Pri Megadim

Below is a printable version of the recently concluded series on Petihah Kollelet Link to PDF file

by R. Gidon Rothstein The End of This Time Through Peri Megadim’s Petihah Kollelet The wells of Peri Megadim’s mind are not easily dried, and as we take our last stab at some of his additional comments in the fifth part, I am acutely aware of how much more we could have done with this material, the reason I always leave open the ...

by R. Gidon Rothstein Hazakah in Its Various Sorts In the fourth part of the Introduction, Peri Megadim had brought up the idea of a hazakah me-ruba, where halachah allows us to assume a certain state of affairs because that’s how it usually is, in the majority of cases. His example was how a court will assume that a woman who raises a child as ...

by R. Gidon Rothstein Peri Megadim subtitles the fifth part of his introduction hashmatot, omissions or addenda, meaning this is a series of notes on the previous parts. He does not order them as they appeared in the original Petihah, just tells us where he is adding [a more dedicated summarizer than myself would go through the whole fifth part, pull out the ...

by R. Gidon Rothstein As he nears the end of this introduction, Peri Megadim seems to have wanted to come back to topics he hadn’t yet finished (and the whole fifth part is addenda to previous points). I have largely avoided pointing out when he refers to other works of his, particularly Ginnat Veradim and Shoshanat Ha-Amakim, which from his references seem to have much ...

by R. Gidon Rothstein It’s Easier to Leave Religion Than You Might Think This fourth part of the Petihah is much shorter (we’re in the homestretch), and starts with a discussion of people who have left the religion to various extents [sadly, a topic still very much alive in our times, one in which I take particular interest, because we often excuse ...

by R. Gidon Rothstein Back to Hearing and Messengers It has taken this painstaking review of this Petihah Kollelet to suggest this third part is about using our bodily senses in the service of Gd. The idea fits with his returning to a topic we have seen more than once, shome’a ke-oneh, the extent to which listening to a recitation can count as ...

by R. Gidon Rothstein The Rest of the Punishments as a Physical Element in a Jewish Life We’re in the middle of Peri Megadim’s list of bodily punishments sinners might suffer in Judaism, part of his third-part review of how the body plays into Jews’ service of Gd. Sacrifices [By placing sacrifices on his list, Peri Megadim seems to be assuming it is ...

by R. Gidon Rothstein Finishing with the Senses, On to the Punishments We’ve been spending some time on thought and how it impacts halachah. In this week’s segment, Peri Megadim will finish that quickly, go back to other senses (he briefly again discusses sight and hearing), then move to the punishments the Torah prescribes for sins. It is an example of an element ...

by R. Gidon Rothstein When the Thought Really Counts The time before last, Peri Megadim raised some questions about hirhur ke-dibbur, the possibility a thought could count as much as speech for some halachic purposes. In paragraph nine of this third part, he returns to the issue, because while it played some questionable role for prayer or blessings, and clearly ...