Sar Torah on Seeking Torah and Talmud

"I know what you seek and My heart recognizes what you crave: you seek an abundance of Torah and a tumult of Talmud, you hope for a multitude of legal discussions, to ask about the law. For a tumult of extension you are longing in order to multiply testimony - mountains and mountains of it; to set down sound wisdom - hills and hills of it; to magnify Talmud in the streets and dialectic in the squares; to multiply laws 'like the sand of the sea' (Gen 32:13) and my mysteries like the dust of the inhabited world."

-- Sar Torah, §287

Introduction to Mishnah and Talmud

The Talmud is the Mishnah and the Gemara. Gemara means Completion. The Gemara is the completion of the Mishnah. The Mishnah is written with an extreme brevity of language; its statements are highly-terse and compact, requiring it to be unpacked and expanded in order to fully understand.

The Sages of the Mishnah began their tradition long before the writing the the Talmud as we know it today (these sages are referred to as "Tanna'im"), which consists of the redaction of the Mishnah and the much lengthier Gemara, which comprises the overwhelming bulk of the text of the Talmud.

The Gemara is the accumulated documentation of a period of intense Torah scholarship that lasted for well over 300 years. The scholars whose debates and inquiries are recorded in the Gemara are known as the "Amora'im".

There are in fact two Talmuds: Talmud Yerushalmi and Talmud Bavli. The Talmud Yerushalmi was begun slightly earlier than the Bavli. The Yerushalmi was written in Eretz Yisrael while the Bavli was written in Babylonia.

Talmud Yerushalmi contains a Gemara for every Tractate until the end of the Fourth Order of the Mishnah. The Sages of Yisrael were unable to complete the redaction of the Gemara for all Six Orders of the Mishnah. Talmud Bavli contains a Gemara for almost every Tractate for the Second through the Fifth Order of the Mishnah.

So for neither the Yerushalmi or the Bavli were the Sages able to finish the Gemara. The major missing component of both Talmuds is therefore the Sixth Order of the Mishnah, the Order of Purities.

The result of this analysis proves that the Sixth Order of the Mishnah remains the most elusive and difficult to understand of all the Orders of the Mishnah.