This beautiful book aims to capture what the Talmud actually is. Come and Hear is helpful, clear, practical, and detailed—and always engaged in conveying the fundamental uniqueness of the Talmud, which Adam Kirsch movingly calls its own genre. This is a love song to the ‘freedom to learn without the obligation to agree,’ and a living example of the Talmud’s central role in Jewish continuity—-in Hebrew, Aramaic, and now, in a leading contemporary critic’s hands, in English.