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[[File:Talmud.jpg|thumb|Complementing the Scripture, Jewish oral tradition was only written down in the early centuries of the Common Era in a book known as the Talmud. In this Warsaw edition published in 1877 you can see the distinctive text layout where an initial thought is surrounded by a later commentary, which in turn is surrounded by a commentary to the commentary, etc.<br>{{small|Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw}}]]
First of all, Judaism is a religion which is very big on obeying commandments. Jews believe in a God who doesn't really care whether someone believes in him. What he's interested in is whether the Jews, a nation whose ancestors he made a special covenant with, respect the law he gave them as part of that deal. What you believe in doesn't matter as much as what you do. The chief source of that law is the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch, that is, the first five books of the Bible (Old Testament). It's not just the famous Ten Commandments chiselled onto stone tablets, but all of the various commands and prohibitions the Torah is filled with. Long time ago someone determined there's 613 of them altogether and this is the number that has stuck, even though, when other people later did the counting, they got different results.
Biblical commandments are often quite specific and pertain to various spheres of everyday human life. The problem is that it's a sin to break any of them even inadvertently (of course, sins committed on purpose are even worse). That's why generations of rabbis, or experts in Jewish religious law, came up with extended or additional commandments you have to follow in order to prevent breaking any of the Biblical laws even by accident. Eventually, this broad interpretation was bloated to such an extent that it made regular life almost impossible. And so, in the subsequent stage, the rabbis devised a collection of loopholes to bypass these additional commandments, allowing the Jews to lead relatively normal lives while keeping God happy at the same time. I suppose it explains why the Jews are such a creative people. In any case, we will be seeing here, time and again, the same cycle of: simple Biblical commandment → broad rabbinical interpretation → inventive ways of circumventing it.
