MISHNA: From when, that is, from what time, does one recite Shema in the evening? From the time when the priests enter to partake of their teruma.
On the basis of what prior knowledge does the tanna of our mishna ask: From when?
–Tractate Brachot 2a
Talmud begins with a question about beginnings. It’s a fitting start for such a desultory text. Unlike a standard law book or really any textbook, the Talmud is filled with tangents, assumptions, digressions, and unspoken considerations. It begins that way as well. The Talmud asks when we read the nighttime shemah, but glosses over the daytime shemah and, more fundamentally, the obligation to read the shemah altogether. I imagine for most who began their Talmud study along with the fourteenth Daf Yomi cycle, the worldwide program that completes Talmud every seven and a half years by studying one page of Talmud a day, it was an inverted beginning as well.
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