Well,
we're still here, and so is the city. We thought this time we would
talk about the main thing we're doing with our time: studying Talmud.
Woo! Yeah!
Jeremy
Four mornings a week we are studying the eighth chapter of Pesachim ('Passover offerings'). We've done like 3 pages in the several weeks we've been here.
Yeah.
3 pages. (well actually 4 as of this morning)
Strangely, tractate Pesachim is not as much about Pesach (Passover)
as you might think. In fact, we've barely touched on it so far.
Miri
Since we got here, we've realised that this actually isn't strange at all! It's totally normal for the Talmud to go off on tangents that seem unrelated to the specific legal questions at hand. In another section of
Talmud I'm studying at the moment in tractate Brachot (Blessings), there's this really fascinating section about whether a good dream is
better than a bad dream, on the principle that the majority of most
dreams are unlikely to come true. They conclude that it might be better
to wake up from a bad dream, basically because your day is going to be
better than the dream, whereas the opposite is true if you wake up from a
bad dream.
Jeremy
Right. The Talmud often gets sidetracked into other issues as linguistic or thematic parallels present themselves, for ease of memorisation.
