Question

Shalom to Rabbi Michael Abraham! My name is Eliav, and I am a student at the hesder yeshiva in Otniel. Recently I became acquainted with the books and articles you have written, and I am enjoying them מאוד and feel growth and enjoyment from them, and for that I thank you. I wanted to ask two questions that came up for me during my analytical Talmud study, and perhaps the Rabbi can shed some light on them and help me understand what lies behind these Talmudic moves, which seemed a bit puzzling and unclear to me. 1. A “rolling gezerah shavah” that appears in Eruvin 51: “We learn ‘place’ from ‘place’… two thousand by the cubit.” In general, the method of gezerah shavah is not fully clear to me, but if it were about one word, fine; here we are dealing with a sequence of four different words, and I was not able to understand the meaning of this derivation. 2. In Sukkah 36b there appears a kal va-chomer: “Just as the lulav, which does not apply at night as it does by day, nevertheless applies only with four species, then regarding sukkah, which applies at night as it does by day, is it not all the more so that it should apply only with the four species?” In the book True and Unstable you wrote that the assumption in a kal va-chomer is that there is some connection between the parameters included in the derivation (and that indeed seems reasonable), but here, seemingly, it is not clear what the connection is between whether the commandment applies by day or by night and the issue of using specifically the four species. Thank you in advance!