I love reading history. I love finding continuities with the past that echo through our lives today. I particularly love to find the antecedents for something we find natural today, but was very contingent and had to evolve. Think France or England – they were not always the countries we know today. There are times, however, when I cannot fathom what people in the past were thinking. I know I am projecting my own values and circumstances backwards, but sometimes the issues are so fundamental that I just cannot ignore my own reaction. Today’s Daf presents one of those moments.

The first and most famous verse of the Shema, “Hear o Israel, the Lord is God. The Lord is one” commands us to hear. What does it mean to hear? In answering this question, much of today’s Daf is consumed with debates about a deaf person who can speak reciting the Shema, the Megeliah (the Book of Esther) and the Birkhot Hamazon (the blessings after a meal). In all these cases, we are commanded to have an oral recitation. In all these cases multiple rabbis appear to have conflicting views about whether a deaf person who recites these things, but does not hear them, has fulfilled a commandment. Indeed, with regard to reading the Megeliah, the rabbis lump deaf people with minors and “the deranged.” Individual rabbis do not have a consistent position with regard to a deaf person’s validly fulfilling each commandment. Therefore, a large portion of today’s reading is spent trying to logically harmonize seemingly inconsistent positions.

No one asks what to me is the obvious question in this whole debate. Why can’t deaf people validly fulfill commandments? If God made them deaf, does that mean that God intended deaf people to be sinners? There is a whole undercurrent of debasing people because of a disability, a notion that really offends my modern (and slightly deaf) sensibilities. I can’t blame the Rabbis. In my own lifetime we have come to have a different understanding of disabilities, abilities and difference. I can’t expect people who lived thousands of years ago to share the same worldview as I do. Scripture is not helpful either. In the second-most-troubling passage in the bible, we learn that people with defects cannot serve as a Priest in the Temple. And to make sure we understand what defects are, we get a list the includes blindness, lameness, misshaped limbs, hunchbacks, dwarfs, crushed testes. The bible continues, “He shall not profane these places sacred to Me, for I the Lord have sanctified them.” Leviticus 21:23. The mere presence of the disabled profanes sacred places! (For the record, I believe the most disturbing part of the bible is the last two verses of Psalm 137. Go read them).

Let’s jump into today’s Daf.

We start with an understanding of how we should approach the morning. We should rise, relieve ourselves, wash our hands and then recite the Shema. In ancient times, water was not always available, so if we cannot wash with water, we should was with rocks, chips of wood or whatever is available. I actually find a lot of beauty in this part of the Daf. We are learning how to transform every day acts and human requirements into a holy experience. Much of Jewish thought is how do we turn each act into something holy – by following the laws that regulate the minutia of our lives! There is even a discussion of how far we must go to find water to wash, assuming you can’t go down the hall and turn on a faucet.

We then come to our next Mishnah where the whole debate on whether the Shema must be audible to our ear begins. In case you are interested, the Talmud concludes that we should not approach the Shema thinking we will say it in inaudible manner, but if we do, it is valid.

At this point, we come to a very odd digression. The Talmud meditates on the meaning of Proverbs 30:15-16 (or what I deem a paraphrasing of those verses), ” There are three things that are never satisfied . . . The grave, the narrow part of the womb and the earth that is never sated with water.” In each case, there is always room for more dead, more intercourse or more water (the Rabbis not living in Houston). The Rabbis wonder why these things are linked. They conclude that each takes something in and spews something forth – graves take in corpses that will be resurrected, the womb takes in sperm that will be humans. This is important to the Rabbis because the bible never mentions resurrection of the dead. The Rabbis posit this as a proof text that resurrection will come.

The Daf concludes with a discussion of which verses of the Shema belong in the mezzuzah. Do we need to put the verses stating that the words belong in a mezzuzah? (yes.) The Daf ends by re-vowleizing accepted readings of words in the bible (which in Hebrew have no vowels) to prove that Gehinnom (the place for the wicked) will cool if we enunciate each word of the Shema.