If you are ever dining with a famous Rabbi and she or he asks you to say the blessing before or after the meal, DON’T DO IT! Remember just a couple of pages ago when Rabbi Gamliel (who did not have the greatest reputation for social grace) publicly rebuked Rabbi Akiva after requesting that Akiva say grace after meals and then disagreeing with the blessing chosen by Akiva. Today’s Daf begins with a very similar story. Bar Kappara ate dinner with his disciples. He asked one to recite the blessing before the meal. The unfortunate disciple began reciting the proper blessing for the partridge meat. Another disciple chastised our poor reciter because the second disciple thought the blessing over the cabbage should have been recited first. Bar Kapra first publicly disciplines the second disciple for mocking his fellow. Bar Kapra then chastises the first disciple for not asking Bar Kapra, his mentor, which blessing should be recited first. We learn that both disciples were dead within a year. Obviously, when Rabbis ask you to recite the blessing before or after a meal, you may be stepping into a trap.

If we have bread with a meal, then before we eat we only say the blessings appropriate for bread. In other cases, however, we may need to say multiple blessings and in the proper order, if we had multiple foods. We spend much of today’s Daf not only discerning the proper blessing to say before we eat certain foods, but what order we say them. For instance, if we have several foods, we would say the more specific blessing (numbers 1-5) before we say the general Shehakol blessing (number 6). However, we also say the blessing over the favorite food first. Hence we may have a conflict of rules.

We learn much about the varied diet of Jews in ancient Babylonia. In today’s Daf we discuss, olives, cabbage, partridge, turnip heads, beets, turnips with flour, beets with flour, soups of cooked beets or turnips or other vegetables, bread made of wheat or barley, dill as a spice as well as Durmaskin, which is apparently mountain spinach that could only be consumed cooked. We read of soup with bread in it, bread eaten in loaves and bread eaten in pieces. We have a long dispute about how to bless bread that consists of a whole small loaf and a larger piece. Which should we bless? The whole loaf or the larger piece? We compromise by blessing them together by putting the piece under the loaf. We learn that cooked beets (which I love) are healthy for the heart, good for the eyes and the digestive track. We ask whether we recite the same blessing over cooked vegetables and raw vegetables, fruit and fruit juices and other possible distinctions.

We learn that not only do we need to thank God for our food, but we must properly thank God. Simply expressing gratitude is not enough. We must say the proper blessings in the proper order, because by doing so we are treating the Torah and its commandments as the blueprint for the world and therefore showing that we were made in the image of God. God put the minutiae of the world in the Torah. Our job is to discern the minutiae and act upon it.

Curiously, we read a debate about the proper blessing for a dish of beets cooked with a small amount of flour and the proper blessing for a dish of turnips cooked with a lot of flour. Previously, we learned that if a dish has any grain, we recite Borei minei mezonot. Today, however, we draw a distinction between a dish with lots of flour and a dish with a small amount of flour. I have found no explanation for the seemingly contradictory passages.

Finally, there is a mention of a people called the “Nehardeans”. I have done a little research on who were the Nehardeans. I have not found much (other than a book that can be purchased for $142). The Nehardeans appear 45 times in the Talmud. They appear to be a group of Rabbis from a Babylonian town that predate the scholars of the Talmud. The Nehardeans apparently focused on making the law practical for people’s every day lives, but little historical information about them is in the Talmud. Rather we just hear their rulings in different situations.