Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour, just 10 minutes a day throughout the entire Talmud. And today, we are continuing our exploration of tractate Brachos, the first tractate in the entire Talmud. And tractate Brachos is really fascinating. As I mentioned earlier, I look at this tractate as the introduction to the Oral Law itself. We don’t have an introduction to the Talmud, so in many ways what the Talmud is trying to accomplish is captured in this very first tractate.
And if you examine the word bracha, which is usually translated as blessing, you’ll see a very interesting anomaly. There are three Hebrew letters that appear in this word that is the root of the etymology of the word that we now translate as blessing, meaning baruch, brachot, to bless, blessings. The anomaly is that the letters that make this word, bet, resh, chaf, have a numerical value each that are factors of two.
Every letter in the Hebrew alef-bet has a corresponding numerical value. This is normally known as gematria, which is the numerical values. I’m not that into gematria. Sometimes you’ll find some really weird ones online. There’s this very strange gematria that… Non-Jews are not good at gematria. I love the non-Jewish world. I love all of you. If any non-Jews are listening, I love you. You’re not that great at the at the numerical value stuff. I saw one video where they tried to figure out why Monster, which is a an energy drink, is like sent from the devil. That’s definitely not what we’re talking about today.
The anomaly of the word baruch is that the numerical value of the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet is two, bet. Alef, bet, the second letter is bet, is two. Resh is all the way at the end. The numerical value is 200. And chaf is the numerical value of 20.
So, 2, 200, 20, they’re all factors of two, because at the heart of blessing, at the heart of baruch, is stepping into this world of multiplicity. Stepping into a world where there are competing factors, and knowing that even in this multiplicity, even when things are not that initial, original unity, we still are connected to that original source. Even in a world of multiplicity, even in a world of this diversity. “Where does this all come from?” What blessings does is saying, “With everything that you have, you are still connected to the original source.” And that is really what this tractate is about.
If you go through the tractate, you will see that everything that is spoken about in this tractate—whether it’s the blessings that we make on food, whether it is the times that we pray every day, whether it’s the blessings that we make after food, all of these are discussed in the tractate—the common idea is creating a world where godliness, where divinity is palpable in our everyday life.
And that really explains something fascinating at the very end of tractate Brachos. We go through the tractate and we start talking about Shema, unifying God in the morning and at night. We talk about prayer. We talk about blessings.
What is the last chapter of Brachos about? The last chapter, the ninth chapter, is all about dreams. You heard me correctly. This is the Freudian chapter of Talmud. An entire chapter that is just about finding meaning. What is the meaning? What is the purpose of our dreams? Now, there are so many fascinating passages of Talmud here, but I want to pause.
There is a reason why the entire climax of this entire tractate then focuses on dreams. There is a verse in Psalms that is actually said quite frequently. It appears in prayers. It’s something that we say very often to introduce Grace After Meals, and it’s the Song of Ascent that is in the 126th chapter of Psalms, and it says that right after the Babylonian exile, they were sitting on the banks, and it says they described exile, hayinu, we were as if, kecholmim, as if we were dreaming. We literally describe ourselves as dreamers.
In the middle of a dream, you know, it’s this upside-down world. Strange things happen. You don’t know, “What is the meaning of this? What is the purpose of this? Why am I back in fourth grade and I have a test this day, and, uh, look down, I’m not even wearing pants?” You have these dreams that seem so chaotic.
The last chapter of Brachos is all about dreams because what this tractate is about is this exilic experience. The experience of being alive in the world is literally in exile, it’s like you’re dreaming. Hayinu kecholmim, we were as if we were dreaming. That is how we describe that exile, and that is what tractate Brachos is trying to address to us: to realize that life can feel so strange, exile is so out of place, it can literally feel as if we are dreaming, but we have an interpretation to that dream.
We have a way of finding meaning within the dream. And the way that we do that, the primary vehicle to finding meaning in this dreamlike state called exile, is through that idea of the bracha, of making a blessing and saying that, “Even in this multiplicity, even in this chaos, we’re still connected to the source.”
And when we make a bracha, we do something very, very important. I’ll make one right now. This is like the catch-all blessing that we make on drinks, beverages—the non-specified blessing. It is the blessing that we say, “Everything is created through Your word,” meaning God’s word. This is the blessing. I’m going to make one right now on this delicious Coke Zero, even though normally the official drink of 1840 is Diet Dr Pepper.
Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha’olam shehakol nihyeh bidvaro. [Takes a drink.]
What does that blessing mean? Every blessing starts the same way: Baruch atah, and then we say the name of God. “Blessed are You.” Atah, “You.”
And then we describe God: Eloheinu Melech ha’olam, “the sovereign God of the world.” And then we say what we’re blessing for. Then we have the specific part. We might say, shehakol nihyeh bidvaro, “Everything is created through Your word.”
If we’re eating fruit, we might say borei peri ha’eitz, “the Creator of fruit.” If we’re eating a vegetable, it might be borei peri ha’adamah—ha’adamah, “the fruits of the ground.” All this is discussed in tractate Brachos.
But there is a profound idea: In the world of exile, it feels, you look around, we don’t really see God’s open presence in the world. We don’t have miracles. We don’t have prophecy. How do we bring that sense of immanence, of proximity to divinity into our lives? That is the language of the bracha. The bracha begins by referring to God literally as You, like as if He’s right in front of us.
Baruch atah, “Blessed are You.” Somebody who’s right there. And then we switch, and we say, “the King, the Sovereign of the world.” All of the commentaries of the Talmud point out that this specifically, this experience, is meant to capture what we are trying to achieve. We’re trying to create a world where immanence, God can literally be felt. You standing right in front of me. This is the world of prayer, where we literally try to act as if we are standing right before the Creator of the world.
When we make a blessing, each blessing is like a little prayer throughout the day. We make prayers on our sustenance, we make prayer when something good happens, we have prayers when something bad happens, but these are little prayers. I like thinking of a blessing as a little prayer that can animate even a drink from a Coke Zero to be the interpretation of the dream of life itself, of exile itself.
But we start in second person, You, and then we go to third person, as if God is not in the room. That is how we connect. Again, this is what bracha is doing: connecting the immanence to then step back into the world of transcendence, the world of exile, where we don’t really see that immanent God right before us.
And this is what every single blessing is doing, and this is the meaning behind Tractate Brachos. I want to end with one story that appears in tractate Brachos because I think it encapsulates everything that we are talking about and discussing, and it is such a beautiful story that I know you’re going to love it. When I read this story, it’s like, is this really in the Talmud? It sounds like a more contemporary story. It’s so powerful. This appears on page 58a, the first side of the page, in tractate Brachos. This is in the last chapter.
It says that there was a rabbi named Rav Sheshet, and Rav Sheshet was blind. He could not see.
And he saw a big commotion, and he asks, “What’s the commotion for?” He says, “Everybody is going to greet the king. We’re all going to greet the king.” And somebody who’s like a little mean, mean-spirited, looked at Rav Sheshet, said, “Look, you going to visit the king is like bringing a broken vessel to fill up with water. You’re not going to be able to see anything. There’s no point of you going to this parade.”
And Rav Sheshet says, “Even though I’m blind, I’m going to know when the parade of the king comes before you do.” Person says, “Okay, let’s see what happens.” All of a sudden, the trumpeters come, the band is playing, and the guy says, you know, knocks to Rav Sheshet, and says, “You’re missing it, you’re missing the main event.”
Rav Sheshet says, “No, no, no, the king is not coming. This is not, that’s not the king.” Okay, they wait a little bit longer. The noise gets even louder, and now the band has even more impressive instruments, and they’re dancing, and he says, “Okay, you’re missing it, the king is here.”
And Rav Sheshet says, “No, no, no, this is not the king either.” And then, all of a sudden, the entire place gets very, very quiet. And this time, Rav Sheshet, who was blind, knocks on him and says, “Now the king is coming, when it’s totally silent.” And the person was astonished: “How did you know?” He said, “Kings on earth are like the King in Heaven, and the way that God reveals Himself is not through noise, it’s not through pomp, it’s not through circumstance,” but quoting a verse in In the Prophets, he says, “God reveals Himself bekol demamah dakah, with a still, silent voice.”
This is how we find God. And this is really what tractate Brachos is all about. Sometimes we think about bringing divinity and spirituality into the world. We need trumpets, we need bands, we need big events, we need live concerts. These can all be wonderful moments and experiences.
But you want to know how to really bring God into your everyday life, where the real parade, where the real presence of God comes? It’s in the silence. It’s in the quiet, bekol demamah dakah, “with that very impenetrable, very quiet, still voice.” And this is the still voice of every time that we make a bracha, every time we say a blessing on food. This is the quiet voice that we pray every day the Amidah, the Shemoneh Esrei, which we will get to, of course.
This is the still, small voice of finding divinity in the crevices, in the details of everyday life. So that is the underlying meaning of tractate Brachos. It is the interpretation to the dream of exile itself.
Hope you enjoyed, and stay tuned for more. Let’s keep making Torah sweet.