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Mar. 23rd, 2021 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretMazel tov again to lannamichaels who completed her Daf Yomi study of Masechet Pesachim yesterday. I fell off Daf Yomi after less than three weeks. But then I saw that the next Masechet is almost exactly three weeks long, and I said, "Maybe I can do that!"
Masechet Shekalim is about taxes!taxation is theft And the weird intersections of civil/municipal responsibility and theocracy/ritual regulation, which is clearly fascinating to me.
Daf 2
The Torah obligates Jews in a tax of one half shekel a year for the Temple upkeep. Or maybe three half shekels a year in different levies for different parts of the Temple upkeep? The initial Mishna lays out some rules surrounding this levy- On the first of Adar, a month before it is due on the first of Nisan, the civil/theocratic authorities of the beis din publicly announced that it would be collected soon. There is a remnant of this today in our practice- we leyn Parshas Shekalim in early Adar as a special Torah reading. The Mishna then, fascinatingly, goes on listing other things the beis din does in Adar, an interesting mixture of ritual and civil administrative tasks: repairing roads damaged by the rainy season, repairing grave markers similarly damaged, repairing mikvahs, sending out messengers to check if kilayim (forbidden mixed species of plants) has grown during the winter. The 35 Minute Daf podcast brings an opinion that these are all essentially ritual tasks- the general repair of roads is for the main civil authorities, the only roads the Beis Din is seeing to are the roads to Yerushalayim needed for the pilgrims who will be coming for Pesach, for example. So there are civil tasks that are essentially ritual, and that's the ambit that's being discussed here. But I think there's another possible understanding which is that there is a blurring of the responsibility. The beis din is responsible for the well-being of the nation and that includes both ritual and civil tasks. The beis din deals with the roads not because there's some religious imperative, but because there are people in a community who, when they see a problem, they go fix it, and if they see a task that needs doing and nobody's doing it, they find an organization willing and able to do it.
There is no extant text of Talmud Bavli for Masechet Shekalim, but there is Yerushalmi, so the Daf Yomi uses the Yerushalmi. Which is linguistically weird, it's still Aramaic? But it has a lot more Hebraisms, and some different stock phrases. An English introduction I read says that because the Yerushalmi text of Shekalim was used the way it has been in lieu of a Babylonian version, sort of Babylonianisms seem to have crept in over time. Also a lot of the Amoraim are different, though there's some overlap. Whole new cast of characters to meet!
lannamichaels who completed her Daf Yomi study of Masechet Pesachim yesterday. I fell off Daf Yomi after less than three weeks. But then I saw that the next Masechet is almost exactly three weeks long, and I said, "Maybe I can do that!"Masechet Shekalim is about taxes!
Daf 2
The Torah obligates Jews in a tax of one half shekel a year for the Temple upkeep. Or maybe three half shekels a year in different levies for different parts of the Temple upkeep? The initial Mishna lays out some rules surrounding this levy- On the first of Adar, a month before it is due on the first of Nisan, the civil/theocratic authorities of the beis din publicly announced that it would be collected soon. There is a remnant of this today in our practice- we leyn Parshas Shekalim in early Adar as a special Torah reading. The Mishna then, fascinatingly, goes on listing other things the beis din does in Adar, an interesting mixture of ritual and civil administrative tasks: repairing roads damaged by the rainy season, repairing grave markers similarly damaged, repairing mikvahs, sending out messengers to check if kilayim (forbidden mixed species of plants) has grown during the winter. The 35 Minute Daf podcast brings an opinion that these are all essentially ritual tasks- the general repair of roads is for the main civil authorities, the only roads the Beis Din is seeing to are the roads to Yerushalayim needed for the pilgrims who will be coming for Pesach, for example. So there are civil tasks that are essentially ritual, and that's the ambit that's being discussed here. But I think there's another possible understanding which is that there is a blurring of the responsibility. The beis din is responsible for the well-being of the nation and that includes both ritual and civil tasks. The beis din deals with the roads not because there's some religious imperative, but because there are people in a community who, when they see a problem, they go fix it, and if they see a task that needs doing and nobody's doing it, they find an organization willing and able to do it.
There is no extant text of Talmud Bavli for Masechet Shekalim, but there is Yerushalmi, so the Daf Yomi uses the Yerushalmi. Which is linguistically weird, it's still Aramaic? But it has a lot more Hebraisms, and some different stock phrases. An English introduction I read says that because the Yerushalmi text of Shekalim was used the way it has been in lieu of a Babylonian version, sort of Babylonianisms seem to have crept in over time. Also a lot of the Amoraim are different, though there's some overlap. Whole new cast of characters to meet!