The end is the beginning: we will return to you

Today was the siyum (the end celebration) for tractate Bava Batra. It's been 176 days since I first dove headfirst into the world of property, contract, and inheritance laws. I want to conclude with a quote from the final Mishnah of the tractate:

Rabbi Yishmael said: One who wishes to become wise should occupty himself with the study of monetary law for there is no branch of Torah greater than it, for they are like a welling fountain.

The Jewish legal scholar, Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, explains that Rabbi Yishmael's statement is apt because "no other branch of Torah law provides the human intellect with as wide-ranging a field for reasoning and analysis. Hense, its study sharpens the mind."

Although I'd been study a page of Talmud everyday for a number of months before I jumped into the offical cycle, I began my official foray into the Daf Yomi world this past spring. Counting the 119 pages of monitary law in Bava Metzia, I've been studying this legal minutia for 295 days strait. Over this period, I've stretched myself in new ways. I've incorperated words like lein, guarentor, encumbered property, and partial admission oaths (modeh b'mikzat) into my vocabulary and through this blog have begun to explore what this journey has meant to me as a modern Jew trying to fit these laws into my secular worldview.

Tomorrow I leave monetary law and begin a 113-day study of criminal law. I'll enter into the world of death penalties (do I deserve strangling or stoning?) and the intricacies of court procedures. However, I won't leave the past 295 days far behind. I am and will continue to be shaped by these two tractates. Through them, I have developed a better sense of legal thinking, a truer appreciation for the Rabbis and for argumenation and a better sense of where God and my personal ethic fits into the text (more on this in later posts).

Today was an end. Tomorrow will be a beginning. I look forward to returning to you Bava Batra.