Moving On

Well, we got through three days of Purim. Though some hangovers linger, today is a new day - one on which scribes were saved. Next challenge - erev Pesach. Ta Shema and Gertner.

At the Dinur Center book sale last week I acquired the long-awaited memorial volume for Tirtzah Lifshitz, titled Mehkarim beTalmud uveMidrash. Almost 600 pages of articles by leading Talmudists. Things that caught my eye - Alon Goshen-Gottstein on the death of R Eliezer b Hyrcanos, Menahem Kahana on Klal uFrat in Tannaitic literature, Chaim Milikowsky on philology and text-criticism (finally, a good discussion of how to deal with manuscript variants). And I'm only halfway through. Mrs Lifshitz was working on her doctorate on Midrash Shmuel, the text of which will hopefully be published soon on the basis of her work. She died in 1998, before I started university. But her photo told me that I had known her by sight, from the neighbourhood we both lived in. May her memory be a blessing.

And now, for fear of running out of time, I will go.