Off the Daf and Into Israel

How to Get Rid of Pesky Demons   Gittin 68 The lengthy discussions about demons and Ashmedai in Gittin are not out of the realm of Gemara discourse but are certainly strange and completely unrelated to the topic of divorce.  Or are they? In a fascinating article   Avigail Manekin Bamberger shows that Aramaic incantation bowls discovered in Babylonia sometimes used the language of gittin to rid the house of demons. The bowls had a formula that bore similarities to divorce papers. They cite that this is a divorce between the owner of the house and Lilith (or another demon) and even include the standard וכל שום דאית ליה ; and any (other) name the owner has. Bamberger suggests that this shows how widespread and accepted the gittin formula was among Babylonian Jews, as well as how perhaps scribes could have written both writs of divorce and incantation bowls (gotta make a living). Divorce those demons and have a happy home! http://thegemara.com/naming-demons-the-aramaic-in

We'll Always Have Yavneh Gittin 56 Give me Yavneh and her sages תן לי יבנה וחכמיה .  Among the many stories presented in the Gemara, this vignette in Gittin, with Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s daring escape from Jerusalem and his prescient request of Vespasian is one of the most famous. We often tell it to help explicate how Judaism was able to survive one of its greatest catastrophes, the destruction of the Second Temple. But what is Yavneh? What did Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai really accomplish? And how? Yavneh was, and still is, a relatively small town, not near the major cities of the time: Jerusalem, Zippori, Caesaria.  It was part of the tribal area of Judah and was centrally located  – not far from the sea, near the coastal road, close to the metropolis of Lod. It had a Jewish and a Hellenized population in Second Temple times. And it was the first stop outside Jerusalem for the nomadic Sanhedrin: www.lib.cet.ac.il But most significantly, according t