Works
Terumat HaDeshen is written as 354 responsa. Note that Rabbi Shabbatai ha-Kohen comments in his famous commentary on Shulchan Aruch, the Shach, on Yoreh De'ah 196:20, that there is a tradition that Rabbi Isserlein was not answering questions posed to him in the Terumat HaDeshen, rather he actually wrote the questions and answers himself. Therefore, Shach concludes, in contrast with other responsa, the parameters of the questions posed in the Terumat HaDeshen are themselves binding when alluded to in the answer.
The work is named for the practice in the Temple in Jerusalem of removing a part of the previous day's ashes from the furnace - 354 is the numerical value of Deshen (Hebrew: דשן). Terumat HaDeshen serves as an important source of the practices of the Ashkenazi Jews. The work was therefore used by Moses Isserles as one basis for HaMapah - the component of the Shulkhan Arukh which specifies divergences between Sephardi and Ashkenazi practice.
Rabbi Isserlein also wrote Pesakim u-kethahim (267 decisions) largely on points of the marriage law.
- See also History of Responsa: Fifteenth century.
Read more about this topic: Israel Isserlein
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increasing confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us; not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. Fortunately, we had no business in this country.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)