Israel and peoplehood

Jeremy

We've been rather busy recently. But we've finally managed to be in the same place at the same time for long enough (without our Talmuds on our tables) to talk about the College Winter Learning Seminar that happened at the beginning of this semester.

Miri

It was really great to be back and learning in depth on a really contentious topic: Israel. We had around 20 college students join us for 2 weeks. They were here for davening, for learning and for chilling out. And there was quite a lot of diversity of opinion about the topic at hand. The goal was not to have political conversations but to put together a shared canon of sources around which the conversation could be framed, from Tanakh to Talmud to modern religious Zionists.

Ruminations on Talmud

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.