Portland Open Beit Midrash — Blog

In the Image of God: Reclaiming Bereishit 1’s Clobber Verse

2026-10-09T00:00:00Z

The Torah starts out with the creation story (actually, two creation stories, but that’s for another time) in Parashat Bereishit. Towards the end of the first chapter of Genesis, we are told that on the sixth day, God created humanity, male and female, and made them betzelem elohim, in the Divine Image. It is among the best-loved lines in the entire Torah, the root of every sermon about human dignity. It is also, as I have learned from painful personal experience, a verse that can be turned into a weapon.

It is common to speak of “clobber passages” in anti-queer, homophobic, and transphobic discussions of Scripture. These verses are called that because they’re often used simply to shut down debate, to say “Well, the Bible says X, so your point of view is wrong, debate over”—in essence, to clobber, rather than to engage. The two best-known and frequently cited clobber passages in the Hebrew Bible are, of course, Lev. 18:22 (and 20:13): “thou shalt not lie with a man as one lies with a woman”, and Genesis chapter 19, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Another clobber passage one sees deployed against queer people is Genesis 2: the slogan “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” derives from this part of the second creation story. Many people have written about these passages from the perspective of how to engage with them fruitfully and reclaim them; I have no doubt that when Sodom, Leviticus, etc. come up in the cycle of Torah readings we’ll talk about them. (For the moment, I recommend Amy-Jill Levine’s article on this topic: “G-d,” she notes, “also created Steve.”)

But there’s a clobber verse in the first creation story too. The verse is Gen. 1:27:

וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃

And God created ha-adam in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (my translation)

Notoriously difficult to translate, of course, is the word ha-adam. It clearly doesn’t mean “a person named Adam”; that’s an anachronistic misreading of the text (see Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler’s excellent section on this topic in their book The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently). It probably means “the first human being” or “humankind” writ large—or both. The verse’s grammar is odd, too: it goes from singular oto to plural otam: “him” to “them”—and “male and female” are in the verse before any binary split. The midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 8:1) famously reads Adam as an androginos, and much has been written about the rabbis’ attempts to square the halachic binary categories of “male and female” with the wide range of human sexual and gender experience. (A good start for exploring some of this is TransTexts from Rabbis Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman.)

None of this proves that Genesis 1 is “about” trans people, and I’m not claiming that the rabbis had us in mind. But it does mean that the verse is stranger and more open than the way it gets used. A text whose grammar slides between persons and pronouns, that names “male and female” as the Divine Image before it describes any division of humanity, and that the ancients could imagine as a single being containing both, is a poor foundation for a rigidly closed binary.

And yet I have had this verse thrown at me as a clobber passage. One doesn’t have to look very far to find people proclaiming that trans people are tampering with the way God made us. God made you perfect, goes the thinking, in the Divine Image, so your body is exactly the way it’s supposed to be, so altering that body is desecrating that image.

But the creation of humanity is not the climax of the creation story in the first section of Bereishit: the climax of creation is Shabbat. Shabbat is a day of rest, and it is through that rest that God and creation find their fulfillment and ultimate realization. Every Friday night, we say the Kiddush prayer to sanctify the Shabbat day, in which we refer to multiple aspects of Shabbat: techila le-mikra’ei kodesh, “the first of the sacred festivals”, zeicher litzi’at mitzrayim, a reminder of the Exodus from Egypt, and of course, zikaron lema’asei bereishit, a remembrance of the works of creation.

There’s something very instructive about the idea of Shabbat—rest—as the climax of creation. Rashi, citing the midrash in Bereishit Rabbah, notes a seeming paradox here: the Torah says that God finished working on the seventh day, which implies that God created something on the seventh day:

מֶה הָיָה הָעוֹלָם חָסֵר? מְנוּחָה, בָּאת שַׁבָּת בָּאת מְנוּחָה, כָּלְתָה וְנִגְמְרָה הַמְּלָאכָה:

What was the world lacking [on the seventh day]? Rest! Shabbat came, and rest came; thus was the work completed and finished. (Rashi to Gen. 2:2, my translation)

Genesis 1 tells us that human beings are created in the Divine Image, but it doesn’t tell us what that image actually is. God doesn’t get a physical description here. The only things we learn about God here are that God creates, separates, names, and rests. So here is my answer to the weaponization of “created in the Divine Image”. If creation were finished and final on day six, the argument might hold: God made you, so don’t touch it. But that isn’t the Torah’s full picture. The world on day six was still lacking something. It lacked menucha, rest, and Shabbat completed it. Creation is not over when the last thing is made.

The rabbis go further. The creation account ends with the statement that God rested on the seventh day, “having ceased on it from all the work of creation that God had done” (Gen. 2:3, revised JPS). The final word is la’asot; “to do”, “to make”. The world is in a constant state of being created and re-created. The midrash takes this odd phrasing to mean that creation was left incomplete on purpose; God handed it to us to complete:

כָּל מַה שֶּׁנִּבְרָא בְּשֵׁשֶׁת יְמֵי בְרֵאשִׁית צְרִיכִין עֲשִׂיָה, כְּגוֹן הַחַרְדָּל צָרִיךְ לְמִתּוּק. הַתּוּרְמוּסִים צָרִיךְ לְמִתּוּק. הַחִטִּין צְרִיכִין לְהִטָּחֵן. אֲפִלּוּ אָדָם צָרִיךְ תִּקּוּן.

Everything that was created during the six days of creation requires action: for example, mustard requires sweetening, lupines require sweetening, wheat requires milling. Even man needs tikkun. (Bereishit Rabbah 11:6, my translation)

Tikkun means something like “setting right” or “bringing to completion”. As an example, consider the blessing we say over bread: hamotzi lechem min ha-aretz, thanking God who “brings forth bread from the earth”. But bread does not come from the earth. Wheat does. Between field and table come plowing, sowing, reaping, threshing, winnowing, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking. And yet we thank God for the bread, as though the grain and the loaf were a single gift. Our tradition has no trouble with human hands finishing what God began; on the contrary, our finishing it is the whole point.

Nobody applies “God made you perfect, don’t touch it” to haircuts or eyeglasses, braces or insulin. It gets applied to trans people. Our tradition says the opposite of what the slogan claims: no one is born finished, and we are meant to be partners in the work.

And that brings me back to rest. When trans people describe transition, we often talk about it in terms of relief, settledness, coming home. I remember vividly the sensation I had, when I started taking estrogen, of finally feeling like I was letting out a breath I’d been holding my whole life, and letting my entire body settle. This is the language of menucha. The world wasn’t complete until rest arrived, and maybe it isn’t surprising that a person isn’t either. The image of God in us isn’t a frozen snapshot. It’s something we’re invited to bring, in our own time, to its own Shabbat.

So to the people who threw that verse at me: you were right that I was made in the image of God. You just stopped reading a day too early.

Allyship as Sacred Work

2026-06-09T00:00:00Z

I was recently privileged to be the featured speaker and teacher at Temple Israel of Sharon, Massachusetts for Pride Shabbat 2026. This is the d’var Torah I gave during that Shabbat service.

When I was young—a kid in the 90s—and just starting to explore my own identity, and my place in the world, I signed onto an Internet chat service called ICQ. I made many friends there, some of whom persisted in my life for years. Some of those friends were other trans people, all around the world. One of these people was a trans woman called Sandra. She was one of the first people in my life to address me by a chosen name and chosen pronouns, to really care about who I wanted to be, and to help me identify those parts of myself that I wanted to bring to the forefront and make part of my authentic self. Sandra told me something profound. The key to living as a trans person, in a world that barely recognizes you as human, is to find your joy, and to affirm yourself through it.

But Sandra was not a happy person. In a classic demonstration of how it’s easy to give someone else advice but difficult to take it yourself, she struggled with depression, born of living in a society in which she was isolated for two reasons: first, because she was trans, and second, because she was HIV positive, and even in the queer and trans community, she was treated as an outcast. She was always struggling to find her joy and to affirm herself through it. She died about a year after I made her acquaintance.

The AIDS crisis is not front of mind for many queer and trans people of my generation and younger. Due to the advance of medical treatment, blood testing, antiretroviral therapy, and far greater public awareness than existed in decades past, HIV is no longer the automatic death sentence it once was. Many people living with HIV and who respond well to treatments can expect more or less normal lifespans. But it never went away: there is no cure. The disease is still with us. And, of course, everything I just said refers to those of us living in the so-called “first world”: in other places in the world, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is a full-blown pandemic, and it’s very easy to forget this. In 2022, fourteen percent of the population of South Africa was HIV positive: eight and a half million people. AIDS is not over.

What hurts the vulnerable—what killed my friend Sandra, what kills millions still, both globally and here in our own communities, what afflicts the suffering—is not simply a virus. It is isolation, which breeds despair: being cast out by the very community, the world, that should have held the needy and the desperate with care and tenderness and love. On Pride Shabbat, I want to lift up the sacred work of allyship and ask ourselves the question: how can those of us who are not inside the community do the work to break down this kind of separation, these barriers of artifice that keep us from one another?

I think we may find some answers in this week’s parasha, which contains the famous incident where Aaron and Miriam speak against the “Cushite woman” that Moses married, and God strikes Miriam with tzara’at as a punishment. It’s worth reading the whole story so that we have the full context: this translation is the Revised JPS 2023 version.

Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married: “He married a Cushite!” They said, “Has God spoken only through Moses—and not through us as well?” God heard it. Now Moses himself was very humble, more so than any other human being on earth. Suddenly God called to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, “Come out, you three, to the Tent of Meeting.” So the three of them went out. God came down in a pillar of cloud, stopped at the entrance of the Tent, and called out, “Aaron and Miriam!” The two of them came forward. “Hear these My words: When prophets of God arise among you, I make Myself known to them in a vision, I speak with them in a dream. Not so with My servant Moses; he is trusted throughout My household. With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles, and he beholds God’s likeness. How then did you not shrink from speaking against My servant Moses!” Still incensed with them, God departed. As the cloud withdrew from the Tent, there was Miriam stricken with snow-white scales! When Aaron turned toward Miriam, he saw that she was stricken with scales. And Aaron said to Moses, “O my lord, account not to us the sin that we committed in our folly. Let her not be like a stillbirth that emerges from its mother’s womb with half its flesh eaten away!” So Moses cried out to God, saying, “O God, pray heal her!” But God said to Moses, “If her father spat in her face, would she not bear her shame for seven days? Let her be shut out of camp for seven days, and then let her be readmitted.” So Miriam was shut out of camp seven days; and the people did not march on until Miriam was readmitted. (Num. 12:1–15)

Quite a few things are going on here. Who was the “Cushite woman”? Was she Tzipporah, the wife Moshe already had, or was she somebody else that Moshe married at some other point while in the wilderness? Why exactly did Miriam and Aaron “speak against” Moses because of her? What was the content of that speech? Why does God react so strongly? What, even, was God reacting to?

The text seems to suggest that God was angry with Miriam and Aaron for speaking against Moses, since he speaks to God directly. God even says that he is unique in this regard: when God wants to speak to other prophets, He does so through dreams or visions. But ironically, God is directly addressing Miriam and Aaron!

The rabbis of our interpretive tradition pick up on some of these threads. They famously suggest that Miriam is punished with tzara’at because she spoke lashon hara: in fact, in the rabbinic imagination, tzara’at is the specific punishment for lashon hara. Ibn Ezra even finds an allegory for this in the word metzora, “one who is afflicted with tzara’at”: it contains the initial letters of the phrase motzi shem ra, “to bring a bad name” against someone else.

And note that there is always a “someone else” here: lashon hara never happens in the abstract. It is always speech against a specific target. Our tradition’s intense focus on the sin of the speaker can have the somewhat surprising effect of obscuring the one who was actually targeted. In the rabbinic framing of this story as being about lashon hara, the victim of the story is Moses. It’s really easy to forget that there’s another victim here: the anonymous ishah kushit, the “Cushite woman”, whom the Torah’s narrative skips lightly over.

So who was the ishah kushit? In the Hebrew Bible, Cush is a rather vaguely-defined area of northeastern Africa. The Greek Septuagint calls her a gyne aithiopissa—an “Ethiopian woman”—though, again, what exactly was the extent of “Ethiopia” in the Greek-speaking world was somewhat vague. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore the racial implications: she was not Israelite, she was not even from the Near East—and she did not look like Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Chazal spend quite a lot of time pointing out that there was nothing specifically derogatory about being a Cushite woman, and that it was even seen as to her credit in some particular ways. But it’s a difficult factor to ignore.

I want to ask another question: why did Aaron not get punished? There are several classical explanations. Perhaps since he was Kohen Gadol, it would have seriously compromised the people’s ability to function in a ritual or religious sense. Aaron seems to have admitted fault and pleaded with God for mercy, though one should note that he only did that after Miriam’s punishment had already taken hold. One strain of interpretation reads the text as pointing to Miriam specifically as the instigator of the whole incident, since her name shows up first, and the verb is specifically directed at her: the Torah’s exact language is va-tedaber miriam ve-aharon, which we earlier translated as “Miriam and Aaron spoke”, but va-tedaber is a third person singular feminine verb whose subject is “Miriam”.

It’s important to name this dynamic: the text removes agency from Aaron and assigns it entirely to Miriam. Like the rather ugly undercurrent of racism in this text, there is also a rather ugly undercurrent of misogyny. Sometimes women get punished and bear the blame, when, fairly, the burden should be more equally apportioned. It’s important to name that dynamic; too often it goes unsaid. Here, the text hands the woman the whole bill and doesn’t exactly tell us why.

Miriam’s specific punishment is tzara’at, which is often translated as “leprosy”, but, as is well known, is not actually what we now know as Hansen’s disease. For our purposes, it isn’t really important to come up with a specific identification of what the disease was. What is sufficient is to discuss how it functions socially.

Tzara’at is a disease of avoidance. There is no “cure” in the medical sense: the patient is not administered medication or therapy. As the disease runs its course, the patient is to be kept in isolation, fully quarantined from participation in society. It is enforced invisibility.

And this is the connection between the two threads I’ve been talking about. Lashon hara is a disease that infects spiritually. The Gemara in Sotah tells us that people who speak lashon hara do not merit to be in the Divine Presence. The precise language the Gemara uses is instructive: it calls people who speak slander kat mesap’rei lashon hara, the “band” or “cohort” of people who speak lashon hara, and that they are ein mekablot p’nei shechinah: they do not literally “receive the face of the Shekhinah”, the Divine Presence. They are spiritually isolated by their actions. In the Torah, there is a physical manifestation of this spiritual isolation enforced by the quarantining of the afflicted individual.

In our day, when there is no physical manifestation of lashon hara like tzara’at, we must rely entirely on the community to notice and name the isolation itself: to see who has been pushed outside the camp when nothing overt flags them for us. But first, we must choose to look. Earlier I referred to the barriers that keep communities from caring for their vulnerable as “barriers of artifice”. These barriers are human-made, and therefore human-removable.

The story in our parashah closes with one of the most famous prayers in all of Scripture: Moses’ prayer: el na refa na lah, “God, please heal her, please!” The master stroke of the narrative is that Moses, the injured party, intercedes for the one who injured him. This is the sacred work of allyship: Moses, the man with the most standing and power among the Israelite people, spends that capital interceding for someone in a position of vulnerability. When he prays, he is using his voice, his place inside the camp, to advocate for someone outside of it.

And of course, the story doesn’t end with Miriam still in quarantine: the people do not march on until Miriam is readmitted to the camp. The entire camp refuses to move forward while a single person is left outside. Granted, she’s a very important person, but a single person nevertheless: everyone waits a full week for her; the community declines to proceed on its way until it is whole. And this, right here, is the sacred work of allyship. My friend Sandra fell outside the camp twice over: from the physical disease of AIDS, and from the social disease of transphobia. What would it look like if we had a community, a world, in which we refused to move on without her?

The world is a scary place for queer and trans people right now. It’s a terrible, gut-wrenching feeling for me to tune into the news every morning and wonder what new thing the world is going to inflict upon us. The optimism many of us were feeling a decade ago has been replaced with a deeper existential dread: what new societal ill are they going to decide we are responsible for, and use as a cudgel to try to shunt us out of existence? And how will the next blow land: by legislative and administrative fiat? By economic injustice? By physical violence, by murder?

Right now, the world is a scary place for many people: war, environmental catastrophe, unprecedented economic pressures under late-stage capitalism, what feels like a constant erosion of respect for the rule of law. And I can’t really blame anyone for not feeling like they have the bandwidth to care about people other than themselves. But the Torah is calling us to more than that. It is calling us to reject the urge to throw members of our community under the bus so that we may achieve an apparent compromise. The Torah knows that such a compromise isn’t really a compromise at all, but a defeat. The Torah calls us to not march on until every member of our community is restored to us.

This Pride Shabbat, I pray Moses’ prayer for all of us: El na refa na lanu. Please, God, please heal us. Heal our communities, and heal our world. Heal our souls from the disease of lashon hara, from being motzi shem ra on the most vulnerable among us. Help us to build communities that do not leave people behind when we march on. Grant us the strength to build ourselves up, out of the pit of desperation, past grudging inclusion, to affirmation and to celebration. Then we will truly feel pride in ourselves, in our communities, and in our future.

Making Sense of the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah

2026-04-22T00:00:00Z

In the upper corner of the outer margin of the standard page layout of the Talmud (the so-called “Vilna Shas”) is a set of notes under the heading עין משפט נר מצוה. The notes under this heading cross-reference laws and principles mentioned in the Talmud with the places in the medieval halachic literature where they were codified. In this essay, I’ll teach you how to read it and locate the texts it references!

What is it?

The Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah was compiled by R’ Yehoshua Boaz ben Shimon Baruch in the 16th century. The scion of a prominent Spanish family, he left Spain after the Jews were exiled from there and settled in Italy, where he published several different commentaries and sets of notes on the Talmud, which are still printed in the standard Vilna editions of the Talmud. He also wrote other commentaries, particularly the Shiltei Ha-Gibborim, a set of critical notes on the commentary of the Rif (R’ Yitzchak Alfasi), by which title R’ Yehoshua Boaz is also known.

The name Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah means “Wellspring of Judgment, Lamp of the Commandment”. The phrase “Ein Mishpat” is a reference to Genesis 14:7, which refers to a place in Canaan called “Ein Mishpat”; here the phrase is intended to mean that the Talmud itself is the wellspring of the judgments and rulings of the halakha. Likewise, the phrase “Ner Mitzvah” comes from Proverbs 6:23, which says נר מצוה ותורה אור, meaning “The commandment is a lamp and the Torah is a light”; here, the phrase is used to mean that these notes “light the way”, as it were, to the locations of the codifications of the mitzvot in the law codes. (The continuation of the phrase, “Torah Or”, is the name of a different set of notes on the Talmud written by the same author, which give the citation to every quotation of a verse from Tanakh in the Talmud.)

The Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah is written in a very terse, abbreviated style. It is almost always printed in Rashi script, and many of the words in it are abbreviations and numerals.

Which works are referenced?

The Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah refers to three (or four, depending on how you count) major law codes from the period of the Rishonim (medieval rabbis):

Mishneh Torah

The earliest code is the Mishneh Torah (“Repetition of the Torah”) by the Rambam (Maimonides), compiled between 1170 and 1180. Sometimes the Mishneh Torah is called the Yad Ha-Ḥazakah (“Strong Hand”). The Mishneh Torah has fourteen sections (“yad” in Hebrew has the gematria value of 14, whence the name).

SeMaG

The Sefer Mitzvot Gadol (“Great Book of Commandments”) was written by the French Tosafist R’ Moshe ben Yaakov of Coucy, completed in 1247. This work is often called by its Hebrew initials as סמ״ג, or SeMaG (not to be confused with the atmospheric phenomenon or the dragon). It consists of two sections: one for positive commandments (“do this”) and one for negative commandments (“don’t do this”).

Tur and Shulḥan Aruch

The Tur was composed by R’ Yaakov ben Asher in the early 14th century, in Toledo, Spain. The Tur is more properly called the Arba’ah Turim (“Four Rows”), referring to the four rows of precious stones on the breastplate of the Kohen Gadol, so called because it is divided into four sections. However, the work is very commonly called just the “Tur” in the singular, and its author is often referred to as the Ba’al Ha-Turim (“Master of the Rows”).

The Shulḥan Aruch (“The Set Table”) was written by R’ Yosef ben Efraim Karo in 1563. R’ Karo, often called the Mechaber (“Composer” or “Author”), was another exile from Spain and Portugal, who moved around the Ottoman Empire, eventually settling in the city of Safed (Tzfat) in the Galilee. The Shulḥan Aruch is largely based on his earlier work the Beit Yosef (“House of Joseph”), which itself is a long and intricate commentary on the Arba’ah Turim. The Shulḥan Aruch, too, shares the same basic structure as the Tur.

Understanding the notes

As I mentioned, the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah is a very pithy work, and many of the words in it are abbreviations or numerals. Irritatingly, you may find some words abbreviated in some printed editions but written out in full in others, or with different abbreviations. Another irritation is that the usage of single-geresh and gershayim (what we call apostrophes and double-apostrophes or inverted commas in English) is often inconsistent, especially with numerals—even within volumes produced by the same editor or publisher.

References in the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah are given in chronological order: citations from the Mishneh Torah are presented first, then the SeMaG, then the Tur and Shulḥan Aruch.

But before you can read the note, you have to find the right note on the page! Here’s what you’re looking for.

How to find the correct note

To illustrate this, we’ll look at the very first note from the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah, which occurs, of course, on the first page of the Gemara: Berachot 2a.

References to the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah are block Hebrew letters in superscript, which come immediately before the text they refer to. The first line of the Mishnah has a small superscript א before the words משעה שהכהנים. The א points to the first note in the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah in the upper-left corner of the page. The astute reader will note that this note is preceded by two אs: the first one is the running number of notes from the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah in this chapter of Gemara, and the second one is specifically note א from our page.

Notice that on the next folio (page 3a—there are no Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah notes on page 2b), the first numeral keeps increasing (the first one is ז, meaning the seventh cumulative note in this chapter), but the second numeral (א) is the first note on that page (you can find it in the Gemara text about halfway down the page).

Note that sometimes multiple superscript letters refer to the same note—this happens with notes ב and ג on this very page!

How to parse the text of the note

As we’ll see, different editions sometimes print slightly different versions of the notes. In the volume of Gemara I’m looking at, the text of note א on page 2a says:

מיי׳ פ״א מהלכות ק״ש הלכה ט׳ סמ״ג עשין י״ח טור וש״ע או״ח סימן רל״ה סעיף א׳

Remember, these notes go chronologically: first the Rambam, then the SeMaG, then the Tur (and Shulḥan Aruch).

Rambam (Mishneh Torah)

The Mishneh Torah is cited as מיי׳ (short for מיימוני or מיימונידס). The basic structure of a reference to the Mishneh Torah is: (1) chapter from (2) volume, followed by (3) the specific halacha.

The first abbreviation will tell you the chapter number: for example, פ״ב is short for פרק ב, meaning “chapter 2”, פ״ט is short for פרק ט, meaning “chapter 9”, and so on. In our case, we have a reference to פ״א = פרק א, “chapter 1”.

Then the note will refer to a specific volume of the Mishneh Torah, often also by abbreviation. In our example, הלכות ק״ש is “Laws of Reciting the Shema” (ק״ש is an abbreviation for קריאת שמע). The מ before הלכות ק״ש is simply the prefix meaning “from”.

Finally, the note will point to the specific law in that volume, written out as הלכה (or abbreviated as הל׳) followed by the number of the halacha: in our example, הלכה ט׳ refers to halacha 9. Sometimes you even see this whole phrase abbreviated, e.g. ה״א for “halacha 1”.

So the note from our example breaks down like this:

Hebrew	Expansion	Meaning
מיי׳	מיימונידס	Rambam (Mishneh Torah)
פ״א	פרק א	chapter 1
מהלכות		from Hilchot (“Laws of”)
ק״ש	קריאת שמע	Keri’at Shema (“Reciting the Shema”)
הלכה		halacha
ט׳		9

Putting it all together: Rambam (Mishneh Torah), Laws of Reciting the Shema, chapter 1, halacha 9.

SeMaG

The SeMaG is organized into two sections: לאוין lavin (“noes”, as in “negative commandments”) and עשין asin (“do-s”, as in “positive commandments”). There are 365 sections in the lavin and 248 in the asin. There is also a section of עשין דרבנן, “positive Rabbinic commandments”.

Notes from the SeMaG are fairly uncomplicated: first, the positive or negative section is specified, followed by the section number(s). Occasionally there is a note that points to a section in the positive commandments and a section in the negative commandments, e.g. לאוין רח ועשין רלה, “negative commandments 208 and positive commandments 235”.

So the note from our example breaks down like this:

Hebrew	Expansion	Meaning
סמ״ג	ספר מצות גדול	The SeMaG
עשין		positive commandments
י״ח		18

Putting it all together: Sefer Mitzvot Gadol (SeMaG), Positive Commandments, section 18.

Tur and Shulḥan Aruch

Since the Shulḥan Aruch is structured the same as the Tur, they have the same reference conventions, and you’ll often see them referred to jointly as טוש״ע, which expands, simply, to טור ושולחן ערוך, “Tur and Shulḥan Aruch”. Sometimes you’ll see them referred to separately, particularly the Shulḥan Aruch, whose initialism is שו״ע.

The next word will be the abbreviation of one of the four sections of the Tur/Shulḥan Aruch that the citation refers to. These abbreviations are:

Abbreviation	Full Name
א״ח or או״ח	אורח חיים (Oraḥ Ḥayyim)
י״ד or יו״ד	יורה דעה (Yoreh De’ah)
אה״ע or אבה״ע	אבן העזר (Even Ha-Ezer)
ח״מ or חו״מ	חושן משפט (Ḥoshen Mishpat)

This will be followed by the סימן siman (chapter) and סעיף se’if (subsection) numbers. Sometimes these words are spelled out; often they are abbreviated, and it can be confusing because they both start with ס. Remember that the siman always comes before the se’if. You might see סי׳ קנ״ב סעיף א meaning siman 152 se’if 1, or perhaps an editor might write it as סקנ״ב ס״א, meaning the same thing.

So the note from our example breaks down like this:

Hebrew	Expansion	Meaning
טור		Tur
וש״ע	ושולחן ערוך	and Shulḥan Aruch
או״ח	אורח חיים	Oraḥ Ḥayyim
סימן		siman
רל״ה		235
סעיף		se’if
א׳		1

Putting it all together: Tur and Shulḥan Aruch, Oraḥ Ḥayyim 235:1.

The word שם

One word you’ll encounter a lot in this work (as in many references) is the word שם sham, literally “there”, meaning “in the last place the text mentioned explicitly”. For example, to interpret a note that says “סמ״ג שם”, you have to find the nearest previous explicit reference in the commentary to the SeMaG. (Oftentimes, when you find it, it too will say שם, and then you’ll have to find the next one back, and so on.)

Note also that sometimes שם will be preceded or followed by another partial reference, so you have to make a mental note of which part of the reference you need to find the previous reference to. If the note simply says מיי׳ שם, it’s the same reference as the previous reference to the Rambam. But if it says, for example, מיי׳ שם ה״א, then you have to find the last reference to the Rambam and substitute “halacha 1” for the halacha number of that citation.

Putting it all together: another full example, with editorial differences between editions

As I write this (spring 2026), the Portland Open Beit Midrash’s advanced Talmud cohort right now is learning Chapter 7 of Tractate Berachot, שלשה שאכלו כאחת, about the laws of Birkat Ha-Mazon. On page 45b, the superscript ט before הא בבונה ירושלים הא בשאר ברכות (three lines up from the bottom of the page) points to note ט in the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah. This note is confusingly prefaced by the numeral כ, meaning it is the 20th note in the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah in this perek.

My printed (Tal-Man) edition

The note in my printed Gemara, edited and published by Tal-Man, reads as follows:

מיי׳ פ״א שם הל׳ יז סמג שם טוש״ע או״ח סי׳ קפח סעיף א׳ ובסי׳ רטו סעיף א

The first part of the note, מיי׳ פ״א שם הל׳ יז, breaks down like this:

Hebrew	Expansion	Meaning
מיי׳	מיימונידס	Rambam (Mishneh Torah)
פ״א	פרק א	chapter 1
שם		“there” (we’ll come back to this)
הל׳	הלכה	halacha
יז		17

So what place does שם refer to in this note? Look back to note ח; its Rambam citation says פ״ה שם, “chapter 5 there”, so go back another note. Note ז doesn’t have a reference to the Rambam, so go back another note. Note ו also says שם, as do note ה, note ד, note ג, and note ב. So we go all the way back to note א, where we finally get an explicit reference: מיי׳ פ״ה מהלכות ברכות הלכה ז, referring to chapter 5 of Hilchot Berachot (“Laws of Blessings”) halacha 17. So we know that the שם in our note refers to Hilchot Berachot.

Now we can translate the first part of our note, מיי׳ פ״א שם הל׳ יז, as: Rambam (Mishneh Torah), Laws of Blessings, 1:17.

The next part simply says סמג שם, “SeMaG there”. So we have to follow the same trail to find where the SeMaG was last referenced on this page. It, too, is in note א: סמג עשין כז, SeMaG positive commandments, section 27.

The final part reads:

טוש״ע או״ח סי׳ קפח סעיף א׳ ובסי׳ רטו סעיף א

Breaking it down word by word:

Hebrew	Expansion	Meaning
טוש״ע	טור ושולחן ערוך	Tur and Shulḥan Aruch
או״ח	אורח חיים	Oraḥ Ḥayyim
סי׳	סימן	siman
קפח		188
סעיף		se’if
א׳		1
ובסי׳	ובסימן	and in siman (note the standard prefixes ו and ב)
רטו		215
סעיף		se’if
א		1

So this part of the note translates as Tur and Shulḥan Aruch, Oraḥ Ḥayyim 188:1 and 215:1.

The online Nehardea edition

As I mentioned, different editors and different editions sometimes write things out, well, differently. The equivalent note in the publisher Moznaim’s digitized “Nehardea” edition reads:

מיי׳ פ״א שם הל׳ טז [יז] סמג שם טוש״ע או״ח סי׳ קפח סעיף א וסי׳ רטו סעיף א

There are a couple of differences. First, the citation to the Rambam points to halacha 16, and the editor has put the numeral 17 in brackets. I presume the editor was working from a source text in which the number 16 was written, but when you look at the text of the Rambam, you’ll see that the correct citation is to 17, not 16, so he put 17 in brackets. I am at a loss to explain why the editor didn’t just emend טז to יז like the editor of the Tal-Man edition apparently did. Or maybe the editor of the Tal-Man edition was working from a text that already said 17. I don’t know.

The other difference is minor: the Tal-Man edition’s text, in the citation to the Tur/Shulḥan Aruch, says ובסי׳ “and in siman”, while the “Nehardea” text doesn’t have the ב “in”.

Conclusion

Reading the Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Once you know the basic structure of the notes, and the “signposts” for what to look out for, you’ll have the tools to puzzle through these sometimes cryptic notes.