Sukka 24 a, b

Our Sages are concerned that we might eat or drink before terumah and/or tithes have been separated.  What do they suggest?  They use a wineskin as an example.  What if it bursts? How might we figure out  how to tithe the remains?  Could we drink when it had not been tithed?

And when we use an animal as the wall of a sukka, should we be worried that the animal might die?  It is noted that in Yoma we learned that the High Priest takes on a second wife lest his wife dies while he is praying; he needs a family to pray for.  Should we have two different standards of atonement?

The rabbis continue to discuss the notion of an animal as a partition; a wall.  They debate over whether or not a person or another animate object can be a partition; whether or not something that moves can act as a partition.  How much might we have to tie something down.  Is the sukka automatically unfit if the walls can move in the wind?

The rabbis now consider the earlier Mishna limitation: an animal cannot serve as a surface upon which one can write a get.  Some of our Sages argue that this is in direct contradiction with other instruction, where a get can be written upon the horn of an animal or the arm of a slave, as long as the arm is not cut off to share the message.  They diverge into a conversation about a man who puts a condition into his get.  As long as the condition is short-term and does not bind the wife to her husband, it is fine.

A new Mishna teaches that in the case of a sukka using tree branches as walls, the sukka is fit.  These walls must be fit, however.  The Gemara discusses different types of trees and how much these walls are allows to move before the sukka will be ruled invalid.

Sukka is the first masechet I have learned that refers often to other masechtot that I have learned.  So we hear about Eirivin and Yoma within one daf.  Fun!

What's not fun is reading about the use of animals as walls, as writing surfaces.  Again, noone worries about the suffering of the animal, just the death of the animal and what that might incur based on halachot of ritual impurity.

I have been learning Ketubot in chevrutah with Rabbi Audrey Pollack over the past three years - the opposite of learning daf yomi!  Reading about the laws of divorce in the context of constructing Sukkot  is very bizarre.  Those laws leave women terribly vulnerable to their husbands and ex-husbands.  For example, a note in Steinsaltz teaches us that thought the condition in a get is not meant to last more than 30 days, as that binds a woman to her husband, many rabbis believe that the condition can in fact last a lifetime.  How are two people divorced when there is no legal divorce??

A final thought today referring to a sukka built in the trees whose branches reach down.  Perhaps this was intended to mean that the sukka was built between two trees where the branches hung down as walls.  The rabbis seem to think that we are thinking of a sukka built under a tree.  But how would one have a fit roof under a canopy of branches?

I am learning that the process of constructing a sukka is infinitely more challenging that n I had ever known.