Berakhot ברכות

The tractate opens the whole Mishnah with the question "from what hour is the Shema read in the evening?"—and with that question the study of the Oral Torah begins for many generations. Then come the order of prayer, the blessings over different foods and over the world's happenings: over thunder, over a rainbow, over bad news.

Here too are the best-known pages on prayer: how to pray in a place of danger, what to do if one has erred, why prayer is called "the service of the heart." And here is the treatment of dreams, running over several folios—the only one of its kind in the Talmud.

Order: Zeraim. There is Gemara in both the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmud.