"Surely it is a doubt and a certainty, and a doubt cannot negate a certainty."
Without getting too closely involved with the details of the arguments on these two pages, I found the underlying notions of doubt and certainty to be extremely powerful, for in the religious life, as perhaps in all life, we must balance what we are certain of against the creeping sense of doubt that things are not as we hope/suspect them to be.
Various situations involving doubt are brought up - mice moving around chameitz, finding meat that we don't know where it came from, mixing terumah and chullin, chameitz that may or may not fall from the rafters.
And we some principles at work - apparently a doubt cannot override a certainty, in some situations we can follow the majority or the more likely case.
The talmud gives us many different ways of trying to work through our uncertainties, to recover a sense of control over our houses on pesach, or to cast the net wider, a sense of control over our lives.
One of the great strengths of ritual actions, in my mind, is that it gives us one area of our lives that we can be certain we are fulfilling our requirements, doing the absolute best we can. The same cannot be easily said for ethics, or relationships. So how do we cope when uncertainty strikes at the heart of our rituals, the place that was supposed to be clear cut?
While the gemara gives us these tools, in the end, the sugya ends with Raba's questions, first about one mouse entering with a loaf of bread and another mouse seen leaving with a loaf, until the case of a loaf of bread in a snake's mouth.
And these are questions to which the gemara has no answer - Teiku, it declares, let the doubt stand.
Even in the ritual sphere not all uncertainties can be resolved, and we must simply learn, at a certain point, to let them stand and live with the tension.
How much the more so in our every day lives, where the doubt is even more real, and perhaps more painful, we must learn to live with our uncertainties.
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