Chullin is up! And some of Rabbi Yishmael’s students...

I am pleased to announce that we know have Mi vaMi up on masechet Chullin. We rely on Sefaria’s text as a base for our processing, and they follow the Daf Yomi cycle. As Chullin fast approaches, they put the tractate up, and so we updated our data as well.

Today’s daf (Menachot 90b) contains a brayta with a dispute between Rabbi Yoshiah and Rabbi Yonatan. These fifth-generation Tannaim are students of Rabbi Yishmael. We more often see other fifth-generation Tannaim, Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehuda, Rabbi Shimon, and Rabbi Eleazar, who were students of Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Akiva work within different frameworks of halachic exegesis.

Two students of Rabbi Yishmael

Indeed, on the next daf, we will see the gemara analyze this brayta in terms of klal ufrat, which is within Rabbi Yishmael’s framework, rather than ribbuy miut, which is that of Rabbi Akiva.

Menachot 79: Once again, ruling like one’s father

A few thoughts on today’s daf (Menachot 79a).

First, we have two accounts of the dispute between Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah, both 3rd generation Tannaim. One account of the dispute was from Rabbi Meir, and the other was from Rabbi Yehuda. These were both fifth generation Tannaim, looking back two generations at a (fuzzily?) known dispute:



It is quite strange to me that Rabbi Yehuda records an elaborate back-and-forth between Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Eliezer about their respective reasonings. This would be no fuzzily known dispute, but a rather clear, definite tradition. It seems far more likely that Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda were fuzzy about, and therefore argued, about what that 3rd generation dispute was about, either baal mum or piggul chutz limekomo. If so, it would be Rabbi Yehuda (or else the setam of the berayta) filling in the respective arguments, based on assumed reasoning. If so, Rabbi Eliezer’s “silence” at the end should not necessarily be taken as a retraction, as the gemara takes it.

Next, according to the first lashon of the gemara, it seems extremely strange to have Rava (or perhaps Rabba, depending on girsa), retract, since Rabbi Eliezer retracted. What in the world?! The brayta predated Rabba and Rava, and if they truly based themselves on the aforementioned authorities, Rava should never have taken the position in the first place. Surely he knew about the retraction!

Next, it is interesting how the girsa is changed, flipping Rabba and Rava. Presumably this is so that the earlier authority, Rabba, should be listed first. See the Rosh’s position about changing Rava to Rabba if he is listed prior to Abaye.

Finally, this seems to be a trend I am noticing more in Menachot than elsewhere in Shas. Once again, the gemara assumes that Rabbi Eleazar beRabbi Shimon would hold like his father.

ורבי אלעזר ברבי שמעון סבר לה כוותיה דאבוה דאמר כל העומד לזרוק כזרוק דמי

And then the gemara asks whether Rabbi Shimon really holds position X, under the assumption that the son’s taking this position commits the father. I will keep an eye for it in other masechtot, to see if it is advanced elsewhere.

Menachot 72: Ruling like one’s teacher

Today’s daf (Menachot 72) provides a great argument in favor of the Mi vaMi approach, that knowing someone’s teachers and grand-teachers will help us understand their position.

It starts with a statement by Rabbi Yochanan, that Rabbi Eleazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, bases himself on the position of his father’s teacher:

אמר רבה בר בר חנה אמר רבי יוחנן רבי אלעזר ברבי שמעון בשיטת רבי עקיבא רבו של אביו אמרה

”With regard to the opinion of Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon , that barley for the omer offering that is reaped by day is unfit, Rabba bar bar Ḥana says that Rabbi Yoḥanan says : Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon , said his statement in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Akiva , the teacher of his father. “

It goes on to explain exactly what position of Rabbi Akiva it is. But there is a focus on the familial (father-son) and scholastic (student-teacher) relationship.

Of course, Rabbi Yochanan’s statement proceeds with an additional prong, that Rabbi Eleazar beRabbi Shimon is also based on an opinion of Rabbi Yishmael (who would be Rabbi Akiva’s disputant.)

The setama degemara carries on this assumption, that you can figure out a rabbi’s position based on the position of his father or teacher. So, for instance, it points out that Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, a 6th generation contemporary who takes a different position than Rabbi Eleazar here, also was a student of the same Rabbi Shimon (who in turn was the student of Rabbi Akiva)!

 ורבי לאו תלמידיה דרבי שמעון הוא ?

And tries resolving it by saying that there is a different position of Rabbi Shimon that Rabbi is basing himself upon. But then, the gemara asks:

ורבי אלעזר ברבי שמעון לא שמיע ליה

So, throughout this particular sugya, this assumption holds, that halachic position should more or less follow the scholastic relationship. Which, in turn, recommends the Mi VaMi approach.

Is this really the case, though? There are many, many instances in which a student does not rule like his teacher. Artscroll refers us to Chidushei HaRashba, which we can read here, who enumerates a number of conditions for this assumption to hold.

Introducing Biographies

A first version of the new biographies feature is now up. Each rabbi’s name in the Talmudic text, besides being highlighted in color (by generation), is now also a hyperlink to a rabbinic biography.

In this first stage, the bio consists of a graph showing teachers and students. For instance, here is the graph for Shmuel:

Teacher / Student graph, with Shmuel in the center

Additionally, the bio includes a text version of the same, with hyperlinked students and teachers.



The plan is to add additional relationships and biographical data in a later stage.

Why doesn’t Rabbi speak up?

In yesterday’s Mishna (Menachot 13b) we see a dispute between Rabbi Yose ben Chalafta and the (contemporary) Sages.

שחט שני כבשים לאכול אחת מן החלות למחר הקטיר שני בזיכין לאכול אחד מן הסדרים למחר 

רבי יוסי אומר אותו החלה ואותו הסדר שחישב עליו פיגול וחייבין עליו כרת והשני פסול ואין בו כרת

וחכמים אומרים זה וזה פיגול וחייבין עליו כרת: 

And then, in today’s daf (Menachot 14a) there is a brayta which records Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi’s opinion:

הא מני רבי היא

דתניא השוחט את הכבש לאכול חצי זית מחלה זו וכן חבירו לאכול חצי זית מחלה זו

רבי אומר אומר אני שזה כשר 

If Rabbi has an opinion, how come he does not speak up in the Mishna he redacted? (Certainly if he differs with both. But also, if he will hold like either the Sages or like Rabbi Meir, shouldn’t he express this.)

One answer might be that he is trying to have a light touch on the Mishna, either as an earlier extant text before him, or because he wants to primarily present the dispute among the Tannaim of the previous generation, rather than the Mishna being an expression of his own views.

Rabbi as a 6th generation student of Rabbi Yose

We see from the graph that Rabbi Yose was a 5th generation Tanna, while Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi was of the subsequent generation. The Sages would be of the same generation, meaning fifth generation Tannaim.

Further, maybe this is why Rabbi often uses the expression omer ani, as he does here in the brayta. This would not just be humility. He wants to distinguish between the corpus of recorded previous-generation disputes and his own view of the matter.

(As an aside, it seems possible that Rav Huna, by saying that the brayta brought by Rav Nachman in objection was the opinion of Rabbi, is to say that Rabbi has his own opinion, which is neither that of Rabbi Yose nor of the Sages. But the setama degemara assumes that it must be in accordance with Rabbi Yose or the Sages, and asks this, despite the words omer ani.)

A few steps forward...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the refactoring of the mivami process. (This was so that building the graph could happen in about twenty minutes instead of several hours, and so that the building would happen in stages, with the ability to inspect the output at each stage.) That resulted in a few of the nicer features (such as the local and global interaction graphs) temporarily disappearing.

We have further developed the code since then. Now, not only are the two interaction graphs back online, there are two new exciting developments.

Here is a global relationship graph from today’s daf (Menachot 9a) to illustrate:

Global relationship graph, Menachot 9a

#1: We carry over the generational information from the student/teacher graph. Thus, we see Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya (rather than plain Rabbi Yehoshua, which is what appears in the text), together with the generation tag of T3 (third generation Tanna). Because we have these generation tags, nodes are no longer randomly colored, but are colored by generation, as per the legend.

#2: Where there is more that one relationship between rabbi1 and rabbi2, the labels for the edges no longer overlap, as they did in the past. Instead, they appear as a comma-separated list.

More to hopefully come soon!

Two steps forward, five steps back

For the next few weeks, two of the three graphs are effectively down. The teacher-student graph is still up and running. But the local interaction and global interaction graphs are only sparsely populated. Please bear with us.

This was the result of refactoring the text analytics. We segmented the code into four stages, namely (a) statement processing, (b) person identification, (c) html generation and (d) relationship processing. We are also tagging some (English) verbs indicating speech, not just names. And rather than building every graph up front, we build the graph on demand, on page load.

The benefit of this refactoring is that processing the entire Talmudic text takes about 10 minutes rather than 5 hours, and the intermediate results of each stage are stored for inspection and improvement. However, the stage [a] output doesn't play as nicely as it used to with the regular expressions used in stage [d]. Once these are re-aligned, we should restore these graphs and be able to add more complex relationships or hard-to-detect relationships to the graphs.

An example of a relationship that is harder to detect is on today's daf (Zevachim 96b):

אמר ליה בעי מיני מילתא דאיפשיט לך כי מתניתא

Neither the speaker or listener is present in the Aramaic. The English translation has:

“Rami bar Ḥama said to him : Ask me about a matter, which I will resolve for you in accordance with a mishna.”

which has the speaker but not the listener. We can obtain the listener, Rav Yitzḥak bar Yehuda, from context. This functionality should be easier to isolate and focus on when it is in a stand-alone component that runs in 2 minutes, based on output of the previous stages.