Ch. 308 of Tur with R Karo’s commentary. Part 1

How did we get from a rule stating that all utensils can be touched and moved for Shabbat, whether one needs them or not, to a situation where halakha books list hundreds of untouchable items?

Jeremiah and Nehemiah tried and failed to convince people to keep Shabbat. The Rabbis succeeded by attaching the prohibition to a physical object.

One of the few texts in Mishnah touching the subject of asking a non-Jew to perform a forbidden task on Shabbat. What is the origin and scope of the prohibition? Are observant Jews bypassing it regularly?

The laws of extinguishing fire on Shabbat serve as a case study of the evolution of Halakha. We see how some rabbis recognized the changes and others did not, and how arguments were made in an attempt to defend the reasoning and ruling of previous generations.

The war against Amulets and Midrash; how the approach to firefighting changed over time.

In this episode: Torah scroll with errors; anecdotes and laws about mistakes during Torah reading; Priority of text to study in Jewish tradition.

The discussion on Ch. 16 about a house on fire branches out to questions of Jewish literature, the “mitzvah” of eating 3 meals, and the evolution of halakha.

A term lost in translation, the confusion it caused, and women rewriting halakha.

What kinds of knots cannot be done on Shabbat, how this halakha got out of hand, and what to do in the army.