JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH (2/17/2006) wrote:
Rating 5 Stars Out Of 5


Master Mishna: Technology for Mishna Study and Review, a set of six
CD-ROMs, sold together or separately on one DVD-ROM, by TES
(www.jewishsoftware.com), requires Windows 95 and up, for ages 10 through
adult, $39.95 per disk, special price $129.98 for whole set, or shekel
equivalent.


With growing numbers of Jewish men ­ and women ­ wanting to devote part of
their day to Torah while pursuing their professions, one doesn¹t have to sit
in a yeshiva or attend frontal lectures to do so. Instead, the use of
software and the Internet for such studies is burgeoning, allowing those
thirsting for such studies to do so when convenient and at their own speed.
As the demand is highest among the English-speaking Jewish community around
the world, most of the programming is in that language.


Now TES, a veteran software house based in Monsey, New York and specializing
in Jewish educational software, has released a series covering the entire
text of the Mishna, narrated in Hebrew with a sentence-by-sentence English
translation and lessons by teacher and author Rabbi Avraham Kosman ­ who
studied at the famed Ner Yisrael Yeshiva in Baltimore and then moved to Bnei
Brak¹s Slabodka Yeshiva in 1981. The audio narration selector makes it easy
to play, rewind, pause, stop and resume Rabbi Kosman¹s flow of words at any
time.


The six orders of the Mishna are Zera¹im ( dealing with agricultural laws;
field gleanings for the poor. forbidden mixtures of plants, animals and
clothing, tithing and the sabbatical year); Mo¹ed (Shabbat, festivals and
fast days); Nashim (marriage, childless widows, the Nazirite, divorce and
suspected adultery); Nezikin (property damage, loans and interest, stolen
and lost goods, inheritance, capital punishment, the judiciary, oaths, idol
worship and ethics); Kodashim (animal and bird sacrifices, flour and wine
offerings, laws of the firstborn, atonements and the building of the Second
Temple); and Tehorot (purity, impurity, corpses, ritual baths, marital
relations and leprosy).


The digital formal is a boon, because you can view not only the traditional
layout of each Mishna page, with vowels and the adjacent commentary by R.
Ovadia Mi¹Bartenura and Tosfot Yom Tov¹s side commentary, but also as a
text-only format whose fonts and letter and page sizes can be changed at
will and manipulated like any word processor text.


Also included in the disk¹s database are the full Babylonian Talmud with
Rashi and Tosefot, the complete Bible in Hebrew with an English translation
and the entire Rambam, Shulhan Aruch and Mishna Brura. This makes it
possible to look up a cross references in any of these sources, just by
clicking a button ­ a split-second operation that saves hours that it would
take to painstaking flip through pages in a variety of volumes.
Teachers will find it extremely useful for printing out text, annotating,
highlighting and personalizing the page in any combination of colors and
copying and pasting text to their computer¹s paint program to design class
worksheets.


The Add & Link feature enables users to integrate pictures and flow charts
to any letter, word or sentence on the page. Using a microphone and the
built-in sound recorder, you can even record and store your own notes in the
specific place in the text that you want them. To attach a note, recording
or picture, just click on an icon and then on the highlighted material you
want to link, giving it a name and easily locating it in the future. There
is also an icon linking you to TES¹s Web site to access additional
resources, including Mishna Yomi (daily Mishna) information and the ability
to hear a virtual mishna lesson over the Internet.


A single mishna can be listened to in as short a time as 10 minutes when
you¹re on the run, but you can also delve deeper and devote hours to the
material. The set ­is a mini-yeshiva in a box!