Hello Everyone,
I am writing to welcome you to another season of our series “Gemarah Key Words and Phrases.”
From the outset, in this course we studied legal sections of the Gemarah. The reason for this is that the legal discussions of the Gemarah all share a common syntax. The discussions open with a citation ( usually in Hebrew) of a law. The Gemarah goes on to analyze the law. The analysis may begin with the citation of an apparently contradictory law or with a question as to who is the author of the law.
In any event, the cited law is usually stated in Hebrew and the discussion is in Aramaic. And no matter what law is being discussed the patterns of the discussions throughout the Gemarah are similar with a common vocabulary. The impression that I have come away with is that the students who participate in these classes have acquired a familiarity with the Gemarah and a sense of “how it works.”
For this coming series I have chosen a different sort of passage from the Gemarah. We will study passages of non-legal from the Gemarah. These passages are called “Agad’tah.” Agad’tah is the name by which the non-legal discussions of the Gemrah are known. Unlike the legal discussions of the Gemarah the Agad’tah passages do not possess the rather rigid syntax of the legal passages. The Agad’tah vocabulary is more varied than the legal vocabulary. And most importantly, after one finishes studying a passage of Agad’tah one may be wondering what was I meant to learn from this passage?
So, I hope that together we will study the last few pages of masechet Kiddushin. In these pages we have the Talmud’s discussions of Divine reward and punishment. And these discussions address fundamental ideas about how Hashem judges us.
I look forward to studying this Gemarah with you. Before every meeting I will post the day’s passage from the Gemarah as a punctuated Word doc which is easier to read than the “classic” page from the Vilna edition of the Gemarah. We do not actually meet in a classroom so I invite everyone to write to me with suggestions and questions. My e-mail address is fish9999@gmail.com