Read an excerpt from the introductory “A Message from Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz” to the Koren Talmud Bavli

BOB ABERNETHY, correspondent: We have a profile today of one of the most respected rabbis in the world. He is a seventy-four-year-old Israeli, Adin Steinsaltz, the author of 60 books on ethics, theology, prayer, and mysticism, with a few mystery novels included. Rabbi Steinsaltz is most admired for a monumental project that took him 45 years, sometimes working 17 hour days. He translated the Babylonian Talmud from ancient Hebrew and Aramaic into Modern Hebrew. The Torah is Judaism’s holiest text, Genesis through Deuteronomy. The Talmud is commentary on the Torah. But in its original languages, the Talmud was studied primarily by students and scholars. Now, the Steinsaltz Talmud makes it available to everyone.

The holiest site in all Judaism is in Jerusalem, the Western Wall of the Second Temple, destroyed in the year 70. The devout come to the wall to pray, and so do many thirteen-year-old boys at the time of their Bar Mitzvahs, when they take on the full responsibilities of adults. One of those duties is studying the Torah, with its 613 laws about how to live. The Torah, for Rabbi Steinsaltz, is a divine guide, a map of the paths and the main road through a world of danger and blessings—in his words, lions and angels.

RABBI ADIN STEINSALTZ: We are living in a world we really don’t know what are the paths. We don’t know what are the ways. We don’t even know what the main road is. So we need some kinds of signs to tell us that here live lions, and here possibly live angels. That’s mostly what the Torah is, a book basically of instructions: go this way, go the other way, do it, don’t do it. So that’s as simple as that.

ABERNETHY: Holy as the Torah is, its laws are in some ways unclear. For instance, it requires keeping the Sabbath, but it never explains exactly how. So the Talmud emerged, first as an oral tradition, later written down—centuries of rabbinical commentaries interpreting the Torah’s laws and arguing over them. Rabbi Steinsaltz began his translation of the Talmud when he was 28. It took him 45 years and ran to 45 volumes.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: It was necessary because it is an important book. I once called it the center pillar of our culture.

ABERNETHY: Recently, Steinsaltz was in New York City teaching and explaining what is unique about the Steinsaltz Talmud—his own commentary and extensive background.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: You have here the original Hebrew, the translation in English, and then you have, you see, notes about the law.

ABERNETHY: With his many books as well as his Talmud translation, the rabbi personifies Judaism’s commitment to learning and to argument as a means of understanding.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: The idea of the Talmud is that you are allowed to ask questions about anything, everything that can be done, encouraging you to ask questions, trying to find answers.

Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical Students: And the rabbis let her then remarry. Even though there was only one witness.

ABERNETHY: Every day students and scholars around the world study and question and debate the meanings of the Torah and Talmud and the arguments of rabbis who have studied them. There is no single authority to decide how best to interpret the religious law, but argument over the centuries can lead to general agreement—until the next question and the next argument.

Steinsaltz was raised in a secular Jewish family, but his father insisted he study the sacred texts so he would not grow up ignorant. I asked him how he became religious.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: It was almost spontaneous. I don’t know where that came from. Believing in God is in a way is the most natural, perhaps even the most primitive notion that people have.

ABERNETHY: But belief, said Steinsaltz, is just the beginning.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: What is really difficult is not so much the belief but the relationship. I’m still striving to become better, to become faithful for serving Him, to become a human being as He possibly wants me to be.

ABERNETHY: Steinsaltz sees all human beings as God’s partners in what Jews call tikkun olam, repairing the world.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: The Lord says I made the world. It’s pretty good, but there are all kinds of holes in it. You people go, and you make the amendments—bigger ones, smaller ones. But you, that’s your duty.

ABERNETHY: The rabbi says even the smallest good deed can have a global result, the so-called butterfly effect.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: The movement of the wings of a butterfly can change the world, and the point is basically we live in one world. Any movement in this world somehow affects everything else. So when we do anything better, we change the world.

ABERNETHY: If Jews study the Torah, if they honor the Sabbath and the other holy days, if they do good deeds and partner with God, Steinsaltz says they will achieve holiness. He also says everyone possesses a divine spark.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: This spark is in a way trying to find its way to the main fire, and then it wants to sink into the main fire.

ABERNETHY: Steinsaltz said he saw no signs of any early peace in the Middle East, but he insisted that he had not despaired.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: I am an optimist, meaning that I see things as black as they are, but I still hope.

ABERNETHY: Talking with the rabbi, it was clear that his optimism rests on his absolute trust in God.

RABBI STEINSALTZ: When you believe that, you see, everything comes from the Lord.so whenever something happens if it’s a glad thing, I’m saying thank you for making me happy or healthy or satisfied. If something untoward happens to me, I’s saying the same thing. Please, thank you for letting me know that you exist.

God exists everywhere in every way in every form. We have so many prayers in our religion, so many prayers, but sometimes the prayer is just like I pick up the phone and say hello, I’m glad that you are there.

ABERNETHY: Steinsaltz said he would like to be remembered as a person who did something to make the world better. He also said he would like to live another hundred years—teaching, writing, doing what he can to repair the world and to become, as he put it, the human being God possibly wants him to be.

Next month the first four volumes of the Steinsaltz Talmud in English are due to come out.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Every day, hundreds of people gather in a makeshift worship center on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.They profess their Judaism in prayers, pictures, and words. They’re hoping to be heard most immediately by authorities in Israel, which they call the Promised Land. Many left spartan farm lives in the rural north of this ancient east African nation and moved to the city years ago in hopes that they, like thousands before them, would be taken to Israel.

Ethiopian Jew: Our members are suffering. They are destitute. They don’t have places to sleep.

Ethiopian Jew: I come to follow God’s word. He said, as I disperse you I shall bring you together. Because of that I want to go back to the Jewish home.

DE SAM LAZARO: Their pleas have fallen mostly on skeptical ears even though more than 75,000 Ethiopians, including many relatives of these people, were accepted in recent years into Israel.Their acceptance into Israeli society, however, has been difficult. Many in Israel’s religious leadership have questioned whether the Ethiopians are truly Jewish. Many were subjected to conversion rituals upon their arrival in Israel. In recent years, Ethiopians, particularly in the second generation, have taken to street protests.

Ethiopian Jewish Demonstrator: I think what we are looking here today is thousands of Ethiopians saying here to the Israeli society: no to discrimination, no for racism. All of us we came here to Israel to be equal with Israeli society.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Ethiopian Jewish tradition dates back hundreds of years—many believe more than 2,000 years.

MESFIN ASSEFA (Scholar-Activist): The origin of Ethiopian Jews dates back to biblical times when the Queen of Sheba or Magda first went to visit King Solomon, and she returned bearing a child conceived during this visit. The young prince, later King Melenik, went to Israel to meet his father when he was 20, and he returned to Ethiopia accompanied by 1000 members from each of the tribes of Israel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Other migrations followed from ancient Israel, he says, but this account has a number skeptics.

GETACHEW HAILE: It’s more of a legend than historical truth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Getachew Haile, a religion historian now in Minnesota, says there’s no evidence of any trail linking Ethiopia directly with ancient Israel.

GETACHEW HAILE: We have Greek inscriptions, Arabic inscriptions. There is nothing in the sort of Hebrew inscriptions.

DE SAM LAZARO: More likely, he says, Jews came here from the Arabian Peninsula or Yemen centuries later and settled amid certain isolated populations, helping convert them from the Orthodox Christianity that predominated.

HAILE: One possibility, this is a theory, is that some people might have migrated from over the Red Sea, come into Ethiopia, and converted them. The other is within the Ethiopian community, within the Christian community, who rejected Christianity.

DE SAM LAZARO: Through the ages, he says, some Ethiopian kings enforced a rigid conformance to the predominant Orthodox Christianity. Those outside this system, called falasha or foreigners have been marginalized.

HAILE: They are considered outcasts, and I have no doubt that they have been treated like that within the Ethiopian Christians.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thanks in large part to this persecution, the so-called falasha became Ethiopia’s poorest people, and this has complicated the transition for many who went to Israel from medieval poverty to a First World economy. Still, for the Ethiopians it is a huge improvement in the standard of living. Mengistu Kebede, who’d returned to Addis Ababa on vacation recently to visit family, gave us some perspective. It was a difficult adjustment to life in Israel, he says, but well worth it.

MENGISTU KEBEDE: It’s significantly better. Everybody wears shoes, they get enough pay for work, their clothes there are nice. Everything is much better.

DE SAM LAZARO: As part of earlier groups who were airlifted amid Ethiopia’s famine and civil war in the 1980s and ’90s, Kebede received a relatively warm welcome under Israel’s law of return. Today, however, the issue of economic motivation has clouded the politics of migration.

ASSEFA: I understand that there’s a perception that people coming from poor countries, from Africa, are coming for the economic benefits. But the issue is it’s the national law of Israel as well as the religious law to allow all Jews to return to Israel. It’s what God promised. As far as we know, all who have applied are bona fide Jews, and while there are advantages, the true motivation is a religious one.

DE SAM LAZARO: Amid the social, political, and economic challenges involving Ethiopian migration, Israel’s government has restricted the number it will allow in. In 2010 the government, in a move that it said should absorb all remaining Jews in Ethiopia, authorized visas for 8,000 new migrants. They’ll be allowed in in phases through 2016. Most of these worshipers did not make the cut. Deliverance to the Promised Land for these people, whose numbers are estimated in the low thousands, could take years, if it happens at all.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

MARK PODWAL: What’s unique about this haggadah is trying to draw in as many people as possible to participate in the service. That’s why it’s called Sharing the Journey. There are wonderful explanations that are very inclusive, and so you can come to this seder not knowing anything.

Although I try to be as original as possible, I like to have some tradition not only in the concepts but in the images that were used. I wanted somehow to include the seder plate visually because it’s there in the scriptures. I also wanted to make a reference to medieval haggadahs where there were large letters that illuminated a page, and so what I decided to do was have that image with the three letters of the Hebrew word “seder” and within the samech, the first letter, I drew the seder plate.

In trying to come up with an original way to depict the four children I did them as books and as the Torah, so the wise child, his body is the Torah, his arm is the Torah pointer, his head is an open book. The wicked son, or the wicked child, is in a suit of armor. The first time the wicked child was depicted in an illustrated haggadah was in 1526, the Prague Haggadah, where the wicked child is depicted in a suit of armor.

The first time the ten plagues were illustrated was in the Venice Haggadah from 1609, and I came up with just illustrating one plague, the last plague, when God slays the first-born of Egypt, and the way I depicted that was by having a wing and the mummies of the dead Egyptians on the wing.

The traditional haggadah text doesn’t even mention Moses. It’s repeatedly said that it’s God who led the children of Israel out of Egypt. It wasn’t an angel, it wasn’t an angel of fire, it wasn’t a messenger. It was God, and it’s a very beautiful passage.

The tradition is that all the Jewish people were at Sinai for the receiving of the Torah. So there were the tents of the children of Israel, and what I did was, to identify them as such, I put the flags representing the various tribes. I drew Mount Sinai as the Ten Commandments itself. It’s also one of my favorite images.

The afikomen is part of the middle matzoh that’s hidden. It’s then needed to complete the seder, and a custom is that it’s hidden, and children go to find it, and whoever finds it will get some kind of reward. I used that image to hide the afikomen within a prayer book, within the haggadah itself, and the afikomen then serves as a bookmark.

I came up with putting Elijah’s cup in front of the Golden Gate in Jerusalem because the tradition is that the Golden Gate is where the Messiah will come through into Jerusalem and that Elijah will lead the Messiah, and so that’s why the cup is waiting for Elijah in front of the Golden Gate.

Another image that’s in the haggadah that is a reference to a previous haggadah is for the illustrations to the song at the end of the seder, Adir Hu, “Mighty Is He God.” It says in that song, “May God rebuild his temple speedily in our days.” I drew the Torah enclosing Jerusalem, and the rebuilt temple based upon how the temple was drawn in the 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah.

These paintings were really an unexpected gift. Kafka once wrote that writing was prayer, and for me my art is prayer.

Filmed in part on location at New York’s 92nd Street Y.

PROFESSOR AMY-JILL LEVINE (Co-Editor The Jewish Annotated New Testament): Jesus argues with fellow Jews. You can’t be more Jewish than to argue with fellow Jews. It’s not a problem.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the 92nd Street Y in New York, Vanderbilt Divinity School professor Amy-Jill Levine is making the case that Jews and Christians alike need to pay more attention to the Jewishness of Jesus, and the best way to do that, she believes, is by reading the New Testament from a Jewish perspective.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: If I want to understand Jewish history, the New Testament is one of the best sources that I’ve got.

LAWTON: Levine, who is an observant Jew, is co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, a version of the Christian scripture with footnotes and commentaries written entirely by Jewish scholars.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: The New Testament does have extraordinarily beautiful and profound material in it. Paul’s hymn to love in First Corinthians or the parables of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, or comments such as “God is love,” which is First John. This is magnificent material, and everybody ought to appreciate it. I find for myself the more I read the New Testament, in fact the better Jew I become.

LAWTON: The Jewish Annotated New Testament is one of several new projects urging Jews especially to take a new look at Jesus. Bestselling author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s latest book is called Kosher Jesus. That notion, he says, is a radical departure from what he learned as a child.

RABBI SHMULEY BOTEACH (Author, Kosher Jesus): When I grew up Jesus’ name, his very name, was off limits. Jesus was seen as the arch-enemy of the Jewish people. He was really seen as an apostate and traitor to his people.

LAWTON: Boteach believes the time is ripe for a new paradigm.

RABBI BOTEACH: We can’t ignore the 600-pound gorilla in the room, which is Jesus. Christians and Jews come together, and they can never mention Jesus. Christians are afraid of offending the Jews, the Jews are uncomfortable with the mention of Jesus.

LAWTON: Growing up in a predominantly Roman Catholic neighborhood in Massachusetts, Levine had the impression that the Christianity of her friends was just a different form of her family’s Judaism, and then she heard otherwise.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: When I was in second grade, a little girl accused me of having killed her Lord, because she had been taught that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. And I couldn’t fathom how this religion that had such beautiful attributes, and a Jewish man named Jesus, and the same Bible, was saying horrible things about Jews. So I started asking questions.

LAWTON: She says her lifelong study has shown her how embedded Jesus was in the Jewish tradition.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: He teaches like a Jew. He talks in parables, and Jews then knew that parables were not simple banal little stories. They were designed to shake us up, to get us to see the world in a new way, to challenge us. And Jesus is just a fabulous Jewish storyteller.

LAWTON: She says his teachings, such as in the famous Sermon on the Mount, are expansions of teachings in the Torah.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: He’s going to the law and bringing out the heart of it, which is also what Jewish teaching does. So he says not only don’t murder; he actually says you have to love your enemy, and he’s the only person in antiquity I’ve found who says that. But I think that gets to the heart of scripture.

LAWTON: Levine doesn’t shy away from what she calls the “problematic” passages in the New Testament, passages that have been used by Christians over the centuries to persecute Jews.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: We need to know what the New Testament says about the Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus; how the New Testament characterizes Jewish groups, particularly the Pharisees; and we need to know that within historical context. That doesn’t mean we erase them. It doesn’t mean we fudge the translation. It means we deal with them just as Jews have dealt with those problematic passages in the shared scriptures.

LAWTON: Levine believes Christians too can benefit from studying the Judaism of Jesus.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: Jews have been arguing about the law since Moses came down the mountain.

(to audience):Thank you for that “Amen.” That’s lovely. I wish that happened in my synagogue more often.

LAWTON: On this day, she was a guest lecturer at the evangelical Oral Roberts University.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: Unless Christian preachers, teachers, Bible study leaders know about first-century Judaism, often what happens is Jesus gets yanked out of his Jewish context, and he becomes the only Jew who’s compassionate toward women, interested in adapting Torah, interested in adapting the law to the needs of the contemporary community, the only Jew interested in peace among a group of very bellicose, warlike Jews.

LAWTON: She says when Christians don’t understand Jesus’ Jewish context it can lead to misunderstandings about his message, which in turn can lead to harmful stereotypes.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: What I hear in a number of sermons and read in a number of sermons is that Torah is difficult to follow, it’s an impossible burden that weighs people down, and then Jesus comes along and says basically “Don’t worry, be happy.” In actuality, Jews in the first century and Jews who practice Torah today did not find Torah a burden. They found it to be a delight.

LAWTON: Or, she says, many Christians will talk about the angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament in contrast to a New Testament God of love.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: It’s the same God: merciful, compassionate, generous, loving, but not inclined to take sin lightly either.

PROFESSOR BRAD YOUNG (Oral Roberts University): It’s crazy that for 2,000 years Christians have followed a faith in Jesus while rejecting the faith of Jesus.

LAWTON: Oral Roberts professor of Judaic-Christian studies Brad Young agrees that Christians must understand the Jewish roots of their faith. He admits many Christians have been too busy trying to convert Jews to try and learn from them.

PROFESSOR YOUNG: Be honest about your beliefs, share them, but be willing to listen to the other side, and maybe that will change some of your beliefs. Maybe our beliefs will change. We need to share it with one another to go to the next step.

LAWTON: And, he acknowledges, the question of whether or not Jesus was the messiah can’t be glossed over.

PROFESSOR YOUNG: We should recognize when we talk about two great traditions of faith, Christianity and Judaism, that there are very sharp differences, and sometimes understanding the differences are even more important than understanding the similarities.

LAWTON: Rabbi Boteach’s new book does not accept that Jesus was the messiah. Nonetheless, Kosher Jesus has been denounced as heresy by some of Boteach’s fellow Orthodox Jews who worry that the ideas in it could make Jews vulnerable to missionary efforts. Boteach argues that Jews need to reclaim Jesus.

RABBI BOTEACH: Why are we allowing the Christian community to teach us about the Christian Christ in order to convert when Jesus was a Jew and we should be teaching them about the Jewish Jesus in order to enrich their Christian experience?

PROFESSOR LEVINE: For people who are afraid that if Jews were to read the New Testament and find some of this truly magnificent material the next thing we know they’re going to line up at the baptismal font and say, “Please convert me”: I don’t think the way we prevent Jews from wanting to convert is to keep them ignorant of the New Testament.

LAWTON: Looking at Jesus through Jewish eyes, she believes, not only strengthens the individual faiths but can also bring them together.

PROFESSOR LEVINE(lecturing to audience): In learning more about each others’ traditions, we come better to respect our neighbors, and if we are really lucky, for Jews reading the New Testament would give us deeper insight into our own Judaism, and for Christians reading the New Testament with Jewish annotations will give Christians deeper insight into the Lord and Savior they worship. Thank you very much.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in New York.

Interview done in the Victoria Theater at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: There are songs about God and his son. Angels, creation, pilgrimage, prayer, and the afterlife too. Paul Simon says there’s always been a spiritual dimension to his music, but the overt religious references in his most recent album, “So Beautiful or So What,” surprised even him.

PAUL SIMON, singer/songwriter: There seems to be a theme in the album, not intentional, and it’s funny because for somebody who is not a religious person, God comes up a lot in my songs.

LAWTON: Simon may not describe himself as religious, but he admits he’s fascinated by the spiritual realm.

SIMON: I think it’s a part of my thoughts, on a fairly regular basis. I think of it more as spiritual feeling. It’s, it’s something that I recognize in myself and that I enjoy and I don’t quite understand it.

LAWTON: He may not understand it, but he’s been writing and singing a lot about it, and that has generated attention. One Irish blogger suggested “So Beautiful or So What” could be the best Christian album of the year. Cathleen Falsani, an evangelical who writes frequently about religion and pop culture, called it one of the most memorable collections of spiritual musical musings in recent memory.

CATHLEEN FALSANI, Sojourners: It’s fascinating. It’s a stunningly beautiful new album and he’s a great surprise to me and frankly a huge blessing.

LAWTON: Simon comes from a Jewish background.

SIMON: I was raised to a degree, enough to be, you know, bar-mitzvahed and have that much Jewish education, although I had no interest. None.

LAWTON: Now at 70, he says he’s very interested in questions about God. In his song, “The Afterlife,” he speculates about what happens after death. There’s a humorous aspect where he imagines waiting in line, like at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But there’s a serious aspect too.

SIMON: By the time you get up to speak to God and you actually get there, there’s no question that you could possibly have that could have any relevance.

LAWTON: One of the most unusual songs on the album, “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” includes parts of a sermon preached in 1941 by a prominent African-American pastor, J.M. Gates. Simon heard the sermon on a set of old recordings.

(To Simon) What was it about the sermon that caught you and influenced you?

SIMON: I liked the rhythm of the call and response between the pastor and the congregation. What he was saying was very dark. It was a very pessimistic sermon. You don’t know where you’ll be, you might be in a lonesome grave. Here as a songwriter I’m not only writing words, I’m also writing sounds and music. So to take a modern, digitally recorded record and combine it with something from 1941 had a very interesting effect for me. I liked it a lot. It might be my favorite track on the record.

LAWTON: Simon says when he’s writing a song, he doesn’t start out with a theme or a message. He lets the story evolve.

SIMON: Usually the first sentence is, or the first line is, what I’m interesting in finding, because that will launch me on, on a trail that often becomes a story. And then I’ll find out whatever it is that’s on my mind, my subconscious mind.

LAWTON: The song “Love in Hard Times” begins with God and his son visiting earth.

SIMON: To begin with a sentence that is the foundation of Christianity is, I said, ‘This is going to be interesting. Now what am I going to say about a subject that I certainly didn’t study’?”

LAWTON: The song ends with a love story, which he says is really about his wife.

SIMON: When you’re looking to be thankful at the highest level, you need a specific and that specific is God. And that’s what that song is about.

LAWTON: He says the beauty of life and of the earth lead him to thoughts about God.

SIMON: How was all of this created? If the answer to that question is God created everything, there was a creator, than I say, great! What a great job. And I like the idea. I find it very, I don’t know, I find it comforting in some way. But if the answer to that is there is no God, I don’t feel like, well, what a jerk I’ve been. I feel, oh fine, so there’s another answer. I don’t know the answer. I’m just a speck of dust here for a nanosecond, and I’m very grateful.

LAWTON: Simon says he’s fine with not knowing the answers, but he has sought input on his questions. He has spoken with the Dalai Lama, and he once spent hours talking with British evangelical theologian John Stott, who died last year.

SIMON: I talked about everything that was on my mind about things that seemed illogical, and he talked about why he had come to his conclusions and I think both of us enjoyed the conversation immensely. And I left there feeling that I had a greater understanding of where belief comes from when it doesn’t have an agenda.

LAWTON: Many of Simon’s songs raise universal questions about things like destiny and the meaning of life.

SIMON: Quite often, people read or hear things in my songs that I think are more true than what I wrote.

FALSANI: He looks at the world and kind of wonders what the heck is going on, like many of us do. And he asks good questions, and sort of seems to have his finger on the heartbeat spiritually of a culture, then and now. Sort of a God-chronicler by accident.

LAWTON: Simon says he’s gratified, and somewhat mystified, that some people have told him they believe God has spoken to them through his music.

SIMON: Is it a profound truth? I don’t know. I don’t know, but it sounds nice and the combination with the music and the words and all that produces a certain effect and I feel I’m like a vessel and it, it passed through me and I was the editor and I’m glad that people like it and yeah, that’s it. I’m glad.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.