Somewhat of a soft start, I feel like I've seen this daf many times. One of the challenges I see is being able to be mehadesh badavar and find something new and exciting, in old material and material that can be very technical. I'm reminded of the Harvard Education School's "Project Zero," which included a principle called "Ten Times Two." Go through a piece of artwork or a page of a text and find ten things you notice. Right as you get to ten, start over and find ten new things. So, something new I noticed was at the end of the daf, the description of "bein hashmashot":
I feel like this is an incredibly powerful way to begin a document about laws and cultural norms. We may spend considerable time debating details emphatically, but perhaps we require the humility to recognize that exact precision is as fleeting -- and as hard to pinpoint-- as the blinking of an eye.
That contentious time of "twilight" is like the fluttering of an eye -- one time starts as the other begins.דאמר רבי יוסי בין השמשות כהרף עין זה נכנס וזה יוצא ואי אפשר לעמוד עליו
I feel like this is an incredibly powerful way to begin a document about laws and cultural norms. We may spend considerable time debating details emphatically, but perhaps we require the humility to recognize that exact precision is as fleeting -- and as hard to pinpoint-- as the blinking of an eye.
This is beautiful, Rami. It reminded me that although I use the English expression 'in the blink of an eye' frequently, I never really think about it. Really, 'in the blink of an eye' means not only that something happened extremely quickly (that the time elapsed is less time than it takes to blink), but also that its in a sort of liminal space, where you eyes are neither open nor closed. Twilight (Bein ha'shmashot) is really that liminal space.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that struck me the most about this little meimra was the last bit, that you didn't translate. "...and [so it's] impossible to stand [anything] on it [bein ha'shmashot]." There's a lesson here that not only do we find many liminal spaces, but we also have to allow them to be liminal. Some things just fall in the Abyss and you have to respond to them that way. It seems Rabbi Yosi is encouraging us to appreciate the mystery of that transitional time.
To quote the dreadfully oft-quoted Einstein, "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious."