The Babylonian Talmud in Selection: Moed (Holy Days): Day...

This is an early-20th-century English-language anthology of the Babylonian Talmud, compiled by Leo Auerbach in 1944, drawing primarily from the tractate *Ta'anit* (Fasting). The material alternates between *Mishna* (codified legal rulings) and *Gemara* (rabbinic discussion and elaboration), presenting Jewish law and theology as an intertwined whole. The central subject is the communal response to drought: a graduated system of public fasts, horn-soundings, and behavioral restrictions that escalate over weeks if rain fails to come, governing everything from bathing and marital relations to market prices and building projects. Woven throughout is a theology of divine control over nature — Rabbi Yohanan's teaching that God personally holds "three keys" (rain, birth, resurrection) frames rainfall not as a meteorological fact but as an act of immediate divine will. A distinctive moral argument runs alongside the legal material: that individuals must share communally in suffering, illustrated by Moses sitting on bare stone during battle, and that self-isolation during public calamity is a spiritual failure witnessed by one's own house-beams and guardian angels. The story of Honi the circle-maker, who haggles with God over the quality of rainfall until it comes "as a son petitions a father," exemplifies the text's remarkable tone — intimate, argumentative, and unsentimental about the human relationship with the divine.