In the middle of today’s Daf, we end chapter three and begin chapter four. Unlike the previous chapters, where I could not really understand what the division signified, today we leave the Shema and turn to a new prayer or set of prayers. After several days of seminal emissions, excrement, farting, spitting, etc., I feel ready to move on!
Before we begin, a little background. The prayers we are now going to discuss have many names. Commonly, they are called “Shemoneh Esrei”, which literally means “eighteen”. Originally, the Shemoneh Esrei contained eighteen blessings. Later a nineteenth blessing was added to pray for protection from heretical strands of Judaism and on the Sabbath and festivals, the cycle includes far fewer than eighteen prayers. Nevertheless, we call the Shemoneh Esrei, the Shemoneh Esrei. The prayer group is also called the “Amidah” because it is said standing. Sometimes the cycle is simply referred to as “Tefilah” or “Prayer”.
Observant Jews will say some version of the Shemoneh Esrei three times a day. The morning service is Shachareis. The afternoon service is Mincha and the evening service is Maariv. Today, observant Jews wear tefillin on weekday morning services, but not on the Sabbath morning. In the times of the Talmud, tefillin were worn all day.
Before turning to the Shemoneh Esrei, however, we need to continue our tour of bodily functions and how they affect our religious observance. We pick up with a discussion about the storage of a Torah in our bedroom where we might have sex with our spouse. We discuss what makes an adequate partition for the Torah in such a case, but we also learn while we can store a Torah in this manner, we should only do so if necessary. We then go back to a discussion of how far we have to be from excrement to pray. As an interesting side note, we get a brief mention of the superiority of Persian toilets because they were dug over a downhill trench which moved excrement away from the latrine. In general, we will find some admiration for Persians and Greeks and hate of the Romans.
We get one final Mishnah in Chapter Three before moving on to Chapter Four. Our Mishnah concerns a zav, a man who had a seminal discharge two days in a row. Now a baal keri must immerse himself and wait until sundown before he becomes ritually pure. A zav must wait seven days without a seminal emission before he can immerse himself and become pure. We also deal with a niddah, a menstruating woman. A niddah also needs to wait seven days and immerse to become ritually pure.
Our Mishnah considers the stacking of these statuses. What happens if in the middle of our zav time, we have another emission? Are we baal keri all over? If we immerse to cleanse our baal keri status, what happens to our zav status? Do we have to start the seven days over? Similarly, what about a niddah who emits semen from an act of intercourse prior to the start of menstruation? There is a long an acrimonious debate about these situations, without much resolution.
We then turn to Chapter Four and the precise rules for when we recite the Shemoneh Esrei. Please note that there was no good method of keeping hourly time in the Talmudic era. Today we can easily find halachic times based on our location, because we can measure time very accurately and with a lot of precision. In Talmudic times, there was no set way of measuring an hour. Hours of daylight were divided into twelve and we estimated which hour we were in. Since the length of daylight depends on season and geography, we get varying lengths for an hour and imprecision when two or more people try to create the same divisions.
We begin Chapter Four with a Mishnah about when we can recite each of the daily services. In the case of Shachareis and Mincha, there is a definitive time and then a different statement from Rabbi Yehuda. Everyone seems to agree that Maariv may be said at any time of night. On festivals and Sabbath, we sometimes say the Shemoneh Esrei a fourth time in a service called mussaf. Mussaf may be recited for almost the whole day.
The Gemara notes that although we can say Shacharis until later in the day, the best practice is to recite the Shema just before sunrise so we can join it to the Shemoneh Esrei at sunrise, as the “devoted ones” do. The Gemara holds that we can actually recite Shacharis at any time of day, but if we want credit for saying it in the right time, we need to say it in the proper time.
The commentary asks why we start with the Shacharis prayer (the morning prayer). When we discussed the Shema, we started with the evening Shema. We will learn that recitation of the Shemoneh Esrei replaces the various sacrifices brought when the Temple stood. The Torah mentions the morning sacrifice before the other sacrifices, so we start with Shacharis.
We also learn what to do if we miss a service. We can carry forward one obligation to recite the Shemoneh Esrei, meaning if we skip one morning, we can recite two in the afternoon. We cannot skip the morning and afternoon and say all three in the evening. We also learn if we are making up a weekday Shemoneh Esrei on the Sabbath, we use the shorter Sabbath version and vice versa.
The Talmud next discusses where the obligation to say Shemoneh Esrei originates. First we learn that Abraham prayed in the morning, Isaac prayed in the afternoon and Jacob prayed in the evening. The real reason we have three services, however, is that prayer has to replace the sacrificial cult of the Temple. Shacharis is meant to replace the morning sacrifice. Therefore, the rules for when we can recite Shacharis have to be the same as when we could make the morning sacrifice in the days of the Temple. The same holds true for Mincha, Maariv and Mussaf. We conclude with a long discussion of whether when we say we can do something until the fourth hour, does that mean the beginning of the fourth hour or the end of the fourth hour? While tedious, at least its not discussion of the various states of freshness of excrement!