Yoma 86: Pardons All Around (Except Acher)

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As we approach the end of Masechet Yoma, the Gemara turns to the most essential issue of this holy day – the atonement offered by Yom Kippur itself and the teshuva – repentance – associated with this time of year.

In a series of statements of Amoraim praising the attributes of teshuva, two statements made by Resh Lakish (who was, himself, a famous ba’al teshuva) are presented. In one of them Resh Lakish argues (based on the passage in Hoshea 14:2) that teshuva changes zedonot – sinful acts done on purpose – to shegagot – acts done by accident. In the second statement, (based on Yechezkel 33:19) he teaches that through the good offices of teshuva, zedonot are turned into zekhuyot – positive attributes.

To answer this apparent contradiction, the Gemara distinguishes between teshuva that is done because of love – when zedonot turn into zekhuyot – and when it is done out of fear of punishment – when zedonot become shegagot.

We examine the notion of Atonement and Pardon, and the exceptions, most notably Elisha ben Abuya or Acher and why he was refused pardon.

How does Milton Steinberg's account (albeit fictional) differ from the texts we inhabit? (as a Driven Leaf)

Yoma 85: Selicha, Mechila, and Kappara

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Finally we arrive at the concept of atonement and forgiveness!!

“The ritual bath of Israel is God” Just as a ritual bath purifies the impure, so too, the Holy One, blessed be He, purifies Israel.....is it the day which purifies or the effort?

We explore a number of commentators and the metaphor of the mikveh...and Rebbe's outrageous claim "It was taught: Rabbi says: For all sins in the Torah, whether one repents or not – the Day of Atonement atones, except for one who throws off the yoke, offends regarding Torah, or revokes his carnal covenant, where if one repents—the Day of Atonement atones, and if not—the Day of Atonement does not atone."

Finally the Qumran Pesher Habakuk' diatribe against the "wicked Kohen Gadol" in the Temple!

Yoma 84: Medicine and Halacha

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A number of illnesses are discussed on our daf.  What might have been hepatitis; what may have been diphtheria.  Treatments, including bloodletting, are mentioned as well.  At issue is the treatment of illness on Shabbat. The rabbis agree that an illness must be life-threatening for a person to administer medicine on Shabbat.  They argue about which illnesses are in fact life-threatening. 

We explore medicine in the talmud from Pikuach nefesh and Shabbat (Rav Lichtenstein) to the influence of Galen on the Rabbis and the struggle between medicine and religion in the Rambam by Elinor Lieber.  

Yoma 83: Bulmus and Anorexia

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In the case of one who is seized with the life-threatening illness bulmos, causing him unbearable hunger pangs and impaired vision, one may feed him even impure foods on Yom Kippur or any other day until his eyes recover, as the return of his sight indicates that he is recovering.

The rabbis consider illnesses, including confusion or tunba (seemingly senility or dementia), and bulmos. Bulmos, which has the same root as bulimia (Ancient Greek for 'excessive hunger') is a condition that includes symptoms of excessive hunger and loss of vision. The eyes recover first as a person heals from bulmos.

The term bulimia comes from Greek βουλιμία boulīmia, "ravenous hunger",

Although diagnostic criteria for bulimia nervosa did not appear until 1979, evidence suggests that binging and purging were popular in certain ancient cultures. The first documented account of behavior resembling bulimia nervosa was recorded in Xenophon's Anabasis around 370 B.C, in which Greek soldiers purged themselves in the mountains of Asia Minor. It is unclear whether this purging was preceded by binging.

we explore the syndrome of Anorexia vs bulimia ...and modern techniques to manage this deadly disease affecting young people.

Yoma 82: The Pregnancy and Pikuach Nefesh

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Included in the cases of life-saving taking precedence over the laws of Yom Kippur is that of an expectant mother whose unborn child smells food. If the resulting desire to taste that food is not satisfied, the lives of both mother and child are in danger. The mishna therefore tells us that she must be given to eat from that food until she recovers.

The saving of life overrides any commandment. Our Daf (Yoma 82a) explains that nothing stands in the way of “pikuach nefesh”, saving a life, other than the cardinal sins of idol worship, illicit relations or murder.

An Israeli study found that during the Day of Atonement, Jews had twice as many preterm deliveries.

To investigate why, they matched data on deliveries at the hospital from 1988 to 2012 with the Jewish calendar. Of the mothers, 388 were Jewish and 357 were Bedouin. Forty-seven, or 6.3 percent, of the births were premature, or earlier than 37 weeks after conception.

Yoma 81: Erev Yom Kippur

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Four different reasons are given for the mitzvah to eat on Erev Yom Kippur. Rabbeinu Yonah (1) records three of those reasons.

The first reason is to show the great joy of knowing that the time for our atonement has arrived.

A second explanation is that on other Yomim Tovim there is a meal to celebrate the joy of the mitzvos but since on Yom Kippur we cannot have that meal we hold it on Erev Yom Kippur.

A third rationale is to strengthen our bodies before the fast. Hashem knows that fasting is difficult and therefore, commanded us to eat the day before Yom Kippur, in order to ease the affliction (2)

The last reason is recorded in Shibolei Haleket. He writes that the reason for the mitzvah to eat on Erev Yom Kippur is to make the fast more difficult (the opposite of the previous explanation). There are a number of practical ramifications that emerge from these different reasons. One case would be a person who is ill and will eat on Yom Kippur.

The Eliya Rabbah (Rav Eliyahu Shapira’s gloss on the Shulchan Arukh) suggests that someone who eats a lot the day before the fast has a harder time refraining from eating on the fast day, therefore the person who spends the ninth of Tishrei eating is credited for having additional inuy.

Others point out that Yom Kippur is a holiday, a day on which we really should be eating and drinking.

Since we cannot eat and drink on Yom Kippur, we “make up” for it on erev Yom Kippur.

We explore the halacha of eating on the Erev Yom kippur and the chassidic dimension.

Yoma 80: Bar Yochni

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Our daf asks: Even if we claim that the measure for impure foods is an egg-bulk, one could say it is referring to the giant egg-bulk of the bird called bar yokhani.

and elsewhere:

Rabbi Yishmael ben Satriel also testified before Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi: Once an egg of the bird called bar yokhani fell, and the contents of the egg drowned sixty cities and broke three hundred cedar trees.

Among Jews, as among most nations (Gubernatis, "Zoological Mythology," on Birds), birds were thought to possess supernatural knowledge, because they soared in the air.

Overall, bird imagery in Semitic literature outside the Old Testament has an imaginative and mystical flare. There’s the giant ziz, the avian equivalent of leviathan and the legends that King Solomon, the wise monarch and son of King David, could understand the language of birds. We have descriptions in The Apocalypse of Abraham, a first- or second-century CE text of pre-Rabbinic Judaism, of the great patriarch and an angel making their way to heaven by aid of a pigeon’s and turtledove’s wings .

And in other writings, we learn that sparrows sing as spirits continue to be born, set forth from the Guf, a mysterious storehouse of souls. However, once the last spirit departs from this realm, the songs of sparrows will cease and the world will soon end.

Yoma 79: כותבת Phoenix Dactylifera

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We have learned that one of the five forbidden, pleasurable activities on Yom Kippur is eating. The Mishnah (73b) taught that in order to be held liable for eating, one must consume an amount of food the size of a kotevet ha-gasah – a large date. Since this measurement is an unusual one (for example, with regard to birkat ha-mazon – grace after meals – the minimum amount that needs to be eaten is either a kezayit – the size of an olive– or a ka-beitzah – the size of an egg), the Gemara on our daf attempts to define it.

Rava quotes Rav Yehuda asteaching that a kotevet ha-gasah must be larger than an egg, since the Sages determined that only an amount greater than a ka-beitzah size gives a sense of satisfaction. While ordinarily the Sages do not attempt to give explanations for the specific size requirement given by the Torah,

Rabbi Avraham Tiktin, in his DavarBe-ito argues that in this case there was a recognition that the rules of Yom Kippur were left to the Sages to define (see the Ran’s explanation of this phenomenon on page 73b), so we must try and understand their underlying logic.

This leads us to examine the halochos of berocho acharona, and to the extraordinary Israeli scientific achievement of growing seven date palm trees from 2000-year-old seeds found in the Judean desert near Jerusalem.

Yoma 78: Chananya ben Tradyon

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Rabbi Ḥananya ben Teradyon says in the name of Rabbi Eliezer: A king and a bride may wash their faces (on Yom Kippur). The Rabbis said: A new mother may not wear shoes on Yom Kippur. Rabbi Ḥananya ben Teradyon says in the name of Rabbi Eliezer: A new mother may wear shoes.

R' Chanina was punished for pronouncing the Tetragrammaton in public, and his wife was punished for not preventing him for doing so.

R' Chanina had two sons and two daughters. One son associated with robbers and was put to death (Eicha Rabah 3:16, 6; Semachot 12:13), and the other was a Torah scholar (Tosefta Kelim 4:9).

His well-known daughter was Beruriah.

Yoma 77: Pulsa Dinura

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The Holy One Blessed be He said to the angel Michael,"Your nation has sinned!" Michael suggested to spare the nation because of the good ones among them, but the answer was, "I will burn them together with the good ones who did not protest." At this time Gabriel asked another angel, a Cherub, to bring the coals, took those coals and threw them on Jerusalem. However, since the coals cooled somewhat, the nation survived. They gave Gabriel sixty fiery lashes (pulsa dânura) and expelled him.Gabriel continued arguing on behalf of the Jewish people, and when he mentioned Daniel, the Holy One Blessed be He asked, "Who is he that is advocating on behalf of my children?" - and Gabriel was brought back.

We explore the notion of these fiery lashes and some adherents of Kabbalah developed the idea of invoking a curse against a sinner, which they termed pulsa deNura. The source for this modern ritual is not to be found in Kabbalah, but among the Hebrew magical manuals of antiquity, such as Sefer HaRazim and The Sword of Moses.

We attempt to understand how activists performed a “Pulsa Dinura” against Yitzhak Rabin shortly before his death in 1995 and have used it as late as last week on PM Bennett.

Yoma 76: Manna, Nectar, and Ambrosia

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Our daf deals with the mannah. The rabbis do not read the manna as an allegory, but as real food provided by God so that the Israelites would not have to toil for their food, and would have the opportunity to study Torah. God’s supporting Israel with manna gave this generation the unique opportunity to study Torah full time.
According to the midrash, manna is the perfect food that gets absorbed into the body entirely, with no extraneous material. In other words, the Israelites would not have needed to defecate while in the wilderness as long as they ate only manna.

The interpretation of manna as a magical food with spiritual import takes a great leap forward in the Zohar, stressing ontological transformation, and viewing the consumption of manna as a method for internalizing divine wisdom, a transmuting of holiness into corporeality, for those who were scions of faith.

Yoma 75: Quail, Craving or Starving?

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We explore the episode of the Quail in the wilderness and the aggadic interpretations.

Rav Chanin bar Rava teaches that there are four separate birds called slav.We cannot identify each of these birds with certainty, but it appears that they are all members of the pheasant family of birds, which are similar to chickens.The birds mentioned in the Gemara are variously identified as Alectoris, Francolinus, Ammoperdix and Phasianus, all of which have similar body structures and make up a natural family. The pheasant (Phasianus) is raised as poultry in many places. Standard quail – Coturnix coturnix – is the smallest of the birds related to the chicken.

"It is well known that the quail, known to ornithologists as Coturnix coturnix, migrates in huge flocks from Europe to CentralAfrica in the autumn and returns in the spring. A short-tailed game bird of the pheasant family, it flies rapidly at very low altitudes. Due to the long distance involved, the migration is carried out in stages.

The small quails twice each year land exhausted on the Mediterranean shore, where they can easily be captured by hand and by nets in great quantity.

Their flesh and eggs are said to be delicious, and to this day they are a prized food among the local population and are exported as a delicacy to Europe.

The season of the year in which the Israelites encountered the quails fits in precisely with the bird's migratory pattern." (Nahum Sarna, Exploring Exodus pg. 119)

Yoma 74: The Koy, Tragelaphus?

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Our daf refers to an animal called a koy which is halfway between domesticated and wild species of quadruped, and debates how far it is subject to the laws governing each category. Scholars are divided on whether the rabbis believed the koy to be a real creature or an imaginary example used for a hypothetical discussion.

Judith Romney Wegner discusses how the koy represents a hybrid:

Yoma 73: “Inuy”

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The Gemara teaches us that the rabbis argued about what of this Mishna is based on Torah law and what is based on rabbinic law. Does it matter what a person eats? Can the food be treiefot? At what point did we make an oath that we would not eat such food - on Mount Sinai? or simply before Yom Kippur? How do we define “inuy” affliction? According to Rashi, the Rabbis set aside certain rabbinic prohibitions in order to increase a person’s mental anguish and thus allow him to better fulfill the mitzva of affliction on Yom Kippur. According to Rashi’s understanding, this talmudic passage contradicts our proposal, for it follows from what he says that the Yom Kippur prohibitions are intended to cause pain and anguish. Most Rishonim, however, understand the passage differently.

Yoma 72: Poles of the Aron

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It is prohibited to remove the poles from the holy ark, and anyone who does so is subject to lashes. What is the reason that the Torah requires that the poles for carrying the Ark always remain in their rings, whereas the poles for carrying the Altar and the table are only required to remain in their places when their respective utensils are actually being moved?

Meshech Chochmah explains that the poles for carrying the Aron represent the segment of Klal Yisroel which supports and upholds Torah scholars who are immersed in the study and dissemination of Torah, just as the poles served to carry the ark and the Torah contained in it. It is only fitting that these supporters be totally and constantly associated with their Torah partners.

We examine the issue of removing the poles for transport by R Yitzchak Levy then compare the poles of Tutenkhamun's tomb by Prof Raanan Eichler.

Yoma 71: Linum Usitatissimum

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The Mishnah on our daf teaches about the bigdei kehunah – the special clothing worn by the kohanim and the kohen gadol. The kohen gadol wears eight special garments, of which four of them were the standard attire of a regular kohen.

The Gemara derives from passages in Shemot 39 that the basic material used in the fabric for the bigdei kehunah was linen, derived from flax – Linum usitatissimum.It is an erect annual plant growing between 30 and 100 cm tall, with slender stems.

The Hebrew language has several words torefer to “linen”: pishtah/pishtan/pishtim (“flax”), butz, sheish (Yoma 71b), and bahd (Zevachim 18b). In fact, the Talmud explicitly defines the last two words as “linen” — which is known in the Talmud as kitna .

We find an aggada about a Kohen Gadol who encounters Shemaya and Avtalyon at the conclusion ofYom Kippur seemingly revealing its proper attitude towards proselytes, and the message that great sensitivity should be shown towards them, including refraining from mentioning their background.

Yoma 70: Two Goats for Two Types of Sin

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Our Mishnah specifically lays out the order of the service. According to this Mishna, Yom Kippur seems like one long day of disrobing, immersing, drying, dressing in gold or linen robes, doing a ritual, and then repeating the process. At the end of this incredibly long day, this Mishna tells us that he is surrounded by people as he walks home. At home, the High Priest prepares a feast. It is tough to imagine the High Priest preparing a feast at that point. Others must have been home preparing while he was leading prayers. But the Talmud tells us that he was the one who makes the feast - an interesting description.

The Zohar notes that the name “Yom HaKippurim” is plural. What can we learn from the fact that the Torah does not refer to this day as “Yom Kippur - The Day of Atonement”?

We can identify two categories of improper actions. One is simply when a person neglects to do that which is incumbent upon him. The other is when a person performs the actions that are expected from him but does them improperly.

To illustrate the body and soul’s responsibility for sin, an early midrash presents the parable of the blind and lame watchmen. Curiously, this parable later shows up in Piyyut and in a Christian text.

What might this teach us about the spread of rabbinic texts and ideas in late antiquity?

Yoma 69: Alexander Macedon

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Our daf includes one of the most famous stories in the Gemara, when the kohen gadol, Shimon HaTzaddik met Alexander Mokdon (the Macedonian). The story is taken from Megillat Ta’anit (where the baraita explains why during the second Temple period the 25th day of Tevet was celebrated as a minor holiday, which was called “the day of Mount Gerizim.”

The Samaritans approached Alexander Mokdon and requested permission from him to be permitted to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem. Alexander agreed. When word of this got to Jerusalem, the kohen gadol, Shimon HaTzaddik dressed in his priestly garments and headed north together with an entourage to greet Alexander.

These stories have some parallels in Josephus but further exploration reveals little historticity. The only historical event connecting Alexander the Great with the Jews is his visit to Jerusalem, which is recorded by Josephus in a somewhat fantastic manner. According to "Ant." xi. 8, §§ 4-6, Alexander went to Jerusalem after having taken Gaza.

Yoma 68: Torah Reading of KG

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The seventh perek of Massekhet Yoma, which begins on today’s daf, opens with a description of the kohen gadol reading the command of the Yom Kippur service as it appears in the Torah (Vayikra 16:1-34; 23:26-32). The Jerusalem Talmud derives the need for this public reading from the passage “…and he did as God commanded Moshe,” which is understood to obligate not only performance of the avoda (Temple service), but also teaching about it.

The Mishna notes that the people who came to watch the Yom Kippur service needed to choose whether to attend the Torah reading or to go to see the burning of the sacrifices (the par and se’ir), which were done outside of Jerusalem, as was taught in the previous perek.

We present a few meditations on the Yom Kippur liturgy as it applies to the KG then to our spiritual worship ending with the famous transgressive poem by Yehuda Amichai.

Yoma 67: The Crimson Thread

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The focus of the sixth perek of Massekhet Yoma has been the se’ir ha-mishtale’ah – the scapegoat – which is not sacrificed in the Temple like a regular korban but is taken to the desert where it metaphorically takes the sins of the Jewish people with it to its death. This process, which is a central part of the Yom Kippur service, is not explained by the Torah.

"At one point in the procedure, the red thread tied to the Azazel goat was removed from its head, torn in half, and one part tied again onto its horns. At the exact moment that the Jews were forgiven, both halves of the thread turned white. (Yoma 67a)"

We explore the poetry of Michael O'Siadhail who appropriates the image of the crimson thread as one of his love for his Parkinsonian wife.

“As I remain your lover come what may— / One crimson thread until the crimson end.”

The image of the “crimson thread” derives from the Song of Songs (4:3), the poet for example, uses it in his epigraph to Love Life:

“Your lips are like a crimson thread / and your mouth is lovely….”

ג כְּחוּט הַשָּׁנִי שִׂפְתוֹתַיִךְ, וּמִדְבָּרֵךְ נָאוֶה; כְּפֶלַח הָרִמּוֹן רַקָּתֵךְ, מִבַּעַד לְצַמָּתֵךְ.

3 Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy mouth is comely; thy temples are like a pomegranate split open behind thy veil.

In One Crimson Thread, the poet portrays her states of mind and feeling, his adjustments to her changing personality, and his brokenness at her death. At the heart of this sequence, the poems courageously show how the couple’s deep-rooted love searches to overcome her illness, their fear and dread, and their eventual loss. As in its incarnations in Love Life, the image of the sonnet sequence’s title demonstrates that love will connect these lovers by an unbreakable “crimson thread.” The poet writes: “I hush you in my arms to tell you how / This suffering still sounds our depths of love.”