Berakhot 17

Today’s folio is very dense. Rabbi Yoḥanan’s prayer reverberates wholly with me. All we really have in this life is our good name and it is all we own on earth: “A good name is better than fine oil, and the day of death than the day of one’s birth” (Ecclesiastes 7:1).  I have lived my life protecting my name and reputation above all else. I also highly value humility in life and this passage resonated with me: “The beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord, a good understanding have all who fulfill them.” Today’s text  again references the World to Come, which I am astonished to find has a place in the Talmud because I was taught in Hebrew School that  there was no afterlife and our existence was “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” I have been directed on this site to a good article on the World to Come: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-world-to-come. My modern feminist sensibility is disturbed by the text which mentions that women are given a promise of  “ease and confidence” because they bring children into the world and send their husbands off to study Torah and wait for their husbands to return (like Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey who waited for Odysseus to return for 20 years). There is an ancient history of women waiting and waiting for men rather than being out in the world studying and fighting battles. I wonder what that ancient Rabbis would think of so many women now studying the Torah and the Talmud (!) along with men? What does everyone think of the mention of Jesus in the Sefaria text, which really surprised me: “who sins in public and causes others to sin, as in the well-known case of Jesus the Nazarene.” Is this specific to the Sefaria text or does it appear in other translations? And finally, what do we make of the opening of today’s text that attributes wars to infighting angels: “in the heavenly entourage [pamalia] of angels each of whom ministers to a specific nation (see Daniel 10), and whose infighting causes war on earth.”