Any tips for surviving Yevamot? #dafyomi

— Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) March 7, 2022

Peter Beinart learns daf yomi!

Feel free to send him some survival tips!

The Jewish social media world is hot right now discussing Miriam Anzovin's reviews of the pages of daf yomi she is learning.

this is cute

the following post has some very interesting information that I did not previously know... it was written in response to an article written against the recent women's siyyum hashas daf yomi, which I am posting here:

The following letter sent to the administrative staff of the siyum hashas in the UK is a nice kiddush hashem. (Now if only they hadnt marred the event by banning the Chief Rabbi from attending...)

the letter highlights the differences we delineate in the text of every siyyum..



shep nachas, God! Like my kids, we might fight incessantly with each other, but in public we know how to behave...

mazel tov to the מסיימות and hatzlacha to the מתחילות..

mazel tov to all the mesaymim, and hatzlacha to all the matchilim

source: Atara German Twitter

Aryeh Deri in the government meeting this morning finishing the last daf of Shas in preparation for the siyyum hashas event he will be attending tonight. I dont know if he learned daf yomi daily, but the tweet (linked above) also says he learned 13 daf over Shabbos...

Minister Deri is a real masmid. His learning should be a zchus for Israel and for the government...

Runners who participate in marathon and half marathon races are given a sticker they can proudly display, boasting of their accomplishments and perhaps inspiring some.

The stickers are fairly well known, and you probably see them on car bumpers around town wherever you live.

This is what they look like:



or some variation of that.. sometimes marathon organizers design their own unique sticker for their specific marathon...

Somebody came up with a great idea.. I don't know if they thought of it because of the we run, they run reference, but the Daf Yomi Portal has designed a sticker for people who learn daf yomi..



There are similarities in the fulfillment of these accomplishments... they both take tremendous will power and determination, endurance and commitment to finish.

אנו רצים והם רצים

Tonight there is a "major" siyum Hashas for daf yomi in RBS. Instead of holding it in any of the local auditoriums - the Ulam Sport, the Matnas, or any of a number of event halls, they decided to hold it outdoors (in the heat) in the Merkaz Mischari (shopping center) of RBS. I hope it won't be too hot or humid, but they have really messed over the residents who already suffer from a shortagre of parking in the area...

(I snagged this picture off someone's Facebook page)

Very nice. Even though it is two weeks late and even though anybody interested has already been to at least one siyum hashas already, if not more, still it is very nice to have another siyum. Whoever wants to go and listen to more speeches, can go and enjoy.

The best thing about it is probably that in honor of the big event they probably cleaned up the area of the merkaz for the first time in years.... If that's the case, someone should consider holding a siyum in the merkaz and other especially central (and dirty) areas around town ona  regular basis - maybe once a week or once a month.

------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

I went with my boys last night to the Siyum HaShas in Jerusalem for the English-speaking community in Israel.

It was really a fabulous program. Kudos to those who put it together, both from IMP and from the Kollel Iyun Hadaf (Dafyomi Advancement Forum). And I must say the MC (emcee) did a fabulous job. While I had been planning on just going for a bit and leaving, it was so good I decided to stay, especially so my kids could be inspired, see and hear gedolim, and experience a grand event to honor the torah and the learners.

2 things that I thought were out of place were:

1. one of the speakers dissed dafyomi learners and dafyomi in general. He said that, not untrue, that dafyomi is a bad system with no preparation scheduled, no review, and at the end of 7 years there is often just a nice party with no memories of what was learnt. He then went on to praise the kollel for the work they do in making the learning more memorable and at a deeper level.
   
   While true, I don't agree that a dafyomi siyum hashas is the place to talk about how everyone there wasted the past 7 years. If his goal was to inspire people to learn more, at a less superficial level, he could have done so without saying they all had wasted the past 7 years. As a matter of fact, a different rosh yeshiva who spoke did just that - he called on people to take more upon themselves, to learn for more time, with more concentration, at a deeper level, and he did not feel the need to talk about how useless dafyomi is in its current format.
2. Another rav who spoke turned his speech into an anti-internet and cellphone speech. This also seemed out of place, considering the hosts of the event is a kollel whose work is done and used entirely on the internet.

------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

I went last night for a late visit to the Kotel.

The Kotel was fairly busy at midnight, with lots of people already there, along with a bustling crowd of people coming and going.

Here is a good image of both one of the things great about the Kotel and one of the things great about daf yomi. Put them together, daf yomi at the Kotel, and you can have an amazing experience...

all different types learnign daf yomi together at the Kotel

 This daf yomi shiur had about 30 people sitting and learning together, along with maybe another 20 or so bystanders listening for a few minutes as they passed the group. The group consisted of Yerushalmim, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Yemenite, Dati Leumi, Litvishe Haredim, Hassidic Haredim, etc. You get the point.

After listening to a few minutes of the daf, I took my 6 month daughter down to the Kotel itself. We davened for a few minutes and I gave her a tour. Here she is checking out the majestic Wall.



After that we said some tehillim in a lage group that had just finished the nightly "Nishmas" and then were saying some tehillim for Rav Elyashiv.



------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

I was driving home from the airport last night and was listening to a radio program on Radio Kol Chai. The program was a call-in show with some rav. After a few calls discussing various topics ranging from how bad the internet is to the Russian goyim who were brought to live in Israel, a woman called in and said something that floored the host of the show.

After introducing herself, the host Rav Turetsky (I think) aasked what she wants to talk about. She started off complimenting the radio station for the daf yomi shiur in the morning. She said she listens to the daf yomi shiur  every day on the radio while she does some chessed program. He was floored. He was shocked and kept repeating, "you listen to the daf yomi every day?"

It was an interesting conversation to hear...

------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

Mishpacha reported a story this past week about how Daf Yomi saves lives.

Meoros Daf Yomi is an organization that promotes the study of daf yomi. They form and support daf yomi shiurim all over Israel, along with publications that they put out.

A Rabbi affiliated with Meoros was on his way to giving his daily shiur. He decided to stop at a lottery stand to ask for an explanation of a certain type of lottery. He did this because the topic of that days shiur was to be "Asmachta Lo Kanya" - an insincere commitment does not effect a transaction, and the particular lottery game was a very good example of the concept.

So the Rabbi stopped at the Lotto stand to clarify how the game works to see if it qualifies for the concept of "Asmachta". He knocked on the stand window to get the attention of the clerk. The clerk did not respond. He noticed the clerk was not moving at all and seemed to have collapsed inside the stand. He right away called for medical help and MDA came and resuscitated him.

So Daf Yomi saves lives!

Now that we are within a couple of weeks of concluding the tractate of Kesubos in daf yomi, I have some questions..

1. Why is the kesuba nowadays still written in Aramaic? It was written in Aramaic originally because that is the language they spoke. Even most Jews living in Eretz Yisrael at the time spoke in Aramaic (proof is if you watched the movie by the anti-semite Mel Gibson called Passion of Christ). So instituting it in Aramaic at the time made sense. But there is no intrinsic holiness to the kesuba nor to the Aramaic language.
So why do we continue to write the kesuba in Aramaic and not switch it to Hebrew? Some might want it in Yiddish, or English, and I see nothing wrong with that either, but at least we should switch it to Hebrew!
As it is in Aramaic, nobody understands it. We all sign on our kesubas and how many of us have actually read the document? Do you know to what you have obligated yourself? Even those of us who have read it hardly understand most of it.
So why continue writing the kesuba in Aramaic? Why not switch to a language that is used nowadays?

2. What is the role of the kesuba in today's marriage?

We had two separate divorced people (separately) speak to our shiur about the topic. Our main question posed to the two of them was during the divorce proceedings in beis din, did the issue of the kesuba come up? How ws the kesuba used in the divorce? Did the judges say let us now read the kesuba to see what you promised? Did they discuss how much value the kesuba had and how much he had to pay her because of it? etc.

The answer of each of the two divorced men who spoke to us was the kesuba had absolutely no role in the divorce. The judges never asked for it. They never looked at it. There was never a discussion as to what the value of it was.

I would guess the reason why it is irrelevant is because in today's divorce settlements the man is generally going to be paying much more that what the kesuba obligates him to pay, so there is no reason to bother getting into the kesuba itself.

But if the kesuba is so irrelevant that it is not even used or even looked at in the divorce proceedings, why then are we so insistent that the couple have a kesuba, to the point that if they lose the kesuba, they cannot live together until a replacement kesuba is written.

So what is the point of the kesuba if it is not used at all anymore in case of divorce?

anybody?

Two biggies right away...

1. No Birkat Kohanim. In Israel the kohanim do birkat kohanim every day. In chutz la'aretz, only on the holidays (aside from sefardim who do it every day)..

2, realizing how great daf yomi really is. For someone who is travelling, it would be hard to keep to his learning schedule. He does not have his chavrusa, his regular shiur, he might be tired, distracted, etc.. With daf yomi, none of the matters. Wherever you go you just join a local shiur and pick up from where you left off...