The Talmud, which is well known to contain many blasphemies against Our Lord and Our Lady, is an odd mixture of authentic Israelite tradition and the damnable “tradition of men . . . making void the word of God” which Our Lord condemned (Mk. 7:8-13; Mt. 15:2-6). While it certainly isn’t reliable history or theology, it does contain material of practical value in religious discussions with Jewish people. In an interview published on the Internet, Roy Schoeman, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, gives this account of one:
The Talmud recounts that when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the sins of the Jewish people were taken away each year on one day, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, when the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies with a sacrifice to atone for the sins of the people for the preceding year. Each year, a scarlet thread was affixed to the entry to the Holy of Holies, and miraculously, when the sacrifice within was accepted, the thread would turn white as a sign that the sins had been forgiven. Well, the Talmud recounts that, for no clearly identifiable reason, the miracle ceased to take place about 40 years before the destruction of the Temple. In other words, after about 30 A.D. the thread never again was turned white! We know, as Christians, that that was precisely when the Temple sacrifices lost their efficacy — at the moment of the Crucifixion, about 30 A.D., when as a sign of the fact the curtain in the Temple was rent in two (Matthew 27:51). Thus, to Christian eyes, it is evident that the Talmud itself attests to the truth of Christianity. Jewish scholars have an alternative, not very convincing, explanation of why the miracle ceased to occur — that God had stopped forgiving the Jews their sins because too many of them had committed the unforgivable sin of following Jesus! (From an interview with the Seattle Catholic)
