Reviews for Mitzvos We Can Do

The average rating for Mitzvos We Can Do based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-12-09 00:00:00 Christine Lewis 3.0 out of 5 stars Over the top Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2019 This is the second of these types of books that I have read. The first was a book about Avraham Ben Avraham. There seems to be quite a bit of overlap between these books. 1. A larger-than-life/ Talmudic genius/ living saint central character that can charm the birds from the trees and whose mouth is a prayer book. 2. The Evil Maskilim are part of the cast of bad guys. 3. A lot of examples of characters that fit the narrative--but may have been completely apocryphal. What biographer could know so much granular detail that it made it to this book? It's as if someone had an omniscient view and could tell you everything that the protagonist did come all the way down to how many squares of toilet paper he used over the course of his life. And there is nary a footnote in this whole book. 4. Time seems to start (and stop) in Vilnius, Lithuania. You'd almost not realize that there was another three thousand years of Jewish history before that event. 5. There is the long-suffering wife, who taxes herself so that her husband can be a Torah scholar. The upshot is that the Chofetz Chaim as a boy was a child of a second marriage of a poor family. And as a young man, he tried several other unsuccessful Ventures. Running a store. Being the rabbi of a town. Building a yeshivah. He finally settled on writing books for a living, and used that plus talks as an income stream. Along the way, he did a yeoman's work in the codification of the laws of lashon Hara. What I did learn that I didn't know was about the Mishnah Berurah: i. It was the Chofetz Chaim's brainchild. ii. It is commentary on only one section of the Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim). iii. It's 6 volumes long and took 23 years to publish. There are no footnotes, and no glossary. Each Hebrew word is defined as it appears in the text. But, if you wanted to look up a word because you forgot it ("haskamah," for example) you would not turn directly to a glossary to do so. Verdict: Recommend at the price of $1.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-17 00:00:00 Jordon Daniel Schottenstein Edition of the Talmud: English Full Size, Berachos, Vol. 2 (folios 30b-64a) (2000)