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Posts by Monica Cellio
According to Ibn Ezra on Devarim 21:15, שניאה is an adjective while שנואה is a noun. When the verse says: If a man has two wives, one a loved one and the other a hated one Ibn Ezra is saying...
The g'mara takes this up on 105a. The discussion in the g'mara suggests that gentiles can enter the world to come: [The mishna] is in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Yehoshua, as it is tau...
Ploni is the child of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father. The father is ill and Ploni would like to say Mi Sheberach for him in a minyan. How should Ploni form the name for a non-Jewish rela...
I was recently doing some baking, and it led to a household discussion: what makes bread bread, as opposed to mezunot? I wondered if it might be about ingredients. Bread, fundamentally, is made o...
Some seder plates (or layout instructions in haggadot) use two bitter herbs (I'm used to seeing horseradish and endive), one labelled maror and one labelled chazeret. Others have only a single spa...
Vayikra 24:10 and on tells of an episode with a blasphemer. The torah tells us that he was the son of an Israelite woman and an Egyptian man. From a Rashi comment there I found my way to Vayikra ...
This is a research-methods question with a concrete example. I'm interested in the answer to the concrete example, but what I really want to know is: how could I look this up myself? There are so...
After the Akeidah, Avraham returns home and then the torah tells us, in Bereishit 22:20: "Avraham was told, 'Milkah too has borne sons to your brother Nachor (etc)'". The torah does not always rec...
The torah records many places where God speaks to Moshe telling him to speak to others, generally to relay instructions. The common structure is: ... וידבר יי אל ... לאמר: ךבר But sometimes ...
In Vayikra chapter 20 the torah gives a long list of forbidden relations. Almost all of them are of the form "if a man (lies with, takes)..." or, in one case, "if a woman..." (third person). In V...
Efrayim and Manashe both have different trope from the other ten, by the way. With Manashe there are extra words that the trope has to account for, but it's interesting that Efrayim, without that ...
At the beginning of Sh'lach L'cha the torah lists the twelve scouts and their tribes. In general these names follow the pattern "from the tribe of (tribe), (somebody) ben (somebody)", with (genera...
I sometimes help other people in my synagogue learn to read torah. While I have a tikkun, I have some vision problems and find it much easier to print a portion from Trope Trainer, which offers a ...
Consider a cabin that has one large room with a loft extending over part of that room. A half-height wall at the front of the loft separates it from the rest of the cabin, so there is a single com...
I asked a question about a passage from Ezekiel, creating the "ezekiel-book-of" tag in the process. (I followed the pattern I saw with other book tags.) I saw that we also have a "prophets" tag, ...
I noticed that Ezekiel 1:16, in describing his vision of something like a heavenly chariot (merkavah), says the words gleaned like tarshish, translated "beryl" by Sefaria and some others: מַרְאֵ...
I know that t'fillin are placed on the weaker arm, which for most people is the left, so that the stronger hand is the one doing the binding. I have heard, but don't remember where, that someone w...
The placement of this text suggests "praise, not request" to me too. In fact, we ask for rain separately in the ninth blessing, which makes it seem even clearer that this mention is not a request ...
Shemot 12:15 tells us: "Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread". But our tradition (I don't know the source, sorry) is that we are required to eat matzah only at the seder(s). Otherwise, the c...
While sorting through boxes of books in the attic, I came across a Christian bible written in Hebrew. (Some family member was apparently given it by a missionary when living in Israel and didn't d...
We weren't able to solve the problem directly (something something Javascript is single-threaded something), but there is now a preference to disable auto-saving, which is a work-around. Go to you...
I'm going to separate out some of my thoughts into multiple answers for the sake of clarity in voting. Questions about people should be in scope if their Judaism is core to the question: "Who was...
At my synagogue we're currently writing a sefer torah in honor of our retiring rabbi. I know that the 613th mitzvah is to write a sefer torah, and have been taught that participating in the writin...
I previously asked this question on Mi Yodeya and while I didn't get a full answer, I received a hint in a comment and will expand it here. The Rambam in Hilchot Avadim 9:7 writes: A master may te...
