8 October 2019

Student Rabbi Lev Taylor appears in a new video as part of the British Library’s Discovering Sacred Texts series.

The latest episode, focused on Judaism, explores what it means to be Jewish today through some of our faith’s most important texts including the Torah, Talmud and Haggadah.

Lev, who is studying at Leo Baeck College, says of the Talmud: “It is an amazing text, or collection of texts, and studying it feels like entering into an entirely different world. It’s an entirely different style of logic, it’s an entirely different culture, it’s an entirely different language.

“It feels kind of like participating in this conversation that’s been happening for centuries, or even millennia now, between sages throughout the generations, and between Jews throughout all time. And in looking at it, and exploring how they reasoned, how they imagined things, and the stories they told, and the laws they came up with.

“It feels like we’re not just looking at history but a possibility of what the future could be like.”

Others appearing in the video include Rabbis Debbie Young-Somers, Jonathan Romain and Abraham Levy, as well as the British Library’s lead curator of Hebrew and Christian Orient studies Ilana Tahan.

You can watch it here.