Ketuvot 86 ~ 1,000 pages, and Counting

Tomorrow we will study the 1,000th page of Talmud in the current Daf Yomi cycle.  That's right, Ketuvot 86 is the 1,000th page. Here's how:

 64=ברכות 

 157=שבת

105=עירובין

121=פסחים

22=שקלים

88=יומא

56=סוכה

40=ביצה

35=ראש השנה

31=תענית

32=מגילה

29=מועד קטן

27=חגיגה

122=יבמות

86=כתובות

Add that all up and you get...1,015. Whoops? Not really. As you may recall, each new מסכת (tractate) of the Talmud has a title page, but the text always starts on page 2 (ב). So we need to subtract one page for each of the 15 tractates we've covered so far. And 1,015-15=1,000.

Pagination in the Talmud

It wasn't always the case that Ketuvot 86 meant the same thing to all readers. Before the printed Talmud, everything was written by hand, and your particular manuscript (if you were lucky enough to have one) might well differ from that in another town.  Here, for example, is the opening of the ninth chapter of Ketuvot, (the one we are currently studying in this Daf Yomi cycle,) in the 1342 manuscript held in the Munich State Library (Babylonischer Talmud – BSB Cod. heb. 95. 1342.) You'll notice how completely different it looks from anything we have today:

Opening of Ketuvot Chapter 9 (=83a), Babylonischer Talmud – BSB Cod. heb. 95. 1342

According to Marvin Heller (who knows everything about early Hebrew printing and the printing of the Talmud) it was Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer who lived in Venice, who established the form of the Talmud that we have today.

“The first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud, the edito princeps, was printed from 1519/20-23. The Bomberg Talmud became a standard for the editions that followed, almost all subsequent editions adhered to his layout and foliation.”

— Marvin Heller. Earliest Printings of the Talmud. In Mintz and Goldstein. Printing the Talmud 2002. p 73.

Bomberg printed the tractate Ketuvot in 1521, and so that is the earliest date we would recognize where we are now- Ketuvot 86, the 1,000th page of the Talmud. 

Some Light Summer Reading Suggestions

There are many novels with 1,000 pages of more. Perhaps you've read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy,  or Tolstoy's War and Peace?  What about Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, (only 1,504 pages, in paperback!) None of them appeal to you? Want something a bit more biblical? Then try Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, a retelling of a few chapters of Genesis...in 1,400 plus pages. (It must be good - he won a Nobel Prize.) Too high-brow? Then consider Stephen Kings's It (only 1,104 pages) Too scary? Then go for Charles Dicken's classic Bleak House; it's a story about the injustices of the British legal system, and the Penguin Classic edition is 1,096 pages long. Perfect beach reading.  

“I looked up War and Peace and it’s about this guy Pierre who fights in France, and all this terrible stuff happens to him, but in the end because of his charm he gets to be with this girl he really loves, and who really loves him even though she cheated on him.”

— Gary Shtenygart, Super Sad True Love Story

Visualizing Numbers

1

​Back on August 3, 2012 we opened the new cycle of Daf Yomi with Berachot 2. That day just happened to be ט׳ו באב.

10

Ten. It's no big deal really, other than we count using base 10 because that's how many fingers we have. We learned the tenth page of  the Talmud (Berachot 11) on August 12, 2012.

Ten is actually of great importance in Judiasm. Here are some of the significant ones:

• There were Ten Plagues in Egypt

• There were Ten Commandments. 

• The Torah (Deut. 26:12) commands that the poor be given one-tenth of our produce: כי תכלה לעשר את כל מעשר תבואתך בשנה השלישת שנת המעשר 

• We observe the annual Ten Days of Repentance from ראש השנה to יום כפור.

• There were Ten Martyrs that are rememberer in Jewish prayers on יום כפור.

• There are said to be Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

• There are Ten Sephirot in the Kabbalah.

• Ten men are needed to make a minyan.

100

We studied the 100th page on Nov 10, 2012. That was Shabbat 38.  100 is of a special number, it being the square of 10. 

We make a big deal out of 100. It's the basis of our percentage calculations, and we count centuries based on their 100 year cycles. 100 is also the sum of the cubes of the first four integers: 100=[1x1x1]+[2x2x2]+[3x3x3]+[4x4x4].

Rabbi Meir taught that  a person should make 100 ברכות every day ( מנחות דף מג, ב). A person should hear 100 notes blown on the שופר on ראש השנה.

1,000

“1,000 is also a huge deal in our world and has a bunch of nicknames, like a grand, a G, a kilo, and k. It’s also part of the elite chain of numbers in the “order-of-magnitude” chain, which we know as million, billion, trillion, etc. Million is actually the third number in that chain, with the dud 1 as the first number and 1,000 as the second number. And 1,000 is the key multiplier that defines the whole chain.
That said, 1,000’s dirty secret is that it’s a fraud like 10 and can’t be made into a square. The square root of 1,000 is an embarrassing 31.62277660168 etcetera without even a vinculum”

— Tim Urban. From 1 to 1,000. Waitbutwhy.com

So we’ve covered 1,000 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. There are 2,711 pages in all, so we’re not even half-way done. But we’re closer than we were yesterday, and we will be even closer tomorrow. Congratulations to all who've reached this milestone.

Bomberg Talmud Ketuvot, title page 1521. From Marvin Heller, Printing the Talmud; A History of the Earliest Printed Editions of the Talmud 1992, p.147.

Ketuvot 83b ~ Cucumbers, Gourds and the Marshmallow Test

In the middle of a long discussion about the substitution of animals that have been designated to be sacrificed, we find this gem:

בוצינא טב מקרא

A small gourd now is better than a large gourd later (Temurah 9a).

Let’s review what we wrote when we first encountered this phrase back in April 2015. Here's how Rashi explained the concept in the tractate Ketuvot (83b):

 בוצינא דלעת קטנה קרא דלעת גדולה והאומר לחבירו קח לך דלעת קטנה בגינתי או המתן עד שיגדילו וקח גדולה טוב לו ליקח הקטנה מיד כי לא ידע מה יולד יום

...When a person says to his friend "you may take this small gourd in my garden now or you can wait until it grows larger and then take it" it is better to take the small gourd immediately, because you cannot know what the future may bring.

This is a fairly unremarkable observation, and it finds a similar expression in the adage "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." The meaning is clear: it's better to have a small but certain gain rather than risk a larger one that is less certain (though see here for an interesting alternative origin of the expression). This is Rashi's explanation. But there is another way to explain the phrase (and this is followed by the Koren-Steinsaltz Talmud).  According to Tosafot, cited in the name of Rabbenu Tam (d.1171), the saying means the following:

ומשל הדיוט כך הוא שאדם אוהב הקישות יותר שיהנה בה מהרה ממה שהוא אוהב דלעת ולהמתינה אע"פ שהיא טובה יותר

This common saying means that a person would prefer [fast growing] cucumbers because he can enjoy them sooner, rather than gourds [which grow slowly and] which require waiting, even though they [taste] better. (Tosafot, בוצינא טב מקרא, Ketuvot 83b).

So according to the great Rabbenu Tam, the aphorism does not address any element of risk. Instead it is addressing the ability to have self-control and to plan for the future.  The larger reward is certain, but is only available if you can wait. In fact, Rabbenu Tam is describing the famous Marshmallow Test.

The Marshmallow Test

The man behind the Marshmallow Test is the psychologist Walter Mischel, the emeritus chair of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. He was born in Vienna and fled to the US in 1938, and sadly he died last September at the age of 88. His obituary in The New York Times noted that his studies on “delayed gratification in young children clarified the importance of self-control in human development, and…led to a broad reconsideration of how personality is understood.”

The test is simple: give kindergarten children an option -one reward now (in the original experiments the children could choose any reward, not just a marshmallow) or two if you can sit and not touch the reward for fifteen minutes. The studies were performed at Stanford between 1968 and 1974 and involved some 550 children.  If you haven't already seen what the test looks like, grab a coffee and watch the video. It's quite wonderful.

There have been dozens and dozens of academic papers written on the Marshmallow test, since Mischel first published his findings in 1969.  But perhaps most surprisingly, the findings of the Marshmallow experiment on pre-schoolers seems to predict the future behaviors of the test subjects when they are adults. Here is Mischel summarizing his findings in his new book called (predictably enough,) The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.

“What the preschoolers did as they tried to keep waiting, and how they did or didn’t manage to delay gratification, unexpectedly turned out to predict much about their future lives. The more seconds they waited at age four or five, the higher their SAT sores and the better their rated social and cognitive functioning in adolescence. At age 27-32, those who had waited longer during the Marshmallow Test in preschool had a lower body mass index and better sense of self-worth, pursued their goals more effectively, and coped more adaptively with frustration and stress. At midlife, those who could consistently wait (“high delay”), versus those who couldn’t consistently wait (“low delay”), were characterized by distinctively different brain scans in areas linked to addictions and obesity.”

— Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test 2014, p5.

Wow. That's some test. But before you run out and test your preschool aged children (or grandchildren), remember that according to Tosafot, most people prefer a smaller instant reward to a larger but delayed reward. The classic Marshmallow Test measured how long young children could control their desires for an instant reward, but gives a new insight into  this daf. If you can hold out for slow growing gourds rather than go for the faster growing cucumbers, you might just do very well in later life.

[Repost from here.]

Israel's Noble History

Israeli Nobel Prize Winners for $200 Please, Alex

Quick. Name three Israelis who have won a Nobel Prize. Come on. You can do this. Still need a hint? Click here. See, I told you you'd know.  

OK, those were easy. How about this one.  Which Israel won a Nobel Prize for literature? Need a hint? He was awarded it in 1966 for " his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people" and his photo is shown here. Still not sure? You may have read his work on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur which was translated into English as Days of Awe...Of course; it was Shai Agnon, who was born in Galicia, moved to what was then Palestine (twice) and died in Jerusalem in 1970.

As of this year there have been twelve Israeli winners of the Nobel Prize. We've noted Agnon as the single winner for literature, and (as you may have answered correctly) there have been three winners of the Nobel Peace Prize: Menachem Begin (1978), Yizhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (both in 1994).  That leaves eight more prizes. In honor of Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day, we will pause from our analysis of science in the Talmud and reflect on the Israeli winners of this prize, given each year (in accordance with the will of Alfred Nobel) "to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

Daniel Kahneman, Economics, 2002

Following at an eight year prize-drought, Israel picked up her fifth Nobel in 2002, when Daniel Kahneman was awarded the 2002 Prize in Economics. In his biographical sketch, Kahneman credits his early days in the IDF with the first cognitive illusion he discovered.

“… after an eventful year as a platoon leader I was transferred to the Psychology branch of the Israel Defense Forces….We were looking for manifestations of the candidates’ characters… we felt…we would be able to tell who would be a good leader and who would not. But the trouble was that, in fact, we could not tell... The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible...I was so impressed by the complete lack of connection between the statistical information and the compelling experience of insight that I coined a term for it: “the illusion of validity.” Almost twenty years later, this term made it into the technical literature. It was the first cognitive illusion I discovered.”

— Daniel Kahneman, Biographical sketch at Nobelprize.org

(Last summer I was about two-thirds of the way through Kahneman's recent best-seller Thinking Fast and Slow, when I left it on a flight from Tel Aviv. Please let me know if you find it.) 

Ciechanover and Hershko, Chemistry 2004

Ubiquitin-mediated Proteolysis.

In 2004 Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, both from the Technion in Haifa (together with Irwin Rose), were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of how cells breaks down some proteins and not others. They discovered ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis, a process where an enzyme system tags unwanted proteins with many molecules another protein called ubiquitin. The tagged proteins are then transported to the proteasome, a large multi-subunit protease complex, where they are degraded.

Robert Aumann, Economics, 2005

Robert Aumanm from the Hebrew University won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on conflict, cooperation, and game theory (yes, the same kind of game theory made famous by John Nash, portrayed in A Beautiful Mind). Aumann worked on the dynamics of arms control negotiations, and developed a theory of repeated games in which one party has incomplete information.  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that this theory is now "the common framework for analysis of long-run cooperation in the social science." The kippah-wearing professor opened his speech at the Nobel Prize banquet with the following words (which were met with cries of  אמן from some members of the audience):

ברוך אתה ה׳ אלוקנו מלך העולם הטוב והמיטב

The four-minute video of his talk should be required viewing for every modern-orthodox high school student (and their teachers). 

Ada Yonath, Chemistry, 2009

Remember ribosomes from high school? They are the machines inside all living cells that read messenger RNA and link amino acids in the right order to make proteins.  In 2009, Ada Yonath from the Weizmann Institute shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on the structure and function of the ribosome. Specifically, she reported their three-dimensional structure and her work in the 1980s was "instrumental for obtaining the robust and well diffracting ribosome crystals that eventually led to high resolution structures of the two ribosomal subunits." Why is this important?  Well, many antibiotics target the ribosomes of bacteria, and so knowledge of how antibiotics bind to the ribosome may help in the design of new and more efficient drugs.  

Available structures of antibiotics targeting the small ribosomal subunit (30S). From Franceschi and Duffy. Structure-based drug design meets the ribosome. Biochemical Pharmacology 2006; 71; 1016-1025.

Dan Shechtman, Chemistry, 2011

in 1982, Shechtman was working at the US. National Institute of Standards and Technology. As he was  looking through an electronic microscope at the structure of new material that he was studying, and noted that the atoms had arranged themselves "in a manner that was contrary to the laws of nature." 

אין חיה כזו – There is no such entitiy" was how he recalled responding to what he had seen.  Shechtman double checked his findings and submitted them for publication; the paper was rejected immediately, not worthy even of being sent on for peer review.  But Shechtman did manage to get his work published, work that the Nobel Committee found questioned a fundamental truth of science: that all crystals consist of repeating, periodic patters. Shechtman's discovery of what were later to be called quasicrystals  was important not only because of what he found. It was important that he found. Here's why:

“Over and over again in the history of science, researchers have been forced to do battle with established “truths”, which in hindsight have proven to be no more than mere assumptions. One of the fiercest critics of Dan Shechtman and his quasicrystals was Linus Pauling, himself a Nobel Laureate on two occasions. This clearly shows that even our greatest scientists are not immune to getting stuck in convention. Keeping an open mind and daring to question established knowledge may in fact be a scientist’s most important character traits.”

— The Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011. Information for the Public

Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt, Chemistry 2013

Israel's two most recent Nobel Prize winners are Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt. In 2013 they shared the prize in, yes, you've guessed it...Chemistry, (together with Marin Karplus, a Jew, but not yet an Israeli).  Working together in the 1970s on GOLEM, the supercomputer at the Weizmann Institute, they developed computer programs that could simulate chemical reactions with the help of quantum physics.  These programs, and their offshoots, are used in a variety ways, from optimizing solar panels to designing new drugs.

The Last Word

There you have it. Twelve remarkable Israelis who have contributed to peace efforts, science and literature, and whose efforts were recognized by a Nobel Prize. As we celebrate Yom Ha'atzmaut, let's give the last word to the 2005 winner Robert Aumann, who noted in his banquet speech just  what it really important in life. 

“We have participated in the human enterprise – raised beautiful families. And I have participated in the realization of a 2000-year-old dream – the return of my people to Jerusalem, to its homeland.”

— Robert Aumann, Nobel Prize banquet speech, 2005.

Ketuvot 75a ~ Halitosis

 תלמוד בבלי כתובות עה, א  

תנא, הוסיפו עליהן זיעה ושומא וריח הפה

[The following defects are grounds for divorce:] Excessive perspiration, a mole, and bad breath...(Ketuvot 75a)

Bertrand's Bad Breath and Jane AUsten's Sufferings

In his autobiography, the great British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (d. 1970) wrote of his personal ills, and how they affected Lady Ottoline Morrell (one of the women with whom he was an affair):

I suffered from pyorrhea although I did not know it, and this caused my breath to be offensive, which I also did not know. She could not bring herself to mention it, and it was only after I had discovered the trouble and had it cured that she let me know how much it had affected her.

Jane Austen, the genteel author of Pride and Prejudice, did not suffer from bad breath, but she does  seem to have suffered from the bad breath of others. In one of her not so genteel letters, she wrote that "Miss Debary, Susan and Sally made their appearance and I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me."  (This sentence proves, once more, that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.)

The Causes of Bad Breath

Bertrand Russell and Jane Austen were not alone. Overall, about one in four adults suffers from bad breath on a regular basis. There are a large number of causes of  bad breath (or halitosis, from the Latin halitus, meaning exhalation). In the young it is usually caused by a coating of the tongue, whereas in older people, the cause is more likely to be tooth decay or gum disease. Whatever the proximate cause, the final pathway to halitosis is usually microbial action in the mouth (most commonly by gram negative anerobic bacteria,) which release volatile sulphur compounds including hydrogen sulphide. It's these compounds that cause the odor we know as halitosis.

From Seemann R. et al.  Halitosis management by the general dental practitioner—results of an international consensus workshop. Journal of Breath Research. 2014: 8: 1-6.

Dentists have been encouraged to grade the halitosis based on the distance at which it can be detected, or the strength of the smell.  So Grade 3 halitosis on the Distance Malodor Scale is when the breath can be clearly detected "if the observer approached to a distance of about 100 cm to the mouth of the patient". (Really. I'm not making this up.) 

“Morning Breath: Due to the reduced saliva production during night, anaerobic putrefaction will increase, causing the typical morning breath. This is a non-pathological form of halitosis. The problem will disappear as soon as oral hygiene measures are taken...women manifest higher VSC levels than men in the morning. This phenomenon needs to be further investigated to understand its impact.
”

— Bollen C. Beikler T. Halitosis: the multidisciplinary approach.International Journal of Oral Science (2012) 4, 55–63

Bad Breath in the Talmud

The passage on halitosis in this daf has achieved a certain notoriety, as evidenced by this newspaper snippet from the Curiosity Shop column in The Victoria Advocate, a daily newspaper out of Victoria Texas (Jewish population: about twenty families):

The Victoria Advocate, October 14, 2000.

Options, Other Than Divorce

Bad breath is not only grounds for divorce. It is also a condition that renders a Cohen unfit to serve in the Temple. The Talmud suggests that a Cohen with halitosis should chew on peppers, which were considered to be antidote to bad breath. In this way he could become eligible to serve once more.  As for a woman so afflicted, such a cure would not be possible, since, as Rashi points out, a husband and wife need to talk often, and talking is hard to do with a mouth full of peppers:

אפשר דנקט פילפלא בפומיה ועביד עבודה אבל גבי אשה לא אפשר

רשי: גבי אשה  - שהוא מדבר עמה כל שעה -  לא אפשר

What then, can the couple do to save their marriage? Well, how about these suggestions: try brushing your teeth and tongue often; try using mouthwash several times a day, and try visiting your dentist. In fact, just try to follow the advice of this dentist: 

“Do not divorce you partner if he/she has bad breath!
Your dentist and hygienist can help. Just call them.”

— Nicholas Calceterra DDS. Directions in Dentistry, October 6 2013.