Why does tosfos need to ask the same question multiple times in different masechtos? the same question asked in the first tosfos here is also asked in the first tosfos of kidushin?
Gavriel Azra, brooklyn ny
Gavriel, I think that you must have a good memory, so that is why you are asking this question, but for people like me -- by the time I start learning Kidushin I cannot guarantee that I still remember what the first Tosfos in Kesuvos said, so I need Tosfos to do a bit of Chazarah for me.
Somebody once asked me how many Tosfosim are there in the whole of Shas? I still do not know the answer to that question but what I answered is that if somebody will sometime tell us what the number is, you could argue that the number is actually less than we think because there are a lot of comments of Tosfos that are repeated a few times (with slight variations) in different places in Shas.
Tosfos must be teaching us that we always have to review what we have learned!
Kayitz Bari,
Dovid Bloom