IF YOU STUDY ANYTHING, AS the salesman sang in the opening scene of “The Music Man,” “You’ve got to know the territory.”
Case in point: Every Wednesday morning for the past few years, I have conducted an hour-long living-room learning session we’ve come to call “Text Study,” which has included in-depth forays through the Bible’s early prophetic books, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and currently, the Book of Psalms.
Originally, we called it “Talmud Study” because that’s what we started off studying, but that was before we decided (after about a month) that the Talmud was way, way over our heads. I once participated in a seven-year, page-a-day Talmud program, and while I can claim to know “only a little,” I don’t have the necessary schooling that would enable me to actually teach anyone. In the event that someone reading this would like to try their own hand at Talmud study, here is the online resources list I compiled for our second meeting. Use it, and them, in good health.
Per request, here are six links to Talmud resources:
http://webshas.org is a searchable, indexed-by-subject Talmud guide giving citations for almost anything you can think of.
http://www.halakhah.com gives Kindle and PDF versions of the Talmud’s English translations.
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudPage.html is a clickable illustration of a sample page of the standard (Vilna) Talmud edition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud is a dense but good and thorough guide to the Talmud’s history and structure.
http://store.fortresspress.com/media/downloads/0800697499Table%205%201%20p%20113.pdf is a brief index of all 63 tractates of the Babylonian Talmud
(http://www.sefaria.org/ is not strictly a Talmud resource, but rather an effort to put the vast canon of the Jewish textual tradition [including Talmud] online so anyone otherwise without resources can have at.)
Hope this helps!