Hello everyone, and welcome to the introduction to Masechet Sukkah.

Masechet Sukkah deals with three main themes.

The first two chapters deal with the structure of the actual physical sukkah, the shakh, the walls.

Chapter three deals with arbat haminim, the four species, and chapters four and five deal with the service, the temple service of Sukkot as it was in the time of the temple.

However, when we look at the tractate in the Talmud, in the Babli, we can see that most of the tractate actually focuses on the structure of the Sukkah itself.

Now, this Mitzvah of the Sukkah is quite unusual.

And certainly when you learn text, which you can explain to us more because that's what you do all day, but, you know, learning within its context, maybe you can say something more about why you chose it and, and what the difference in approach is to you.

Yeah.

So a lot of times people use the following metaphor to describe the difference between academic learning and traditional learning.

Academic learning is more being an archeologist, so it's looking backwards in order to... or digging down in order to understand the text that we have today.

So for instance, to really understand the rabbis of the, of the Mishnah, for example, we need to understand the context in which they were acting and behaving.

So we'll look back to earlier sources from Second Temple literature or the scrolls that were discovered in the desert in Qumran, and we'll look at s- texts that are similar to the text of the Mishnah or the Tosefta and try to understand what the rabbis were responding to.

So it's a way of looking backwards, and this is true of all academic Jewish studies, that what we're really doing is we're trying to take apart the text that we have today and try and understand how it came to be.

So are you trying to balance both of those things within your career, or has this kind of mass access to Talmud become something that you're more and more leaning towards?

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to the Introduction to Masechet Chulin.

Masechet Chulin deals with various issues of the Kashrut of meat.

There are four main foundations of the Kashrut of meat.

The first is the types of animals that are permitted for consumption, the animals that are Tehorim.

The obligation to slaughter a pure animal, a kosher animal.

The third is the prohibition against eating a kosher animal that has become a Trefa, an animal that was mortally injured.