ah....Moses *did* know...

So Moses did know when midnight was, he was just afraid that the Egyptians would miscalculate and then call him a liar if the plagues came at a different time than they calculated. Moses took care, perhaps, the Talmud suggests, based on a teaching in Tractate Derech Eretz..."For the master said: Teach your tongue to say, 'I do not know' lest you be caught in a falsehood." (translation courtesy of the Schottenstein text)

You wouldn't want to give the wrong information and then have people go around thinking you were misinforming them! It would seriously hurt your reputation, and Moses was a guy with a reputation. For us, I think this lesson is very good. It's better to offer to try our best than to make promises we can't possibly keep....

----

There are rewards for prayer, well....rewards in the World To Come....and today's Daf spends some time talking about these. It brings into play the Ashrei, psalm 145, which is a psalm that is an alphabetical acrostic. It is missing a sentence for the letter nun, though. We say this psalm regularly for 2 reasons: 1) its alphabetical nature and 2) because it contains a beautiful line:

פּוֹתֵחַ אֶת־יָדֶךָ וּמַשְׂבִּיעַ לְכָל־חַי רָצֽוֹן

You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.

This verse, some say, speaks to the infinte capacity of God's bounty...and thus it is the rationale for saying Ashrei three times a day (twice in Shacharit and once at Mincha). Why, though, couldn't we just say this line, or perhaps another psalm with a similar line (Psalm 136, the Gemara's example) -- because of both features (the alphabet and the nice line).

Then the Gemara goes on to explain why there is no verse starting with nun in the psalm. It is a very convoluted argument, referring to a specific verse that contains the letter nun as its beginning letter that refers to the downfall of Israel without a subsequent reminder that Israel will rise again. But frankly, there are lots of good verses that start with nun, is it fair to let the whole deal be wrecked by one "bad apple" of a verse???

I think that the nun is left out to demonstrate the imperfection of even the Divinely inspired words of King David (psalms)...that if even David could make an error, leave out a letter, and he had the clear inspiration of God as he composed these words, then how much the more so are we imperfect, and must continue to work towards the true fulfillment of our creation in God's image!? And that the world itself is imperfect, it is missing its nun, so to speak, and it is our job, and therefore our reminder as we say Ashrei each day, that we have a responsibility to work towards a repair of this nun-less world of ours....

And that's the daf for today! Shabbat Shalom!