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Articles by Shira Botzum
Menachot 93 | My Jewish Learning
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Today’s daf continues the topic of semichah — laying one’s hands on an animal sacrifice before it is slaughtered. As we discussed yesterday, the meaning of this ritual is not fully defined by the Torah or rabbinic sources. It seems to be a way of solidifying the connection between a person and their sacrifice, potentially transferring a piece of their identity and guilt for their sins onto the animal and strengthening the process of atonement.
Menachot 92 | My Jewish Learning
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The mishnah on today’s daf describes the sacrifices in which it is necessary to perform semichah — placing one’s hands on the head of an animal before it is offered. The laying of hands is a somewhat esoteric ritual whose explicit purpose is never fully described in the Torah or even really by the rabbis. Talmudic discussions suggest that it might be a process of transferring one’s identity and guilt for one’s sins onto the sacrifice.
Menachot 65 | My Jewish Learning
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Today’s daf is largely devoted to a sprawling interpretive battle between the rabbis and rival Jewish groups. The question is: When do we count the omer?
Menachot 64 | My Jewish Learning
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Today’s daf begins the sixth chapter of Tractate Menachot, which is all about the omer grain offering. Contemporary Jews practice a related but perhaps more familiar ritual called sefirat ha’omer. This involves counting seven weeks from the second day of Passover, which commemorates the exodus from Egypt, until Shavuot, which celebrates the subsequent giving of the Torah.
Menachot 43 | My Jewish Learning
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Menachot 39 | My Jewish Learning
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Not all Jews tie their tzitzit (ritual fringes) the same way. But if you look carefully at any contemporary tzitzit, you’re likely to see a pattern of knots and wrapped threads trailed by loose-hanging strings. That design is largely based on discussions from today’s daf and those that follow, in which the rabbis try to work out the physical details of tzitzit based on the instructions and language in the Torah.
Menachot 35 | My Jewish Learning
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Menachot 28 | My Jewish Learning
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Anchoring countless discussions in Menachot is the question: Which parts of a sacrifice are actually essential? The mishnah on today’s daf addresses a similar question, but shifts the focus to four ritual objects: the Temple menorah, the passages from Torah written in a mezuzah scroll, the passages written in tefillinscrolls, and the four fringes of tzitzit. Today’s daf focuses specifically on the menorah.
Menachot 29 | My Jewish Learning
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... In Jewish tradition, we call Moses our greatest teacher, but on today’s daf we get to see him in the role of student. We resume where we left off with the Gemara’s discussion of the Temple menorah.
Zevachim 96 | My Jewish Learning
The current chapter of Zevachim is concerned with how we deal with the side effects of sacrifices. Once you’ve completed a sacrifice, how do you clean the vessels that came in contact with it? Underlying these discussions is the idea that even after a sacrifice is completed, the blood and meat remain ritually charged substances, ones whose clean-up requires careful ritual steps.
Zevachim 89 | My Jewish Learning
Time and resources are limited, which means that we are always making calculations about what to prioritize in a given moment. Religious life is no different. When we are faced with multiple concurrent ritual obligations, how do we decide which takes precedence? The opening mishnah of this chapter takes up this topic, innovating an important rule: Anything that is more frequent than another precedes the other. The daily offerings precede the additional (musaf) offerings.
Zevachim 78 | My Jewish Learning
The topic of mixtures dominates this chapter of Zevachim. Up until now, the mixtures under discussion have generally been made of discrete items — entire animals designated for specific sacrifices or entire limbs of sacrificial animals. The mishnah anchoring today’s daf (which actually begins on the bottom of yesterday’s daf) shifts to discussing liquid mixtures, specifically those involving sacrificial blood meant to be sprinkled on the altar.
Zevachin 78 | My Jewish Learning
The topic of mixtures dominates this chapter of Zevachim. Up until now, the mixtures under discussion have generally been made of discrete items — entire animals designated for specific sacrifices or entire limbs of sacrificial animals. The mishnah anchoring today’s daf (which actually begins on the bottom of yesterday’s daf) shifts to discussing liquid mixtures, specifically those involving sacrificial blood meant to be sprinkled on the altar.
Zevachim 67 | My Jewish Learning
Today’s daf follows a fierce debate between two sages from the mishnah, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, about whether one type of sacrifice can ever truly transform into a different sacrifice. To understand their debate, we first need to review some details about bird sacrifices from the previous chapter. In chapter 6 of Zevachim, we learned that there are two types of bird sacrifices: a burnt offering and a sin offering.
Zevachim 58 | My Jewish Learning
Today’s daf today begins the sixth chapter of Zevachim. While the chapter will later address new topics such as bird offerings, the first mishnah reads more like a continuation of the previous section. The previous chapter discussed a group of sacrifices labeled kodshei kodashim, sacrifices of the highest level of holiness. These include burnt offerings, sin offerings and guilt offerings.
Zevachim 51 | My Jewish Learning
The current chapter of Tractate Zevachim is concerned with the procedural details for each major category of sacrifice — details like where in the Temple a sacrifice is slaughtered, where its blood is collected, where and how the blood must be sprinkled, where the remainder of the blood is poured, and details about how it is eaten and/or burned.
Zevachim 43 | My Jewish Learning
Today’s daf begins with a new mishnah on the subject of piggul, the term for a sacrifice (or element thereof) that becomes invalid because the priest offering it mistakenly intended to burn or eat some portion of it outside of its designated time. As we have learned, there are a number of ways in which sacrifices can go wrong, but not all mistakes are created equal.
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