Monica

We started by reviewing the famous story in the talmud (Bava Metzia 59b): Rabbi Eliezer and the rest of the sages are having an argument about the ritual status of a particular type of oven. After failing to win them over by logic, R' Eliezer resorted to other means: If I am right, he said, let this carob tree prove it -- and the carob tree got up and walked 100 cubits (some say 400). The sages responded: we do not learn halacha from carob trees. He then appealed to a stream, which ran backwards -- but we do not learn halacha from streams either. Nor from the walls of the study hall, his next appeal. Finally he appealed to heaven and a bat kol (heavenly voice) rang out: in all matters of halacha Rabbi Eliezer is right. But the sages responded: lo bashamayim hi, it (the torah) is not in heaven. That is, God gave us the torah and entrusted it to the sages, following a process of deduction given at Sinai, and that torah says that after the majority one must incline (in matters of torah). So, heavenly voices aren't part of the process. (It is then reported that God's reaction to this response is to laugh and say "my children have defeated me".)

That much of the story is fairly widely known, and I've also heard a joke version that ends with "so nu? Now it's 70 to 2!". The g'mara goes on from there, though, and it takes a darker turn. After this episode they brought everything that R' Eliezer had ever declared to be ritually pure and destroyed it, and, not satisfied with that, they excommunicated him. Rabbi Akiva agrees to be the one to tell him, and the g'mara describes a fairly roundabout conversation in which it's clear that R' Akiva is trying to let his colleague down gently. But even so, R' Eliezer is devastated and, the g'mara reports, on that day the world was smitten: a third of the olive crop, a third of the wheat crop, and a third of the barley crop were destroyed.

But wait; we're not done. Rabbi Eliezer's wife, Ima Shalom (literally "mother of peace"), was the sister of Rabban Gamliel, the head of the Sanhedrin that had ruled against R' Eliezer. Ima Shalom was careful to keep her husband from praying the petitionary prayers at the end of the Amidah, for fear that he would pour out his heart to God and God would punish her brother. But one day something went wrong, she found him praying these prayers, and she cried out "you have slain my brother!" (And yes, he had died.) How did she know this, he asked? Because tradition says that all (heavenly) gates are locked except the gates of wounded feelings.

And that's the second level of the story, which I also knew before this class. The real "aha" moment for me came when, instead of reading on, we backed up.

Why is the g'mara talking about this now? Sometimes we do get things that just seem to pop up out of nowhere, but usually there's context. In this case, that context is the previous mishna (the g'mara expounds the mishna). (Rabbi Schiff: "ok, everybody turn back four pages in the handout now".) That mishna says: Just as there is overreaching in buying and selling, so is there wrong done by words. One must not ask another "what is the price of this item?" if he has no intention of buying. If a man was a repentant sinner, one must not say to him "remember your former deeds". And if he was the son of proselytes one must not say to him "remember the deeds of your ancestors".

We talked about each of these cases. On the repentant sinner, he said, every married person knows this one: you do something wrong, you make amends and beg for forgiveness, your spouse forgives you... and then, five years later, in the midst of an argument, it comes out again. It feels terrible, right? The other cases can be just as bad. (You ask the price knowing you're not going to buy, then don't buy, and the seller tries to figure out what he did wrong. And for the proselyte, you're reminding him of things that somehow taint him that he didn't even do!)

Right after this mishna the g'mara begins discussing verbal wrongs, saying they're worse than monetary wrongs and that one who slanders another is as if he shed blood. The rabbis discuss all this for a while, and then we get to the oven of Achnai.

The episode with Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Schiff says, is not about rules of derivation, or proofs from miracles, or divine will versus human will. That's all just back-story. The main point is the hurt that the sages caused after the dispute. Disputes are fine; we get that all the time. But they over-reacted, hurtfully, and that is the point the g'mara is trying to make by putting this episode here.

Interesting class, and well-presented. (This writeup doesn't really do it justice, but it's the best I can offer.)

When nobody feels pressure (got to get upstairs to the bar mitzvah, got to beat the lunch guests home, whatever), we can relax and just take our time with services. I don't get that very often and I treasure it. We had kabbalat shabbat out on the porch in the fading sun (plus there were porch lights). Saturday morning after the service we had an energetic discussion of part of the parsha (Tazria [1]), interrupted only by our need to walk up to the main building for lunch (but it continued later in smaller pockets).

Speaking of which: ( Read more... )

Friday night we had a study session around the second chapter of Pirke Avot (teachings of the fathers, where a lot of the sayings we "all know" come from). We broke into pairs or trios to study for a while and then each group shared something it learned. We've used this study method before and I find it works well; it's harder to do in-depth study with 42 people all together, but by doing it this way I learned things both from my group and the larger group.

Saturday afternoon we tried something new. My rabbi asked a few of us to prepare chugim, short sessions to run concurrently, so people could learn what they want. I taught (well, lead a study of) a section of talmud -- how various rabbis concluded their individual prayer at the end of the t'filah. (B'rachot 16b-17a, for anyone following along at home.) I approached this from the prayer context, not the talmud context -- we have this fixed text that we say every service and then we're supposed to say our own prayer, but maybe not everybody is comfortable doing that. The idea was to present a range of things that are recorded in our tradition; maybe people would get some new ideas.

I had not realized, and did not think to ask at the beginning, that no one there other than me had actually studied any talmud before -- maybe they'd seen material that came from the talmud, but they'd never looked at a page of talmud before. I, not knowing this, gave only the scantest of introductions to talmud itself (here's what the full page looks like, here's where we are, here's an interlinear translation to follow 'cause nobody here including me is going to read the Aramaic straight from the page). When I learned at the end that this was new to everybody, part of me wondered if I should have given more of an intro -- but I think not, on reflection. I helped a group of people just dive in to something that many consider intimidating; I think that probably left them all feeling better, and more confident, than a "talmud 101 using this text as an example" class would have been. I am becoming a big fan of the "just do it" school of teaching.

( footnote )

My rabbi and I were recently studying in tractrate B'rachot and came across a story with more drama than you usually find in the talmud. (This story was, of course, not new to my rabbi.) It's described in the commentary as one of the more famous stories in the talmud, but it was mostly new to me. (A tiny part of it shows up in the Pesach haggadah.)

( Read more... )

Someone local took a few thousand dollars and ran in the NH presidential primary, and he actually came in ahead of some of the "real" candidates. The local newspaper reports his reaction to receiving this news thus: "Son of a (gun), no (kidding)? That's (really) amazing." Or something like that, anyway. :-)

Commenting on the FBI getting its wiretaps shut off for non-payment of bills, xiphias posted this story that made me laugh. I'm not saying I believe it -- just that it made me laugh.

If you've read a little talmud, or haven't but still laughed at the halacha of Xmas, you will probably enjoy Tractate Laundry, linked by velveteenrabbi.

Pleo, a robotic dinosaur reminiscent of Aibo, looks like it would be a fun geek-toy. I wonder what the cats would do. (No, I am not going to spend that kind of money to find out. :-) )

I realized tonight that we have more phones (plugged in, on the landline, I mean) than we get (legitimate) calls in a month. Um... I'm not sure what that says about us. (Why do we have a landline? Aside from the general-precautions factor, because there is one use case not covered well by cell phones: the caller just needs to reach, or leave a message for, the household, and not a specific member.)

( watch this morph before your very eyes )

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Plans continue for the Purim feast in two and a half weeks. I expect we'll get a bunch more reservations at tomorrow night's meeting. I did a test run of one of the looks-good-but-haven't-eaten-it recipes tonight, and it passed. I'm pretty happy with the way the menu is shaping up. I'm also grateful for the offers of help I've received.

Apropos of Purim (but not this event), I recommend megillah2a to anyone who's either following the Daf Yomi cycle or just interested in some of the talmud's coverage of Purim.

Our associate rabbi is starting a beginners' talmud class. Good! It's during the work day -- not so good for me, but if it works for others, I'm glad. I hope someday to take an evening class from him.

The person signed up to read torah this Shabbat fell ill, and I've been tapped to pull together something. I'll probably read rather than chant because that's faster to prepare, and everyone's ok with a partial reading given the circumstances. A couple years ago I wouldn't have been capable of pulling something together at almost the last minute, so that's progress! (Last time I got one not-too-long aliya up to speed (with chanting) in about six hours of work, and then it was just maintenance from there. I remember when it took six weeks.)

I received a call from my vet's office today. I had the last two appointments of the day, and gee the snow and sleet are looking bad, and if I wanted to reschedule they just wanted to let me know that that would be ok... yeah, I can read between those lines. :-) It's just routine checkups, so I suggested we let the vet and technicians go home a little early.

I find a few things interesting about this:

The lesson seems to be that we not only hold the lost item but, when that makes sense, increase its value. One could have reasonably argued that when the man showed up Chanina owed him a hen, but that's not what happened.

We sometimes hear stories of how someone abandoned what he was doing to search high and low for the owner of a lost item, and in fact the talmud has a lot to say about this -- that it is inconvenient to search for the owner doesn't excuse us from doing it anyway. In this story Chanina waits but doesn't search. It's possible that the rabbis go on to argue about how he didn't do enough (the talmud is big and contains many cross-references, so for all I know there's a discussion of this story in tractate sanhedrin or something), but in the discussion in this part of the talmud, Chanina is clearly considered to have done a good thing. (Those goats brought him other rewards before the man came to claim them.)

Chanina didn't just take the man's word for it; he asked for a sign. A man's word is important, but we needn't decline to ask for proof. That said, I wonder what kind of sign the man could have given, or how much proof it's appropriate to seek for a mere chicken. I commented to the rabbi this morning that I was curious about the sign, especially as the chicken was no longer there ("it had a little white spot below its beak..." or the like). He suggested that this might go to show Chanina's observance of details, that he could match a description of a long-gone hen. Another possibility occurred to me: any sign might have been good enough, and the point was to ask the man for something (on the theory that a cheat would demur rather than giving a sign that would turn out not to apply).