2,711 pages of Talmud. A gem a day.

Today’s daf focuses on the discussion of what you can and cannot do right before Shabbat begins. It’s my gem of the day because it brings up an enduring understanding: that preparation and rest are always intertwined. We cannot have rest without preparation. If want something to be special, we need to prepare.

Shabbat Kodesh, Sabbath holiness, doesn’t just happen, we need to prepare, and make room, for it to happen.

The Hebrew word for holy, Kodesh, means separate and distinct. Shabbat is a day distinct from the other days. And so our daf is concerned that we might end up treating it like any other day, so we are shown that we must prepare to insure that it’s something special.

I keep thinking of all of the weddings and B’nai Mitzvah that have been cancelled and postponed. These families have been preparing – because the day is so special to them.

Yet, the preparation is holy too, in that it demonstrates how much this moment means to the families.

May they soon be able to celebrate again. With the whole family, all generations, all together in joy and health.

From Today’s Daf:Shammai said to him: If you provoke me and insist that there is no difference between gathering olives and grapes, then, in order not to contradict this, I will decree impurity on the gathering of olives as well. They related that since the dispute was so intense, they stuck a sword in the study hall, and they said: One who seeks to enter the study hall, let him enter, and one who seeks to leave may not leave, so that all of the Sages will be assembled to determine the halakha. That day Hillel was bowed and was sitting before Shammai like one of the students. The Gemara said: And that day was as difficult for Israel as the day the Golden Calf was made, as Hillel, who was the Nasi, was forced to sit in submission before Shammai, and the opinion of Beit Shammai prevailed in the vote conducted that day.

According to legend, the 9th of Adar was day in which the students of Hillel and Shammai, who has always been an example of Mahlokhet L’shem shamayim – argument for the sake of heaven. But on this day, after generations of disagreeing but honoring one another, they almost came to blows. Something happened in that attic.

Some suggests that this passage hints at an actual massacre, a rabbinic civil war. The Jerusalem Talmud, Shabbat 1:4 (3c) describes it as: That day was as wretched for Israel as the day on which the [golden] calf was made.It was taught in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua Oniya:The students of Beit Shammai stood below them and began to slaughter the students of Beit Hillel. It was taught: Six of them ascended and the others stood over them with swords and lances.

Did a massacre actually occur?

Well, the Shulchan Aruch, the most widely accepted code of Jewish law declares this day a fast day.

The Talmud shows us a picture of those in power exploiting the the minority. It is so sad to see the examples of what it means to disagree constructively (Hillel and Shammai) fall apart and turn to blows. So, what can we learn from this?

I would say that the day we stop listening to those who disagree with us, the day we suppress the minority and rule with an iron fist – is the day that we lose ourselves, what we hoped to stand for, and the respect others had for us. We lose a piece of heaven when we shut down dissent. And our opinions, even had they been right, are now less than. People act like this when they have power- but it reflects fear, not strength, to suppress those who disagree.

Today’s daf took the discussion of previous pages (what confers impurity) to household items. Amongst the discussion of when does an item become impure and how can it become pure again, we learn that if an item is broken (and there is a proper amount of brokenness) and is then recast, it becomes pure again.

Why do I like this? If you pull back, you see an ancient recycling program! They recast metal items to make them pure again. Now, I am not getting into the technicalities because I am too excited by this idea, and this value. Within the discussion of purity, we learn that if, let’s say, a metal spoon got a hole in it – instead of throwing it away, our forefathers recast the item – and whatever they created from it was ritually pure.

They did not waste.

Our culture today is so wasteful, so into replacing things before they have lived their full life. We toss before things get a hole, we toss when we see something else we want more. May this page remind us of the preciousness of nature’s resources. May it remind us too that we can recycle, up-cycle, and create something magical out of what might be broken.

(I take my high school juniors who have been accepted into tour social justice teen program to Comalapa Guatemala every year where we make buildings out of things others have tossed. It’s beautiful. Check out the website to see what we do! https://www.lwhome.org/)

Today’s gem comes right in the beginning of the page. The sages are discussing three areas where Hillel and Shammai disagreed. In each case, Hillel is very lenient and Shammai is strict. The gem comes from the rabbis themselves. As they look and see the suggestions of these schools of thought, they record both opinions and then decree the law to be somewhere in between.

I think that is so important – having some who are strict, some who are lenient, and most falling (and the law being) somewhere in between.

I am thinking about this in term of Jewish practice. I think we need people who live halakhic lives, who embrace tradition, and who are strict. I also think we need people who are lenient with the laws, who rethink how each holiday might be celebrated, what it might look like to create Jewish practice that speaks to our values today (just to name a few: eco-kashrut, mikvah for divorce, gender identity celebration). Those on the outskirts, either being strict or liberal, push each other to live Jewish values in ways that reflect the best of humanity.

We all have moments when we are in each space – the strict (me on Passover), the lenient (me for most things), and the middle path.

May we honor those who hold differently than we do. By recording their opinions, and choosing a middle path, the rabbis honored both Hillel and Shammai.

PS I am also thinking about this in terms of how my family is dealing with the coronavirus. some people are taking this as a mini-vacation and are not socially distancing. My family has gone into quarantine, even though we have not been told we need to (to the point where I sometimes feel I have broken the rules when I talk to people on the phone!). Really, the middle path is better: Socialize outside from 6 feet away.

Today’s daf is eesily releavnt to what we are experiencing with the coronavirus. At the end of the daf, we learn that King Solomon enacted two laws for the Jewish people (which had been discussed previously on the page). The first is eruv. We have been studying what can be brought from one domain to another on Shabbat, the eruv symbolically creates a virtual community connecting people living in different courtyards.

The second is one we are all painfully familiar with: handwashing. As we read earlier on the daf, “The hands [are impure] because hands are always busy. It’s on this daf that we learn that our hands are considered impure until we wash them. Solomon made this a law! And apparently, God liked this law because the Talmud connects these two laws, virtual community and washing hands to Proverbs 27:11 “If you are wise [Solomon] it will bring me joy”.

Rabbi Ariel Burger taught me that the “Hasidic master Reb Simcha Bunim asked: What’s the big deal? Why are these two laws so stunning that they evoke God’s admiration?

“He answers: Solomon was teaching his people how to hold the tension between two opposites: the need for community, and the need to wash your hands of any and all attachments. We need to stay connected and we need to remain independent.”

Is the Talmud eaves dropping on the news? This could not be more relevant to our times. Wash your hands. Find ways to create virtual community. This is holy stuff. As God says in Proverbs: “If you are wise it will bring me joy”.

Today’s page gave us a really powerfully painful moment.

“The school of Eliyahu taught: There was an incident involving one student who studied much and read much, and served Torah scholars, and, nevertheless, died at half his life expectancy. His wife would take his phylacteries and go around with them to synagogues and study halls, and she would say: It is written in the Torah: “For it is your life and the length of your days” (Deuteronomy 30:20). If so, my husband who studied much, and read much, and served Torah scholars extensively, why did he die at half his days?“

How incredibly heartbreaking. A man taken too young, his grieving wife going to the synagogue and house of study – quoting Torah – and saying that her husband did everything right, but died anyway. What was the point?

It becomes even more heartbreaking a few lines later, when a rabbi is trying to figure out how it could be that this righteous man died young. Eliyahu reports that he met with the widow: “And I said to her: My daughter, during the period of your menstruation, how did he act toward you? She said to me: Heaven forbid, he did not touch me even with his little finger. And I asked her: In the days of your white garments (after the menstrual flow ended, and you were just counting clean days), how did he act toward you then? She said to me: He ate with me, and drank with me, and slept with me with bodily contact and, however, it did not enter his mind about something else, i.e., conjugal relations. And I said to her: Blessed is the Omnipresent who killed him for this sin, as your husband did not show respect to the Torah.“

Before getting to the callousness of Eliyahu’s response to this young widow, take a moment and see how she paints such a loving picture of her husband. No, he stayed away during the time when they were forbidden to be in physical contact, but as soon as she was no longer menstruating, he made sure to eat with her, share wine with her, cuddle her . . . it’s a picture of such a loving husband. This makes the scene above with her anger, her taking his tefillin, his ritual garb, and marching around these places of God and asking why, asking how, all the more painful.

The gem on this page is not Eliyahu’s response. When someone asks why, asks how God could have allowed this to happen – they do not want you to find the tiniest thing that the person who died might have done wrong. As a modern reader, I find his response incredibly off-base and offensive. When we lose someone we love, we want to talk about what we loved about that person. We want to talk about all the good that person did. We want to talk about that missing piece of ourselves. No one is perfect. Pinpointing a supposed imperfection does not make the loss any easier, any more palatable.

When Eliyahu said “to her: Blessed is the Omnipresent who killed him for this sin, as your husband did not show respect to the Torah” we do not hear her say, “Amen.” We do not hear her say, thank you for explaining it to me, now it all makes sense.

In fact, we hear nothing. Perhaps because she never spoke another word to this man who was supposedly comforting her as a widow. (Perhaps she smacked him in the face and he didn’t want to tell them that!)

The gem on the page is this wife and the love between her and her late husband. May we all be blessed to love, and have people who love us, like this. May we be blessed to have someone to eat with. To drink with. To cuddle with. And who will always hold up our gifts and challenge those who would like to think less of us.

On today’s daf, there is a conversation about if you can visit the sick on Shabbat (yes, it’s a mitzvah), and if you do, what prayers can you say? Then we read this:

“Rabba bar bar Ḥana said: When we would follow Rabbi Elazar to inquire about the health of a sick person; sometimes he would say in Hebrew: May the Omnipresent remember you for peace, and sometimes he would say to him in Aramaic: May the all-Merciful remember you for peace. He would say it in Aramaic when the sick person did not understand Hebrew (Rav Elazar Moshe Horovitz). The Gemara asks: How did he do this, pray in Aramaic? Didn’t Rav Yehuda say: A person should never request that his needs be met in the Aramaic language? And, similarly, Rabbi Yoḥanan said: Anyone who requests that his needs be met in the Aramaic language, the ministering angels do not attend to him to bring his prayer before God, as the ministering angels are not familiar with the Aramaic language, but only with the sacred tongue, Hebrew, exclusively. The Gemara responds: A sick person is different. He does not need the angels to bring his prayer before God because the Divine Presence is with him.“

Wow! What timing! Clearly, during the current pandemic, we are not making casual visits to the sick in hospitals (although I love that they permit visitation on Shabbat because it’s so high of a mitzvah). However, the conversation about prayer for the sick is my gem of the day. This piece teaches us that if you’re sick, and either because it’s Shabbat or because your Hebrew is not strong, you can’t pray in Hebrew, you can just pray in whatever language you’re comfortable praying in. They believe that the angels (who usually attend to us and help bring our prayers to God) prefer Hebrew, God understands every language. And the prayers of the sick? They need no intermediary.

I love that we each have an angel whose role it is to be our advocates before God. And I love that, when times are tough, we don’t need that angel.

I also love that, while Hebrew is prefered in prayer, when we need God, any language will do.

Right now is really tough. While we are streaming services every day at 10:30, and many other congregations are as well, we are not coming together as a community to pray because of the need to protect the health and safety of our people. So, we may be missing the Hebrew. We may be missing the minyan. We may be missing our human angels. But we don’t need the intermediary. We can go straight to the source.

Todays gem, a perfect one for election day (today was the Florida Primary): “The kingdom must have so many things in mind, they could not be written down even if all the seas were ink, and all the swamps quills, and Heavens were parchments, and all people were scribes.”

There are so many things I love about this text. One is the simple beauty and poetry of it, “if all the seas were ink . . .” I also love the truth of it – that the leaders in government have to think about so many things.

Right now, so much is changing every day as we go through this crisis. It’s hard to think about the right way for my family to adjust, daunting to think about how to create community for the synagogue when we are in quarantine; but all of this is small potatoes in comparison to what the government is trying to deal with.

I am highly politically active. I believe that all people who take the bible seriously need to be, because God demands justice and our society (or any currently society) is not yet just. We are to speak truth to power, to be a light unto the nations. I say this because I am quick to critique our government (both the US and Israel, and no matter who is in charge), but I wouldn’t want their jobs. I can’t even imagine how hard their jobs are. How much they have to think about. How many factors they have to weigh. “They could not be written down even if all the seas were ink, and all the swamps quills, and Heavens were parchments, and all people were scribes.”

Today Floridians voted in the Primaries. We don’t yet know who our leaders will be come November. But we need those who hold office to act as leaders now.

Right now our government needs to do all it can to save as many lives as possible. To save as many jobs as possible. May God bless them and guide them, for the task is too great, and too important. Each life holds a spark of the Divine. God let them treat each life as precious and help us to get through this crisis alive, healthy, and grateful.

Today’s gem – What do we wear to pray? Do we come from a place of fear or fanfair?

“Rava bar Rav Huna would wear expensive socks and pray and he said he would do this as it is written: “Prepare to greet your God, Israel.” Rava had a different practice, he would remove his cloak and clasp his hands and pray. He said that he would do so because he was as a slave before his master. Rav Ashi said: I saw that Rav Kahana, when there is suffering in the world, would remove his cloak and clasp his hands and pray. And he said that he did so as a slave before his master. When there is peace in the world, he would dress, and cover himself, and wrap himself in a significant garment, and pray, and he said that he did so in fulfillment of the verse: “Prepare to greet your God, Israel.”

Here we have two approaches to prayer (and by extension approaches to God): That we are merely slaves to our Master and therefore should appear humble before God. The removal of the cloak and clasping of hands would make him look indistinguishable from anyone else. Rava is essentially teaching: slaves are humble and fearful before their master – all the more so we should be humble before the Master of Creation! Our clothes should not make us stick out or distract from our prayers. (Indeed, as the gemara mentions, a little fancy cloth didn’t go well for Joseph . . .)

The second approach is that, when approaching God, we should appear in our finest. It teaches – you dress up to meet a king! All the more so you dress up to meet the King of Kings! We should try and look our best when we come and pray.

Rav Kahana seems to say, sometimes one is appropriate, and sometimes the other. When things are not going well in the world, and people are struggling, that’s not the time to put on finery at shul – that’s a time to appear humble. But when all is well int he world – celebrate.

I think it’s an interesting opening to an important and often visited conversation about what is appropriate dress for shul. (And I am sure we will get to these laws later in this 7.5 year endeavor, but here’s a few pieces of wisdom.) The real appropriate dress is a combination of the two. We have to look nice, trim, as though we have tried. However, it’s inappropriate to dress to the 9s. No tux. No PJs. Our dress should be modest and respectful.

I like to, personally, compare this to meeting my husband’s grandmother for the first time. When we met, she was already in her 90s. (She lived to almost 103!) She came from an era where you dressed to meet an important person. I had learned from my grandfather, who was born within a few years of her, that he thought people who wore jeans to meet someone was being disrespectful. So, I wore a modest dress. And even though I was Jewish and she was not, and even though I was warned that she didn’t like any of my husband’s previous girlfriends, she liked me.

As a rabbi I know that the last thing I want people commenting on after services, is what I was wearing. So, I strive for that medium place. Somewhere between Huna and Rava.

On the B side we get a new mishnah: “A person may not sit before the barber adjacent to the time of minḥa until he recites the afternoon prayer. And a person may not enter the bathhouse and may not to a tannery [burseki]. And he may neither begin to eat a meal nor to sit in judgment.”

What do all of these things have in common? Once you start you don’t stop. I cut my boys’ hair, and there are times when they want to stop. A friend will knock on the door and suddenly they want to run out of the house with half their head trimmed and the other half shaggy.

But the real question is – why would you start something right before prayer time?

One reason might be because you are trying to squeeze one more thing into your day. And so you are hoping that this little spot of “me time” won’t really last that long because you have things to do. If that’s the case, we can learn a lesson about savoring our “me time” and our prayer time and not trying to cut either of them short.

Another reason might be because we are being somewhat disrespectful of when prayers time starts. Maybe prayer hasn’t been working for us lately. Maybe we find it boring and don’t mind rolling in a few minutes late. (If you’re a regular service goer, you will know that this is a common practice.) Maybe we do it, but with a bit of reluctance.

I think sometimes we do this in relationships too. We squeeze it in and don’t really make time to connect. We call that person back knowing we only have 5 minutes so that we are fulfilling our responsibility but making sure we have an out.

As a working mom, I have to make a conscious effort to talk to my husband at the end of the day. It’s hard! I’ve worked like crazy, have been driving my kids around, trying to get everything done and them into bed. And then it’s about 9:00 (if I’m not still at work) and finally we have some alone time and what do I want to do? “Me time.” I want to watch the Bachelor or some other TV version of beach reading – but guess what? This is also the only time I have to be just with my husband. He is more important, but if I put my own TV first, I might miss out on time with him.

So, yeah. If you care about Mincha, and building your relationship with God, maybe don’t sit down in the barber chair right before it’s time to pray.

And if you have other relationships in your life that matter to you – make time for them. Fully present time. But don’t totally neglect the me time either. 😉