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 January 5, 2020 we opened the new cycle of Daf Yomi with Berachot 2.

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 January 14, 2020.

Ten is actually of great importance in Judaism. 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 April 13, 2020. 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 discussion about the rights of a husband to his wife’s property, we find this gem:

כתובות פג ,ב

אמר אביי: בוצינא טב מקרא

Abayye taught: a small gourd now is better than a large gourd later

Here's how Rashi explained this pithy phrase:

 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 in September 2018 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. And that’s a good lesson to think about on Rosh Hashanah.

Wishing you a happy, sweet and healthy New Year from the entire Talmudology team.

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 had 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 volatile sulfur compound 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 your 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.

Ketuvot 71b ~ Abstinence, Kedushah, and a Spiritual Marriage

On daf 61b the Mishnah outlined how often, according to the Torah, a husband should have conjugal relations with his wife. Just to remind you, here are the rules:

העונה האמורה בתורה הטיילין בכל יום הפועלים שתים בשבת החמרים אחת בשבת הגמלים אחת לשלשים יום הספנים אחת לששה חדשים דברי רבי אליעזר

Conjugal rights that are defined in the Torah are as follows: Tayalin (students who are at home with their wives every night) must be intimate each day; laborers, twice a week; donkey drivers (who would be away for six days at a time), once a week; camel drivers, once in thirty days; sailors, once in six months. This is the teaching of Rabbi Eliezer.

The Mishnah seems here to be descriptive, rather then prescriptive. Tayalin are home every day, so their conjugal obligation is daily. But camel drivers are away for up to a month at a time, so their conjugal obligation is...once a month. 

Vows of Abstinence

So far so good. But what happens if one of the partners vows to abstain from marital relations? Is such a marriage sustainable? This question is partially addressed in the Mishnah on 61b:

 המדיר את אשתו מתשמיש המטה ב"ש אומרים שתי שבתות בית הלל אומרים שבת אחת

If [a husband] takes a vow to forbid his wife from marital relations with him, Bet Shammai say that if the term of the vow was up to two weeks, [he need not divorce her], and Bet Hillel say that if the term was only one week [he need not divorce her]

The Mishnah is dealing with a vow of abstinence made by the husband. But what about such a vow made by a wife? That question is dealt with in today’s daf.

דאמר רב כהנא "הנאת תשמישי עליך" כופה ומשמשתו

Rav Kahanah said: If a wife vows: "The pleasure of cohabiting with me is forbidden to you" [the vow has no legal standing and the husband] can force her [to ignore the vow and] to cohabit with him.

In this case, the wife is attempted to forbid the husband from cohabiting with her, but since she has no legal power to do this, the vow has no legal standing. But the Talmud then teaches that if the wife vows not to have the pleasure of marital relations, the vow can take legal effect – since it is a vow she made on herself.

Spiritual Marriages

In 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified the husband and wife team of Luigi (d. 1951) and Maria (d. 1965) Quattrocchi-Beltrame. And what did this couple -the first married couple to be so recognized- do that earned them this extraordinary recognition? There were several achievements, but among them was their decision to engage in a spiritual marriage, that is, a marriage in which, as an expression of piety, the couple jointly undertook a vow of sexual abstinence. Based on what we’ve learned over the last several pages of the Talmud, you would expect that such “spiritual” marriages would be quite antithetical to Jewish practice. And you’d be largely, but not completely correct. Enter Exhibit A, Benjamin Brown’s remarkable 2013 paper, The Sexual Abstinence of Married Men in Gur, Slonim, and Toledot Aharon.

The Sexual Abstinence of Married Hasidim

Brown (no relation to me,) is a gifted researcher in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University.  His 2013 paper reveals a little known practice of the Hasidic sects of Ger, Slonim and Toledot Aharon.  These sects do not require complete abstinence of sexual relations within a marriage, but they start to get very close.  They radicalized a notion of Kedushah (holiness) and in this radical version, married men limited to the minimum the frequency of sexual intercourse with their wives. Brown records how the fourth Gerer Rebbe, Israel Alter (d. 1977) inaugurated the Ordinances on Holiness, which were never published “nor, in all probability, ever formulated systematically.” Instead, they were communicated from the Rebbe to his senior hasidim, “who later became the community’s first marriage guides (madrikhim), and they passed them on to the community...” Here they are, as condensed by the good professor:

1. The couple shall have sexual intercourse only once a month, on leil tevilah (the night after the wife’s immersion in the mikveh at the end of her halakhically prescribed menstrual period).

2. The couple shall refrain from sexual intercourse from as early as the seventh month of pregnancy.

3. After the wife has given birth, the couple shall refrain from sexual intercourse for a further period of six months.

4. During intercourse, the couple shall aim to minimize physical contact. The husband shall wear some of his clothes, including his tsitsit (considered a segulah—supernatural remedy—against the sexual drive) and will not hug or kiss his wife or engage in any behaviour that is not required for the performance of the act of intercourse itself.

5. The husband shall direct his thoughts as far away as possible from the sexual act.

For the Slonim Hasidim, only one rule was  formulated: there was to be no sexual intercourse on Shabbat, because the “crude physical act of intercourse would defile the spirituality of the holy day.” The Slonim Hasidim take this rule very seriously; there is a saying among them that “a man who has sexual intercourse on Friday night is not allowed to recite the Nishmas (shorthand for nishmat kol hai)—a paragraph in the Sabbath morning prayer, considered one of the high points of the Sabbath service in the Slonim tradition.”

Finally Brown turned to R. Avraham Yitzhak Kohn (d. 1996) who led one of the two factions of the Toledot Aharon sect in Jerusalem. In his pamphlet called דברי קדושה he urged his followers to adopt some of the stringencies of kedushah, but he was more moderate than either Gur or Slonim.

“He [R. Avraham Yitzhak Kohn] permitted sexual intercourse not only on both leil tevilah and leil Shabbat (Sabbath night, i.e. Friday night),but also whenever the wife expressed her desire for it (never overtly but rather by subtle indications such as self-adornment or the use of perfume). Moreover, the Rebbe permitted the moderate expression of physical affection between husband and wife. Hugs and kisses are allowed, and during intercourse are even recommended…”

— Benjamin Brown, 2013. Kedushah: The Sexual Abstinence of Married Men in Gur, Slonim, and Toledot Aharon

It is not surprising that rabbinic leaders outside of the Hasidic community criticized these practices. The Hazon Ish, (R. Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz d. 1953) was especially concerned about the effect of these stringencies on a newly wed couple (though Brown notes that Karelitz himself was reported to have abstained in physical contact with his wife). The head of the Slobodka Yeshiva, Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Sher (d. 1952) was also concerned, and outlined his thoughts in his work קדושת ישראל:

As for the bad habits that many of them have adopted in error, believing that in order to maintain themselves in holiness they must refrain from talking to their wives—the rabbis must strive to make them realize that this kind of holiness is the very essence of impurity…and that the husband must speak to his wife, addressing her with wondrously affectionate words of placation. ( p27).

Brown believes that there are three sociological forces that may explain these rather extreme hasidic practices:

(a) the inherent hasidic quest for spiritual renewal, which in time generated a range of supererogatory mysticism substitutes; (b) the overriding Orthodox tendency toward halakhic stringency; (c) the hasidic struggle to resist the promiscuous sexuality of modern society, which prompted the rebbes to construct defensive fences even around the limited sphere of sexual activity that is permissible within the boundaries of halakhah.

So there you have it. Despite all we have learned in the Talmud over the last several pages, sexual abstinence within marriage is certainly to be found in some sections of the Jewish community.

House Work and Intimacy

Predicted Sexual Frequency by Men’s Share of Housework. From Kornrich et al. Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage. American Sociological Review 2012; 78 (1): 26-50. 

If there is one thing that all hasidic sects emphasize, it is the clearly defined gender roles that men and women are expected to have within their society. This is in stark contrast to the way in which many contemporary marriages have evolved.  According to the Emory sociologist Sabino Kornrich and his colleagues Julie Brines and Katrina Leupp, this evolution has challenged "the notion of marriage as an institution ensnared in a stalled gender revolution, [and] this new perspective asserts that today’s marriages are more egalitarian, flexible, and fair than those of the past." For many couples, this evolution revolves around housework, and some research showed that  - at least in the US - couples who have more equal divisions of labor are less likely to divorce than are couples where one partner is the breadwinner and the other takes care of the household duties. But this may come at an unexpected price. In their study of (rather old) data from the National Survey of Families and Households, Kornrich and his collegues concluded that

“...shifting from a household in which women perform all of the core household tasks to one where women perform none of the core household tasks is associated with a decline in sexual frequency of nearly 1.6 times per month. Given a mean sexual frequency in this sample of slightly over five, this is a large difference.”

— Kornrich et al. Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage. American Sociological Review 2012; 78 (1): 26-50.

It's So Confusing...

Some hasidic sects may encourage sexual abstinence within marriage, but do they understand that their preservation of traditional gender roles might actually lead to a greater frequency of sexual relations between and wife and husband? And what is the modern orthodox Jew to do when she asks her husband to vacuum, or he asks his wife to take out the trash? Do they realize that in complying, these egalitarian couples may be endangering their most intimate lives? One thing is certain: further research is needed.

“...sex is an important component of marriage. Blumstein and Schwartz’s classic, American Couples (1983), identified sex (in addition to money and power) as a key good around which marriages—indeed all intimate partnerships—are organized. Sexual frequency is of interest for researchers because it is positively linked to emotional satisfaction and physical pleasure, and couples with greater sexual frequency are less likely to divorce or break up...”

— Kornrich et al. Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage. American Sociological Review 2012; 78 (1): 26-50.