I created The Pshat Heard 'Round the World some eighteen years ago, and I posted weekly on the parashah for about two years. Other items were added here and there subsequently, but for a long time it's been inactive. IYH, I will be starting a new series of pieces on tefillah, with special attention to the first beracha of the Amidah. My claim and approach will be that the first beracha of the Amidah teaches us how to pray and how to pray it! We'll start with a few preparatory and introductory pieces before jumping in to the beracha itself, phrase by phrase. I am considering enabling comments and dealing with "hackish" comments as they inevitably come, so keep tuned.
The term “Act of Speech” is, from the point of view of Halachah, an oxymoron. Speech is neither fully an act nor merely a thought, but something in between, something which, in many ways, mediates between the two. So how to do we parcel out words and sentences, utterances and soliloquies? When is a break in the continuum of speech merely a pause and when does it indicated that an utterance is complete? The halachic notion of “Toch K’dei Dibbur” – within enough time to say something – is used in many contexts to determine whether a pause separates two utterances or should be ignored. To illustrate: If I say “This animal is a burnt-offering…a peace-offering”. If the ellipsis is a pause less than the time it takes to say, “How are you doing?” (there are fine points we’ll ignore for now), then it may well be that my utterance is meaningful and I’ve made my animal a mixture of the two kinds of offerings (with all the problematics that causes). But if the ellipsis is longer than that, w...