A little over a year ago, originally due to an interest in the deeper history of #compilers, I started diving deep into the #Talmud, studying #Aramaic, #gematria, and doing #DafYomi etc in what has become my deepest engagement with the rabbinic corpus yet -- the Talmud isn't a compiler but rather an extensible interpreter, compiled by compilers over the course of many centuries (build times have gotten significantly faster, my G-d), with novel extensions in the form of rabbinic commentary, glossia and the like being added nearly every century by publishers competing to compile the most elegant editions (Vilna Shaws being paradigmatic). And through studying Talmud and the greater body of rabbinic literature I've found myself encountering #magic/sorcery occasionally, and I just gotta say -- the #SICP metaphor of programming as pure magic, with the #hacker as a sorcerer, goes insanely deep when you start to dig into it.
There are lots of ways in which Jewish texts can seem incredibly unrelatable, difficult to match with modernity, your mindset, or even simply your vocabulary.
On the other hand, there are plenty of instances in which Jewish texts, from hundreds or thousands of years ago, can be timelessly understandable.
The notion of somebody carrying a beam of wood and stopping to adjust it on their shoulder is one of the latter for me. Yes, maybe somebody carrying a barrel walks into him, and hey, maybe the beam-carryer should've warned them, but that's besides the point:
I cannot picture more vividly, nor relate to more on a human level, than that beam-carrying adjuster. You awkwardly shift your shoulder and grunt in the exact same manner that man always has and always will. My heart goes out to you, brother.
It's the little things that make the past seem very recent.
Shalom, friends! Welcome to #DafReactions Bava Kamma 11: FOOL OF A TOOK! In which I say goodbye, no thank you to Seder Nashim, and hello to…tort law, which is, I regret to inform everyone, not about Tortellini AT ALL. 😭 #dafyomi#tolkien#talmud
Shalom, friends! Welcome to #dafreactions Kiddushin 44: Angry Bird. Do you have an annoyingly charismatic and hot “best friend” who gets all the attention? You aren’t alone. Try the Reish Lakish method of asserting your opinions with this one weird trick! 📢🪶#dafyomi#talmud https://youtu.be/qPk9f2sVxcw
Shalom, friends! Welcome to #dafreactions Kiddushin 8: One Ring to Betroth Them All. In which we discuss how Jews got engaged in ancient times, and I use more #lordoftherings references in this video than EVER BEFORE! #talmud#dafyomi#jewishlearning
Shalom, friends! Welcome to #DafReactions Gittin 77: It’s a Bird, it’s a Plane, it’s a Get! In which we discover some creative ways to avoid actually directly handing your wife her divorce papers in the era of the #Talmud, especially if there is a courtyard involved. #divorce#judaism#dafyomi
@w7voa It is difficult to feel that one more dead body will create justice. In a strange coincidence, in #dafyomi today they are counting dead bodies after Beitar. As a student of mine once said, we who are alive today are all standing on mountains of corpses.