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In Rabbi Aaron Parry's "The Complete Idiot's Guide to The Talmud," Rabbi Parry writes in the introduction:
Is this a true statement, and if so is there a legitimate source where this statement can be attributed to? (ie biography, close family member, etc)
No, he did not. Almost 10 years ago I was sitting at a Chabad lunch when one of the custodians of the Albert Einstein Archive at Hebrew University gave a speech. Someone asked him if it was true Einstein died religious by saying shema' (another tale of his religiosity). He said that Einstein never said or did anything in [old age] that we [faithful Jews] would consider religious.
Yes. The statement is true. Although Albert Einstein was agnostic, he was a Zionist and supported the secular government of Israel. He was a scientist, physicist, and philosopher. So when you hear the famous quote, “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind,” he was referring to religion as a metaphor for the universe. Not religion in and of itself. We will get to his thoughts on religion in a moment. The same approach can be applied to another quote, “G-d does not play dice with the universe.”
In his “G-d letter”, he relates the following thoughts, “The word G-d is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition.“
...I don’t think he had any motivation to study Talmud for religious reasons. However, he did write later to Talmudic scholar, Prof. Chaim Tchernowitz that the Talmud must be preserved and not forgotten amongst the Jewish community nor the scientific community. And he wished to make the Talmud more assessable for the masses in order to avoid attacks against the Talmud and anti-Semitism.
Another source is from the Michael Enright’s program, The Sunday Edition. There, a scholarly interview claimed that on Einstein’s deathbed he was asked, “if you could do it all over, what would you do differently?” Supposedly the greatest scientist ever to live answered “I would study more Talmud.”
See link here: https://relaxandsucceed.com/2013/12/27/most-popular-blog-of-the-year-countdown-3/
