The first eight chapters of Berachot are composed primarily of halakhah, or Jewish law—close legal and textual reasoning about the correct timing, manner, and language of the major Jewish prayers. Aggadah, the folklore and anecdotes and proverbs that constitute the more imaginative and accessible part of the Talmud, comes in the interstices of the halakhic argument. But chapter nine of Berachot is just about all aggadah—a cornucopia of rabbinic views on subjects ranging from meteorology to embryology to bathroom etiquette to dream interpretation. “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it,” Pirkei Avot famously says of the Torah, and this section of the Berachot seems like the kind of thing Ben Bag-Bag had in mind.The content is too varied to excerpt usefully (read it all), but here's one paragraph of interest:
All of this raised the question for me of how contemporary Orthodox readers make sense of parts of the Talmud, like this one, that are based on clearly erroneous scientific ideas. When Aristotle makes empirical mistakes—as, for instance, when he says that women have fewer teeth than men—it’s easy to say that he was simply wrong, that he lacked modern ideas of scientific observation and method. With the Talmud, which grounds religious obligations on its empirical assertions, things must be more complicated. I’m sure much thought has been given to this problem and—as always—I would be grateful to hear from knowledgeable readers in the comments.It happens that the Jewish Press published an article by Harry Maryles yesterday on this very issue: Rav Elyashiv, Torah and Science: It is very troubling that there are those who say insist that it is forbidden to believe that Chazal were mistaken in matters of science. There are just too many instances of nature quoted in the Gemarah that contradict what we know today.
Kirsh's earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here, here here, here, and here.
