Avodah Mailing List

Volume 39: Number 86

Mon, 11 Oct 2021

• 1. What is a Shuk (Micha Berger)
• 2. Re: The Difference Between Davening and Learning (Zev Sero)
• 3. Re: What is a Shuk (Zev Sero)
• 4. Understanding tosafot (Joseph Kaplan)
• 5. Languages (Akiva Miller)

In Bereishis 9:22, Cham runs out to Sheim and Yafes to tellthem of their
father's nakedness. the pasuq says he told them"bachutz", which Unqekus
translates "beshuqa".

He found them in a marketplace? Who does Unqelus believe were conducting
business there?

Chodesh Tov!
Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

On 7/10/21 2:55 pm, Micha Berger via Avodah wrote:
> AIUI, RYBS was saying there was no siddur, no liturgical prayer, until
> Anshei Keneses haGdolah. In the Gra's parlance, there were tachanunim,
> but no tefillos. (Or: ba'ushon dekhol Beis Yisrael, but not tzelosehon.)

The Rambam says so explicitly.  Tefillah 1:1-5.
https://www.mechon-mamre.org/i/2201.htm

Historically it's not as neat as that; AKhG at most set out very broad 
guidelines for what a tefilah should look like, what major points must 
be covered in what order, but it was still up to each mispalel to 
improvise most of it on the spot, so there became a system of baalei 
tefilah who would daven aloud and let those without their skill listen 
and answer amen.   An actual siddur, from which anyone who could read 
could daven, didn't come along until the Ge'onim; before them such a 
thing was considered "al ta'as tefilas'cha keva".

-- 
Zev Sero            Wishing everyone health, wealth, and
z...@sero.name       happiness in 5782

On 7/10/21 7:31 pm, Micha Berger via Avodah wrote:
> In Bereishis 9:22, Cham runs out to Sheim and Yafes to tellthem of their
> father's nakedness. the pasuq says he told them"bachutz", which Unqekus
> translates "beshuqa".
> 
> He found them in a marketplace? Who does Unqelus believe were conducting
> business there?

Wiktionary says Hebrew "shuq" and Syriac Aramaic "shuqa" derive from 
Akkadian "s?qu", which it translates as "rehov".  So no commerce is 
required; rather once there is a shuq it naturally becomes used as a 
market, because it's ideally suited for that purpose.

-- 
Zev Sero            Wishing everyone health, wealth, and
z...@sero.name       happiness in 5782

? I was responding to a discussion based on R. A Lichtenstein.	I assumed
it meant that ?moving on? without having expended maximum effort to
understand any	(not just tosfot) piece of Torah was not acceptable.?

But then the alleged ?moral failure? is in not expending the time rather
than in not understanding because sometimes you can spend time and exert
effort and still not understand. Perhaps not Rav Lichtenstein, but it?s
true of us mere mortals. 

It also doesn?t take into consideration that time is not unlimited. At some
point, the student might make the decision that it may be possible for her
to understand this tosfot if I she spends an additional 10 hours on it. But
in that same time she can learn 10 other tosfot. I don?t see making that
decision to be a moral failure. 
Joseph

Sent from my iPhone

.
In the course of learning Parshas Noach, I had expected to find the word
"language" several times, and indeed, it appears 5 times in the story of
the Dor Haflaga in Perek 11. What surprised me is that it also appears 3
times in Perek 10, *before* the Tower was even built!

10:5 refers to the descendants of Yefes, who were separated "in their
lands, each to its language, by their families, in their nations."
10:20 refers to the descendants of Cham, "by their families, by their
languages, in their lands, in their nations."
10:31 refers to the descendants of Shem, "by their families, by their
languages, in their lands, to their nations."

The slight variations among these three pesukim is an interesting point,
but it is not what I am asking now. My question is how we can talk about
multiple languages at a point in history when only one language existed.

I found two answers to this. One is from Rabbi Dr J.H. Hertz, found in the
populal (pre-ArtScroll) Soncino Chumash. On 10:5 he writes "The
differentiation of language is accounted for in the next chapter. The
Rabbis explain that the narratives in Scripture are not always in strict
chronological order... Ayn mukdam um'uchar baTorah." I am embarrassed to
say that I dismissed this out of hand, but the more I thought about it, the
more sense it made: The descendants of Shem, Cham, and Yefes, *did* survive
past the Dor Haflaga, and *did* eventually have differing lands and
languages.

I am much more intrigued by the answer of Rav S.R. Hirsch. I must point out
that this question is an excellent example (perhaps the best I've ever
seen) of the dangers of studying Torah in translation. Because while it is
true that the word "language" appears 8 times in this parsha, all 3 cases
in Perek 10 use the Hebrew word "lashon", and all 5 cases in Perek 11 use
the Hebrew word "safah". (By the way, the pesukim in Perek 11 are 1, 6,
twice in 7, and pasuk 9.)

I have long been curious about the difference in nuance between these two
words, lashon and safah. Rav Hirsch, on 10:5 and again on 11:1, explains
that lashon refers to a language, and safah is a dialect. Thus it is
entirely reasonable that even prior to the Tower, Noach's many descendants
had developed varied dialects of their one single language, which were all
intelligible to each other. Then as a result of the Tower incident, Hashem
changed their languages so that they would *not* understand each other.

I do have one question on Rav Hirsch's explanation: Pasuk 11:1 refers to
the "safah echas", the one language that the entire world spoke prior to
the Dispersion. Rashi, citing the Medrash, says that this language was
Leshon Hakodesh. Why "lashon" and not "safah"? Did the meanings of these
words change at some point?

Akiva Miller

PS: Several years ago, I was in a taxi in Yerushalayim, and shmoozing with
the driver. I don't remember what we were talking about, but it was
interesting, and I'm sure the driver was amused by the quality of my broken
Hebrew. At only one point in the conversation did he correct my vocabulary,
and that was to point out that I said "lashon" but should have said
"safah". At the time, I figured this was simply a difference between Lashon
Hakodesh and Modern Hebrew. But now I'm not so sure.
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