Rachel steered me along toward a school for young boys beginning to study the Torah.

The Oral Torah is the primary guide for Jews to abide by these terms, as expressed in tractate Gittin 60b, " the Holy One, Blessed be He, did not make His covenant with Israel except by virtue of the Oral Law " to help them learn how to live a holy life, and to bring holiness, peace and love into the world and into every part of life, so that life may be elevated to a high level of kedushah, originally through study and practice of the Torah, and since the destruction of the Second Temple, through prayer as expressed in tractate Sotah 49a " Since the destruction of the Temple, every day is more cursed than the preceding one ; and the existence of the world is assured only by the kedusha ... and the words spoken after the study of Torah.

as a replacement for the study of Torah, which is a daily obligation for a Jew, and sanctifies God in itself.

Historically, Jews have considered it of central importance: traditionally, children began their study of the Torah with Leviticus, and the midrashic literature on Leviticus is among the longest and most detailed of midrashic literature ( see Bamberger 1981: 737 ).

" A man should not say: I shall carry out the precepts of the Torah and study her wisdom in order to receive all the blessings written therein or in order to merit the life of the World to Come and I shall keep away from the sins forbidden by the Torah in order to be spared the curses mentioned in the Torah or in order not to be cut off from the life of the World to Come.

It is also the subject of intense study in yeshivas ; see Torah study.

The study of Torah ( in its widest sense, to include both poetry, narrative, and law, and both the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud ) is in Judaism itself a sacred act of central importance.

For the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud, and for their successors today, the study of Torah was therefore not merely a means to learn the contents of God's revelation, but an end in itself.

But the study of the Torah is equal to them all.

In Judaism, " the study of Torah can be a means of experiencing God ".

To study the Written Torah and the Oral Torah in light of each other is thus also to study how to study the word of God.

In the study of Torah, the sages formulated and followed various logical and hermeneutical principles.

Maimonides's Mishneh Torah is considered by traditionalist Jews even today as one of the chief authoritative codifications of Jewish law and ethics.

Orthodox Judaism is the approach to religious Judaism which adheres to the interpretation and application of the laws and ethics of the Torah as legislated in the Talmudic texts by the Sanhedrin (" Oral Torah ") and subsequently developed and applied by the later authorities known as the Gaonim, Rishonim, and Acharonim.

They sought to modernize education in light of contemporary scholarship, they rejected claims of absolute divine authorship of the Torah, declaring only those biblical laws concerning ' ethics ' to be binding, and stated that the rest of halakha ( Jewish religious law ) need not be viewed as normative for Jews in wider society.

* their spiritual approach to Torah such as the relative roles of mainstream Talmudic study and mysticism or ethics

The Torah contains narratives, statements of law, and statements of ethics.

Traditionally, a man obtains one of three levels of Semicha ( rabbinic ordination ) after the completion of an arduous learning program in Torah, Tanakh ( Hebrew Bible ), Mishnah and Talmud, Midrash, Jewish ethics and lore, the codes of Jewish law and responsa, theology and philosophy.

The 613 commandments (: taryag mitzvot, " 613 Mitzvot "; Biblical Hebrew: Miṣwoth ) is a numbering of the statements and principles of law, ethics, and spiritual practice which have been derived by religious interpretation of the Torah or Five Books of Moses.

Laws concerning business ethics are delineated in the major codes of Jewish law ( e. g. Mishneh Torah, 12th c .; Shulhan Arukh, particularly Choshen Mishpat, 16th c .).

Jewish war ethics are developed by Maimonides in his " Laws of Kings and their Wars ," part of his Mishneh Torah.

The University aims to forge closer links between Torah and universal studies, " to blend tradition with modern technologies and scholarship, and teach the compelling ethics of Jewish heritage to all ... to synthesize the ancient and modern, the sacred and the material, the spiritual and the scientific.

He made certain that any necessary relief work on Shabbat for Jews was done by Jews ; some wanted such work to be done on Shabbat by non-Jews, but Rabbi Salanter held that both Jewish ethics and law mandated that the laws of the Torah must be put aside in order to save lives.

It is added because its content and style are somewhat similar to that of the original tractate Avoth ( although it focuses on Torah study more than ethics ), and to allow for one chapter to be recited on each Shabbat of the Omer period, this chapter being seen well-suited to Shabbat Shavuot, when the giving of the Torah is celebrated.

By contrast, Kabbalism assumed an " eternal Torah " which was not identical to the Torah written in Hebrew.

The Old Testament is called by the Jews the Tanakh, an acronym formed by combining the initials of the three sections by which the Jews divide the text: the Torah, or Law ( the Pentateuch ), the Nevi ' im, or Prophets, and the Ketuvim, or Writings or Hagiographa ( with vowels added, as Hebrew is written with a consonantal script, TaNaKh ).

This idea is first found in the Torah ( the five books of Moses, which are also included in the Christian Bible ) and is elaborated on in later books of the Hebrew Bible.

Elements of the Oral Torah were committed to writing and edited by Judah HaNasi in the Mishnah in 200 CE ; much more of the Oral Torah were committed to writing in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, which were edited around 600 CE and 450 CE, respectively.

Christians reject the Jewish Oral Torah, which was still in oral, and therefore unwritten, form in the time of Jesus.

Some Christians agree that Jews who accept Jesus should still observe all of Torah, see for example Dual-covenant theology, based on warnings by Jesus to Jews not to use him as an excuse to disregard it, and they support efforts of those such as Messianic Jews ( Messianic Judaism is considered by most Christians and Jews to be a form of Christianity ) to do that, but some Protestant forms of Christianity oppose all observance to the Mosaic law, even by Jews, which Luther criticised as Antinomianism, see Antinomianism # Antinomian Controversies in Lutheranism and Luther # Anti-Antinomianism for details.

One might note, however, that what is assumed to be a niche for the Torah scroll in the building probably originally built as a Judeo-Christian synagogue between AD 70 and AD 135 on the traditional site of the Cenacle or upper room of the Last Supper and now identified as the site of the King David's Tomb is oriented not towards the Temple Mount, but towards the site of the Holy Sepulchre, which would seem to indicate that the Christian community that had built it had already began to transfer many of the religious traditions originally associated with the Temple to the sites they associated with Christ's death and resurrection ( such as the burial place of Adam and the centre of the world ).

Their answer was to insist on strict observance of the Law ( the Torah ), isolation from the gentiles, and minimalisation of the expectation of the coming of the Messiah ( the expectation which had provoked the war ).

In his work Mishneh Torah ( 1178 ), Maimonides included a chapter " Sanctification of the New Moon ", in which he discusses the calendrical rules and their scriptural basis.

The Torah has little to say on the subject of survival after death, but by the time of the rabbis two ideas had made inroads among the Jews: one, which is probably derived from Greek thought, is that of the immortal soul which returns to its creator after death ; the other, which is thought to be of Persian origin, is that of resurrection of the dead.

The sages investigated the rules by which the requirements of the oral law were derived from and established by the written law, i. e. the Torah.

Other important landmarks include the replacement of Hebrew by Aramaic as the everyday language of Judah ( although it continued to be used for religious and literary purposes ), and Darius's reform of the administrative arrangements of the empire, which may lie behind the redaction of the Jewish Torah.

In collaboration with the late Chaim Potok, Kushner co-edited Etz Hayim: A Torah Commentary, the new official Torah commentary of the Conservative movement, which was jointly published in 2001 by the Rabbinical Assembly and the Jewish Publication Society.

Hezekiah enacted sweeping religious reforms, during which he removed the worship of foreign deities from the Temple in Jerusalem, and restored the worship of Yahweh, God of Israel, as instructed by the Torah.

Most of our knowledge of ancient Hebrew medicine during the 1st millennium BC comes from the Torah, i. e. the Five Books of Moses, which contain various health related laws and rituals, such as isolating infected people ( Leviticus 13: 45-46 ), washing after handling a dead body ( Numbers 19: 11-19 ) and burying excrement away from camp ( Deuteronomy 23: 12-13 ).

The philosophy upon which A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice is written is stated in the foreword: " The premise on which Torah is based is that all aspects of life-leisure no less than business, worship or rites of passage ( birth, bar mitzvah, marriage, divorce, death )-are part of the covenant and mandate under which every Jew is to serve God in everything he does.

This assertion was historically challenged by the Karaites, a movement that flourished in the medieval period, which retains several thousand followers today and maintains that only the Written Torah was revealed.