strange books

A man came to Pardes today to tell us about his brother. Apparently his brother made aliyah and then died whilst in the army serving in Lebanon, and afterwards the family collected his various letters and published them in a book.

The family now seem to be dedicated to "spreading the word", as the man put it, to tell the world about the things this person did while he was alive.

To this end, everyone at Pardes gets a copy of The Book, and then we get to go to their house and talk about it. I flicked through the book briefly. He seems to have been a perfectly nice, ordinary, literate young man, who travelled a bit and then went into the army. Nothing much of particular interest, except as a social study.

To be honest - it feels very odd to be talking to a man whose only interest is to tell us about his dead brother - and it wasn't so recent, either. It seems a rather unhealthy way to grieve. I couldn't help but get a sense that now all he does with his life is preach about his dead brother, which didn't feel healthy at all. An odd experience.

- if interested, you can see - http://www.alexsinger.org/

work

We switched places in Kiddushin, because Zvi seemed to think that the rest of the second perek contained too many contemporary issues, and that the class would get sidetracked so much that we wouldn't learn any gemara. I think this is basically true - it starts talking about women and mitzvot - but it's a shame in a way, cos the first part of the perek is all about shlichut, which is all very well but a bit dull, and now we're doing the third perek from the beginning, and it's all shlichut again. It's not exactly boring, but a change in subject-matter would be nice.

So we're on http://www.e-daf.com/Kidushin/59a.gif and http://www.e-daf.com/Kidushin/59b.gif - http://www.dafyomi.co.il/kidushin/points/kd-ps-59.htm - the first part talks about the situation where I send you to marry a girl for me, and you decide that you like her and marry her for yourself. The discussion is basically whether the marriage was valid in the first place, since you were on an errand for me at the time - and it was, so then they discuss just how much of a bastard you were for doing it.

Then it gets into discussing cancellations. If I do an act, it's clear enough from the cases they are thinking of that I can't cancel it with a word, I have to do another act. The question is if I make a promise (in the context of marriage), can I cancel it with just words, or do I have to do some kind of formal act to cancel it?

Well, they discuss it for a bit. R' Yochanan says you can cancel a promise to get married with just words, and Resh Lakish says you can't. In a different context, R Nachman says that when you send a messenger with a get, you can cancel the mission just by saying so, and the get stays live, as it were, it can be re-used; and R Sheshet says no. Then the gemara asks a stupid question, it says doesn't R Yochanan contradict R Nachman? The answer is clearly no because they're talking about different things - R Nachman says that the get is not cancelled but the mission is, and R Yochanan says that the promise is cancelled, the promise being analagous to the mission. So the problem is why did the gemara ask such an obvious question. The rishonim have fun with it.

scary articles

I've started reading articles about rabbinic logic. They're extremely scholarly, and I think the logic is a bit beyond me - and they're in Hebrew, too, which is really rather difficult.

Especially since the modern words they use have a zillion variant spellings, even after you've allowed for grammar, so finding them in a dictionary is hard - extra alephs, yuds and vavs all over the place - and then they're usually transliterations of English, which I just can't get a handle on.

So in a few months I might have read them...