A Daf a Day Blog Posts

Hatimah Tovah, Everyone!

Tractate Yoma deals with various technicalities of Yom Kippur, and it is only in its last chapter, Chapter 8, that it turns to some of the deeper heart practices of the holiday. I’ve

These days, most of us take for granted that the Babylonian Talmud is the central text of rabbinic Judaism; the daf yomi schedule we follow, which is observed throughout the Jewish world, pretty much dictates the agenda in every Orthodox

We’ve made it to what I think is the end of my oven stories series! For those of you who want to read the whole thing, here are links to the different installments in order.

Intro and material culture

Story 1: Rabbi Tzadok and the Matronitha

Story 2: Rabbi Hiyya and the Fake Courtesan Herutha

Story 3: The Ukvas and the Pauper

Story 4: Shorty

The five oven stories we’ve reviewed (Rabbi Tzadok and the Matronitha; Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashei and the fake courtesan Herutha; The Ukvas and the Panhandler; Shorty Singed-Shins; and Rabbi Prida’s Grandpa’s Wife and the Skull of King Jehoiakim) are, as we’ve seen, meditations on shame, envy,

Today’s our last comparative post in the oven series! To remind you of where we are, after introducing the material culture underlying the oven stories, we covered all five: Rabbi Tzadok and the Matronitha; Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashei and the fake courtesan Herutha; The Ukvas and the

We continue with the last comparative installment of the oven stories. So far, we introduced the series and reviewed ovens in material culture. Then, we discussed five oven stories:Rabbi Tzadok and the Matronitha; Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashei and the fake courtesan

We pause our oven stories series to fold in a sweet zoology moment from today’s page (I promise we’ll get to Manichaeism soon!). Our tractate has turned to issues of kashrut and defilement. For a great overview of

Yesterday’s inquiries showed that early Christian theologians had much more voracious appetite for body modification than Jews, even though sitting in ovens was not part of it. Today we turn to the culture that surrounded the Babylonian study halls of the Talmud: the Sasanian empire, a

Yesterday we left things off wondering whether the oven stories, which seem peculiar and extreme considering rabbinic Judaism’s distaste for displays of self-mortification, might be explained by the proximity of the rabbis to people of other cultures. The Babylonian Talmud is

To modern readers, the oven stories read very jarring because of the more recent historical connotations that we have with the horrors of human incineration. But were these stories shocking at the time? Were they deliberately calibrated to shock? For this, we should turn to documentary evidence and figure out how common self-mortification