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May. 26th, 2020 03:01 pmHello to my new subscribers from Wiscon!
I feel like I should explain my previous post to newcomers.
Jewish tradition teaches that when the Torah was given to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, along with the written Torah was an orally transmitted tradition of how to understand its nuances. This oral law was transmitted generation to generation until approximately the second century CE, when fractures in the Jewish community after the Roman conquest made it hard to continue transmitting that way. Parts of the oral law were set down in the Mishnah, with the expectation that the Mishnah, being cryptic and incomplete, would be used as a teaching tool to supplement continued oral teaching. Several centuries later, more of this oral tradition was set down in the Gemara, which is presented in the form of conversations and debates about the Mishnah.
Between the Mishnah and the Gemara there are some 2700 pages, front and back, of text in a standard typeset layout. Each page is incredibly dense with ideas and concepts and laws and requires a tremendous amount of study to master. In the early 20th century, to foster more learning among people who lacked the time to fully study the Talmud, a tradition of learning was started to try to focus on learning just a page a day, so that one could study the entire Talmud over the course of seven and a half years. This is called Daf Yomi.
I've been trying to learn Daf Yomi on and off for the past decade, mostly unsuccessfully, because it turns out I don't really have the time and energy for even that. But when I am learning, I've been trying to post some short comments on some part of the page I've learned. All of these posts are under my daf yomi tag. Some people seem to find these posts interesting.
A lot of people seem to have trouble understanding them. I want to be clear that if you're curious, you can feel free to ask questions. I will be mixing in English, Hebrew, Aramaic, and maybe even bits of Yiddish in these posts, depending on what feels natural. Sometimes I'll translate, sometimes I won't. If there are words you don't know, feel free to ask.
And if you're not interested, feel free to mute my daf yomi tag. I learned at Wiscon that apparently that's a thing you can do!
I feel like I should explain my previous post to newcomers.
Jewish tradition teaches that when the Torah was given to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, along with the written Torah was an orally transmitted tradition of how to understand its nuances. This oral law was transmitted generation to generation until approximately the second century CE, when fractures in the Jewish community after the Roman conquest made it hard to continue transmitting that way. Parts of the oral law were set down in the Mishnah, with the expectation that the Mishnah, being cryptic and incomplete, would be used as a teaching tool to supplement continued oral teaching. Several centuries later, more of this oral tradition was set down in the Gemara, which is presented in the form of conversations and debates about the Mishnah.
Between the Mishnah and the Gemara there are some 2700 pages, front and back, of text in a standard typeset layout. Each page is incredibly dense with ideas and concepts and laws and requires a tremendous amount of study to master. In the early 20th century, to foster more learning among people who lacked the time to fully study the Talmud, a tradition of learning was started to try to focus on learning just a page a day, so that one could study the entire Talmud over the course of seven and a half years. This is called Daf Yomi.
I've been trying to learn Daf Yomi on and off for the past decade, mostly unsuccessfully, because it turns out I don't really have the time and energy for even that. But when I am learning, I've been trying to post some short comments on some part of the page I've learned. All of these posts are under my daf yomi tag. Some people seem to find these posts interesting.
A lot of people seem to have trouble understanding them. I want to be clear that if you're curious, you can feel free to ask questions. I will be mixing in English, Hebrew, Aramaic, and maybe even bits of Yiddish in these posts, depending on what feels natural. Sometimes I'll translate, sometimes I won't. If there are words you don't know, feel free to ask.
And if you're not interested, feel free to mute my daf yomi tag. I learned at Wiscon that apparently that's a thing you can do!