Today, boruch Hashem, I made a siyum on Maseches Eiruvin. There are countless halochos in this particular masechta, primarily having to do with eruvin, which for those unfamiliar are various legal devices to allow certain things like carrying outside on Shabbos, cooking for Shabbos on a holiday, and walking beyond 2000 amos (cubits) in one direction outside of the city on Shabbos. The literal meaning of “eruv” though is “mixing,” which is effectively what each form of an eruv does, mixing either space to allow carrying outside, mixing time to cook on Yom Tov for the Shabbos it leads into, or mixing space in yet another sense for permitting walking beyond a certain distance.
For such a halachically-dense masechta, one would be surprised that nearly one entire perek (chapter) is devoted to Aggadata, which is decidedly un-halachic. There are many pieces of advice meant for helping one to learn and become a scholar, and many other interesting parables that one would not typically expect to find there.
As a little word play, we can see that Maseches Eruvin is in itself very mixed together. The last perek has much drawn directly from Maseches Shabbos as well. So we see that there are lots of ideas from other areas of Torah brought up here. The word ערב can also mean to sweeten, like we say every morning in Birkas HaTorah והערב נא השם אלקינו (and sweeten for us Hashem our God…). Through living with the concepts we learn in Aggadata, those things that are meant to help us become better Yidden or just better people on the whole, as well as having integrity in our halachic practice, this is the proper mix we need to live with in order to sweeten the Dinim (Judgments) and serve Hashem properly. By bringing together the heart and the mind, as we are directed to in the first line of Krias Shma, we can bring down sweetness and holiness to this world that is impossible to attain otherwise.
Yismach Lev 