Interesting Posts and Articles #38

1. Was Shakespeare a Jewish woman?
2. My Machberes on the Oz veHadar Talmud. Interesting stuff. But I don't think they will get all the errors. An excerpt:
   Twenty years ago, Rabbi Yehoshua Leifer, Skverer Dayan, undertook a project to reprint Shas with all errors corrected and fully source-cross-referenced. The effort would include the entire works of published commentaries....
   Before the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in 1440, seforim were copied by hand. Needless to say, errors were made in the copying, as well as in printing by machine. Those errors led to additional errors and made understanding the seforim quite difficult, if at all. Errors were also responsible for many errors in halachic decisions that are only understood when the error is uncovered....
   He realized the importance of the work that should have been undertaken years, if not centuries, earlier....
   Each elucidation, each error detected, each contraction wrongly made, each contraction wrongly opened, each missing word added, each extraneous word identified – allowed additional understanding and clarity of the basic text.
   
3. A speech in Obama's church:
   
   


4. Some weird theology over at DreamingOfMoshiach. Perhaps I'll elaborate in a later post.
5. Was this Yeshiva's money well spent?
   

   Was it necessary for him to learn it by heart? Or could his time have been better put to use by learning it extremely well and moving on to another tractate and learning that very well too? Is there a point at which the extra effort of learning it by heart causes diminishing returns in the extra understanding of it that he gets from an extra review?

   I would say yes, because besides the knowledge this student now has of this material, he was enthusiastic about the project and feels a sense of accomplishment. This is an important thing to develop