Off the Daf and Into Israel

Eruvin 101 How many keys-locks-walls?? By Eli Duker, guest blogger and guide Model of Antonia Fortress, where the second wall began The  Mishna brings a dispute between Rabbi Meir on one hand, and the Sages and Rabbi Yose on the other, regarding the permissibility of unlocking a door when one is in a different reshut than the door. Rabbi Meir forbids it, and the Sages permit it based on their claim that in people were lenient on the matter in the שוק של פטמים in Second Temple-era Jerusalem. Rabbi Yose claims, however, that the Shuk in question was the Wool market.  At first glance it seems strange that he would take issue over a seemingly irrelevant detail. The Gemara questions the relevancy of the Jerusalem key precendent.  It cites Rabbi Yochanan, that as Jerusalem was a walled city whose gates closed at night, its status cannot be that of a “Public Domain” – רשות הרבים.  Hence there is reason to be lenient in Jerusalem; how can the Shuk practice be considered to be r

Eruvin 70+ Another short moral parable on the building of walls and sharing with neighbors: Good fences make good neighbors, so says Robert Frost. That's the poem's famous last line, but what the reader may have forgotten is that first the poet chose to point 'there where it is we do not need the wall'. Perhaps he questions the need to build barriers, suggesting instead a wisdom of manageable togetherness. Fitting for our masechet, for the moral question of ownership and neighborly relations. At first glance, Hillel's take on that is: What's yours is yours and what's mine is yours - a less applicable approach when it comes to the actual halacha of sharing property on Shabbat. Nice in theory, but tough to apply to real life. It seems from the mishna that there is a need at times to establish very clear lines, or at least we try to define them, between properties. Yet the gemara throughout the recent chapters has gone out of its way to figure out how t