A lot on today's page is familiar, and shows just how much of the general structure of Jewish worship was already set by 500-600 C.E. The page mentions saying Ashrei (mostly Psalm 145) three times a day, praying in a synagogue and not just individually, saying the Sh'ma in a service as well as at bedtime. There are even discussions about verses that have been added to the essential prayers -- the beginnings of adornments or embellishments around an understood structure.
So I'll today just observe three things that caught my attention that aren't the usual.
One is a teaching about "midnight." One of the Torah references to midnight is Moshe telling Pharaoh that "around midnight" the final plague will take place. The Talmud wonders: Didn't Moshe know it would be exactly at midnight? The Talmud suggests that Moshe knew, but was afraid the Egyptian elite wouldn't calculate right, and that therefore they would claim that Moshe was lying or didn't know what he was talking about. From this the Talmud learns that a person should be very careful in speech on the basis of what other people might misunderstand -- you have to take that into account even when you think you are very clear.
The second is a tangent on the word "one", which is the key idea in the Sh'ma, the oneness of God. In a brief passage on the page, the Talmud discusses spiritual personages from the Bible who are one step from God vs. more than one step. I'm going to chew on this as a way to meditate on the word the next time I recite the Sh'ma, see what it's like to place one-step-ness in relation to divinity at the center, rather than some statement about the divine itself.
The other thing that struck me is a source that imagines David vouching for himself as a king unlike the fancy kings of other nations. He says that he engages with all manner of bloody things, gets his hands bloody, in order to prove that a woman is in a state of ritual purity so she can sleep with her husband. The Talmud talks about David using his own hands to determine if blood is menstrual or not, to investigate the gestational age of miscarried fetus, to touch placenta.
This is quite a subversion of the Bible's treatment of David with regard to both woman and blood. David's hands were bloody in war, and David went through all kinds of machinations to try to get Batsheva's husband Uriah to sleep with his wife after David had impregnated her, and in the end David had him set up to die in war. What chutzpah to turn around and say that his own bloody hands are testimony to his being a king who is a man of the people and a protector of women and/or marriages? I have no idea on first reading what the rabbis are trying to do here.
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