this: R. Shimon ben Yochai said of the people of his age, regarding their state, "I have seen the sons of ascent, and they are few; if they be two, they are I and my son" (cf. BT Sukkah 45b).
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Therefore the multitude were brought into being to keep the people of the heights company.
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Perhaps you reckon this benefit a slight one — but it is in fact more emphatic than the first. Do you not see that God set the unbelievers in the land to keep the excellent ones company? — this is His saying, exalted and mighty, "I will not drive them out before you in one year, lest the land become desolate" (Exod 23:29).
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This is a purpose the Sages have likewise explained, saying, "What is 'for this is the whole of man' (Eccl 12:13)? The whole world entire was created only to keep company with this one" — its explanation being "to keep him company."
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So it is established from all we have said that the end of all that is in the world of generation and corruption is a complete man who combines learning and action, as we have described. And since we derive from the words of the Sages, peace be upon them, these two meanings — I mean learning and action — from what they have explained and intimated, how true is their saying, "The Holy One, blessed be He, has nothing in His world but the four cubits of *halakhah*."
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We have strayed far from the aim we are pursuing; but we have brought forward an address that improves belief and urges inquiry — not a slight one, in my view. Now I return to my aim.
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When Rav Ashi completed the compilation of the Talmud as it stands, the fineness of its order and the greatness of its benefit bore witness for it that "the spirit of the holy gods is in him" (Dan 4:8).
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Of the Talmud, what is found of Rav Ashi's compilation comprises thirty-five tractates.
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For no discourse of his is found on Seder Zeraim except on Berakhot alone; none is found on tractate Shekalim of Seder Moed, nor on tractate Eduyot nor tractate Avot of Seder Nezikin; nor on tractate Middot and tractate Kinnim of Seder Kodashim;
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nor is any discourse of his found on anything of Seder Tohorot except on tractate Niddah alone. Then Rav Ashi died, having completed the Talmud in the manner we have mentioned, in Babylonia.
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The sages of the Land of Israel did likewise — I mean, they did what Rav Ashi did — and compiled the Jerusalem Talmud; the one who compiled it was R. Yochanan. Of the Yerushalmi, five of the orders are found complete.
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As for Seder Tohorot, no Talmud at all is found for it, neither Bavli nor Yerushalmi, except for tractate Niddah alone, as we mentioned.
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A man can interpret that order only after great difficulty and immense toil, by enlisting the Tosefta and the *baraitot*, gleaning the *halakhot* drawn from it that are scattered throughout the Talmud, and deriving the principles of the tractates and their meanings from those *halakhot* — as you will see in our commentary on that order, God willing.
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When the whole company of the Sages, peace be upon them — those last of whom were Ravina and Rav Ashi — had died, and the Talmud was complete, then everyone who arose after this had as his sole aim to grasp the words of those who had compiled it: "to it none may add, and from it none may subtract" (cf. Eccl 3:14).
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The Geonim composed many commentaries, but in our knowledge none of them was able to complete a commentary on the whole of the Talmud: some had their lifetime cut short by it, and some were cut off from it by the affairs of the people in matters of law. They also composed works on excerpted *halakhot* drawn from it, some in Arabic and some in Hebrew, such as the Halakhot Gedolot, the Halakhot Ketzuvot, the Halakhot Pesukot, the Halakhot of R. Acha of Shabcha, and others.
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But the *halakhot* that the great master, our Rabbi Yitzchak — may his memory be a blessing — composed have rendered all those superfluous, for they gather all the useful matter of the excerpts and the rulings needed in our time — I mean the time of the exile. He has clarified in them all the errors that befell those before him in their excerpts, and we take exception to him in them only on a few *halakhot*, not amounting to ten in all.
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As for the commentaries of all the Geonim that exist, they vary according to the variation of their minds; and the man of understanding who studies the Talmud is able to extract the very substance of each and every Gaon from his words and his commentary.
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When the time reached us, we set ourselves, upon what we found of the inquiry, study, and effort of those who preceded, according to our capacity, to acquire all that we hope to find profit by before God.
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I gathered what reached me of the comments of my father — may his memory be a blessing — and of others, on the basis of our Rabbi Yosef HaLevi, of blessed memory — for that man's mind in the Talmud was astonishing, as God knows for whoever contemplates his words and the depth of his immersion in inquiry, so that I might almost say of him, "Before him there was no king like him" (cf. 2 Kgs 23:25) in his particular method.
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I also gathered what I found of his *halakhot* in his own commentary, and what appeared to me as well of interpretations, according to the weakness of our power and what we have attained of learning; and I composed commentaries on the three orders Moed, Nashim, and Nezikin — except for four tractates which we are now attempting to set down something on, but have so far found no leisure for.
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We also set down Chullin, owing to the great need for it. This is the work we were attempting, together with the pursuit of all that we sought.
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Then, after that, I saw that I should make in the Mishnah itself a necessary intervention, in the manner I shall explain at the close of these words of mine.
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What drove me to this was that I saw the Talmud doing to the Mishnah something no one could ever match by analogy. For it adduces principles and tells you that this Mishnah was built upon such-and-such a basis, or that this Mishnah is deficient in wording and its full sense is thus, or that this Mishnah belongs to So-and-so and his view is thus; and moreover it adds to its wording and subtracts from it and exhibits its reasons.
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So I saw that, if this undertaking were carried out toward the aim we propose over the whole of the Mishnah, there would be in it four great benefits.
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The first is that we would come to know the true interpretation of the Mishnah and the construal of its wording.
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For if you asked the greatest Gaon for the interpretation of a *halakhah* of the Mishnah, he would not be able to tell you anything about it unless he had the Talmud of that *halakhah* by heart, or he would say, "Wait until we look at what is said about it in the Talmud" — and it is not within the power of any person to have the whole of the Talmud by heart, especially since a single *halakhah* of the Mishnah is sometimes interpreted over four or five pages, because discourse enters upon discourse, with arguments, objections, and answers, so that no one can extract what is pure in the construal of that Mishnah unless he is a master of inquiry.
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This is the case where the single *halakhah* is one whose explanation and decisive ruling are not completed except out of two or three tractates.
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The second benefit is the rulings, for at the interpretation of each *halakhah* I tell you which view to act upon.
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The third is that it serves as an introduction for the beginner in inquiry, who gains from it the way to investigate discourse and construe it, so that he becomes like one who has encompassed the whole of the Talmud; this aids him greatly with all of the Talmud.
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The fourth is that it serves as a reminder for one who has already studied and learned, so that all he has studied is always present before his eyes, and "his Mishnah and his Talmud are set in order upon his lips."
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When these meanings had taken shape for me, I devoted myself to the compilation I aim at. Our intent in this compilation is to interpret the Mishnah according to how the Talmud interpreted it, to confine ourselves to the sound interpretations, to abridge the interpretations whose falsity is shown in the Talmud, to exhibit the reasons for which a given statement became clear, the reasons for which disagreement arose among the disputants in some of the disagreements, and which view is to be acted upon according to what the Talmud makes clear.
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In all of this I aim at conciseness of wording, in such a way that it does not become obscure to the reader — for our compilation is not so that stones may understand, but so that one who understands may understand.