I want to apologize for falling behind this week. I am trying to maintain the pace of the Daf Yomi, but this week life intervened. I plan to use the remainder of the week, and particularly the weekend to try to catch up.

I also want to thank the folks who have commented. I really appreciate having feedback on ways to improve the blog, insights I missed, words I misspelled and even things I got wrong. Please do comment.

We are still on the Shema. In order to understand the debates that follow, I want to start with the three paragraphs from the bible that make up the Shema in full. Paragraph 1:

Hear, O Israel! the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on you forehead. Inscribe them on the doorposts of your house on your gates.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Paragraph 2:

If then, you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving the Lord your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil – I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle – and thus you shall eat your fill. Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. For the Lord’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that the Lord is assigning to you. Therefore impress My words upon your heart; bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, and teach them to your children – reciting the when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up; and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates – to the end that you and your children may endure, in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.

Deuteronomy 11:13-21

Paragraph 3:

The Lord said to Moses as follows: Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages; let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner. That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge. Thus you shall be reminded to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God. I the Lord am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I, the Lord your god.

Numbers 15:37-41

At the end of Breakhot 12, a new Mishnah asked why we recite the third paragraph at night. The third paragraph ends with a mention of the Exodus. The commandment to remember the Exodus in Deuteronomy 16:3 says, “. . . that your may remember the day when you came out of Egypt, all the days of your life.” The Rabbis debate why the text says “all the days of your life”. Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah holds that “all the days of your life” means both the days and the nights. The sages hold that “all the days of your life” includes this world and the world after the arrival of the messiah.

The Gemara begins with a proof that we will have to remember the Exodus, even when we are redeemed from our current exile. That brings us to the start of Berakhot 13.

Berakhot 13 starts by considering the name “Jacob”. In Genesis 35:10, God changes Jacob’s name to “Israel”. The Talmud notes that Jacob was still Jacob, but Israel was his principle name. Similarly, after our next redemption, we will recall the Exodus, but not as the principle redemption.

Of course, Jacob was not the only person who had a name change in Genesis. Both Abraham and Sarah are new names from the previous Avram and Sarai. Throughout the rest of the bible, with the exception of I Chronicles 1:27, the new names are the only names used. The Talmud wonders why Jacob’s original name is still used, but Abraham and Sarah jettisoned their earlier names. Of course, God herself uses Jacob’s name later in the bible (See, e.g., Genesis 46:2). Only when recounting the historical fact of the name change does the bible use Abraham and Sarah’s former names.

At this point we come to the end of Chapter 1 of Berakhot. I am fuzzy as to what divides Chapter 1 from Chapter 2. After all, Chapter 2 continues with a discussion of the Shema. Yet, here we are at the end of Chapter 1!

Chapter 2 opens with a Mishnah regarding whether or not we fulfill the commandment to recite the Shema when we read it in the Torah as part of the synagogue service. The Mishnah also addresses those circumstances when we can interrupt our recitation of the Shema to return a greeting or to inquire about someone else’s welfare. There is a lot of discussion of communications from our social betters, communications when we fear for our safety and whether we can interrupt our recitation in the middle of a paragraph or only at the end. This naturally leads to a discussion of why we order the Shema the way we do.

The Gemara starts in a different place. The Gemara notes that the Mishnah teaches us we have to have intent to fulfill a commandment to properly fulfill the commandment. But what intent is required? The intent to fulfill a commandment or the intent to do the act? In this case, the Gemara concludes that we have to have the intent to recite the Shema, whether we believe we are doing it to fulfill a commandment or not.

The Rabbis now debate in which language we must recite the Shema. After all, the Hebrew of the bible was not (and is not) the every day language of the Jews living in the diaspora. The Rabbis ultimately conclude that we must recite the Shema in a language we understand.

The Shema is required to be recited twice daily and in fact is said sometimes more than that. One could easily turn the daily recitation into a rote exercise of repetition without concentration. The Rabbis therefore emphasize that the first section of the Shema must be recited with extra concentration and indeed only the first verse must be recited with the concentration of the heart. Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (known simply as “Rebbi”) instituted the custom of covering our eyes during the first verse so that we can concentrate solely on that verse. Indeed, later in the Daf, we learn if we recite the first verse with concentration and then recite the rest while half asleep, we have still fulfilled the commandment.

The debate raises a real conundrum about prayer for me. If the prayers we say are ritual – meaning the order and language are set as a commandment – the action becomes more important than the meaning. I have a feeling we will return to this theme later.

Two topics end the Daf. First, what position must we be in when we recite the Shema. Just about any position seems ok, except lying on our backs, which may expose sexual arousal or may lead to placing one’s hands on one’s penis. We can recite the Shema while lying on our sides and if we are very fat, like Rabbi Yochannan, then we can recite the Shema while partially inclining, even though we are not fully on our side. Finally, the Daf returns to the question of in what circumstances can we interrupt our recitation of the Shema to return a greeting or inquire about the welfare of someone else.