Year: 2020

Talmud is a record of debates about the law and the meaning of sacred texts. These debates did not happen like a presidential debate with everyone standing on the same…

Yesterday, we looked at 8 cases to determine what was permissible, what was prohibited and what was punishable. To understand today's Daf, we need to first focus on the difference…

Hands, touchin' handsReachin' out, touchin' me, touchin' you Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond ran through my head as I read today's Daf. Of course, in the the days of coronovirus,…

I have not blogged in approximately one month. All I can say is that life got in the way. We have been dealing with illness of our kids, illness of…

I love reading history. About 90% of my reading is history from all periods and all areas of the world. My degree as an undergraduate was in Chinese History. If…

Yesterday, we read about Hannah praying for a child and how that teaches us about prayer. Today we read about Moses praying for God to spare the Israelites after the…

In my last blog entry, I gave a very high-level overview of Hannah in I Samuel. You may want to read that introduction before reading today's entry because we are…

I goofed and owe all my readers a big apology. My last post concerned Berakhot 30. In The Schottenstein Edition of the Talmud I am using, Berakhot 30 spans the…

With the last Daf of Chapter Four, we get a lot of rules about prayer. Why so many rules? We get one clue today when we discuss why we pray…

Several times in the course of this Blog, I have been concerned with the nature of prayer as envisioned by the Talmud. We have already seen rules governing every aspect…