"The compromise of a third [view] is not a compromise."
When there are two contradictory views, how do we achieve compromise?
In the case of a barrel of terumah that becomes defiled, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disagree. Beit Shammai think it must be poured out all at once, while Beit Hillel states it can be used for sprinkling.
Rabbi Ishmael son of Rabbi Yossi comes and makes a 'compromise', stating that in the field it must be poured out all at once, while at home it can be used for sprinkling (or alternatively that new wine must be poured out at once, while old wine can be used for sprinkling).
But the sages object to him that he hasn't stated a compromise at all. Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel don't state anything about fields or houses, old or new wine. Rabbi Ishmael, in trying to create a compromise position has essentially created a new position out of whole cloth.
And this is okay.
It may not be the most ideal kind of compromise, that manages to base itself within the positions themselves, but Rabbi Ishmael manages to keep the thoughts of both parties, maintaining their view of the world, albeit restricted to certain spheres.
With peace talks resuming in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this seems an important lesson to bear in mind. As two parties sit around a table, with apparently irreconcilable goals and desires, how can any compromise be reached that is true to their ideals?
A true compromise will in fact be a new position, a third way that creates a new path for the region.
May we all live to see such a path.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Pesachim 15b - Put your money where your heart is
It can be expensive to be Jewish and observant.
Kosher food costs more money, you need two sets of dishes, not to mention pesach. Collecting all the various ritual objects one needs for the daily and annual cycles (tallit and tefillin, candles for shabbes, lulav and etrog) can really rack up the bills.
The rabbis were sensitive about this, and developed the principle that the Torah is concerned for the money of Jews, and that the law is concerned that nobody should lose out overly much through their commitment to Jewish practice and observance.
Yet at the same time, this Saba, the certain old man, makes the point that the Rabbis were not concerned about a slight loss.
We do not want anyone to lose too much through their observance, but a slight loss is not only necessary but perhaps even desirable. It is a good thing for people to commit their financial resources to the things that really matter in their lives.
If you are unwilling to spend money on something, how much do you really care about it? And to read it the other way, by encouraging spending money on fulfilling Jewish principles, the rabbis are encouraging you to care more about those ideals. After all, you have invested your own possessions into it.
This creates a problem when you do not have very much disposable income, when the principles of tzedakah, and 'kol yisrael areivim zeh ba zeh' (all Israel are responsible for each other) come into play, but for many of us we have the money, we just may not be choosing to spend it on our ritual lives.
The halachic system should not bankrupt you, it should not cause you to lose out overly much - but it should cost you money, and demand a real investment of your resources.
Because our heart often follows where we put our money, we should put our money where we want our heart to follow.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Pesachim 13a - May the messiah come soon, but not when it's inconvenient
Reading this line made me really happy, as something about it seems to sum up something of the essence of Judaism.
A practical kind of messianism, that we believe in but trust that it won't disrupt any of our ritual or halachic obligations; a powerful mythology brought into the human realm of the weekly and yearly cycles of the calendar; a practical kind of mysticism.
I can't get enough of it!
Pesachim 12b - Legal vs. Domestic matters
Abaye answered this on Raba's view: "Testimony is committed to men of care, leaven is committed to all."
The discussion on page 12 of Pesachim is about people making mistakes about the time - how much leeway do we give to witnesses who disagree about the time an act took place? To what extent can we say that they are probably referring to the same event but merely making an error about the time? And at what point do we just say they disagree with one another?
And once we know what the rabbis think about testimony, how does this relate to non-legal settings, such as eating chameitz on the 14th of Nissan? Can the same rules about making mistakes over time apply from the legal field to the domestic?
Abaye suggests that we cannot learn from one area to the other, that in legal matters people take great care to ensure that their testimony is accurate, realising that they will be cross-examined, that there is an enormous amount at stake based on their words.
But in matters of chameitz, the domestic life, it's not just careful people that the law has to account for, all Jews must be able to participate in the ritual of pesach, all Jews must consider themselves as if they had been personally redeemed from Egypt. Therefore the law must be stricter, because it must account for all the people, in a way that laws of testimony do not need to.
There is also a tendency, I think, to take legal matters more seriously than domestic rituals - after all, in a court case there are judges asking you questions, checking the facts. Many of us think of the home as a quite different space, the private sphere in which we are not being judged.
Hence we read in Pirkei Avot 2:1 "Contemplate three things, and you will not come to the hands of transgression: Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds being inscribed in a scroll."
And yet people make mistakes, forgetting that there is always a Judge that is watching. The law must accommodate this tendency, making stricter regulations for ritual life at home to help people remember.
You may not be testifying before a court, no human being may see you, but what you do at home matters.
The discussion on page 12 of Pesachim is about people making mistakes about the time - how much leeway do we give to witnesses who disagree about the time an act took place? To what extent can we say that they are probably referring to the same event but merely making an error about the time? And at what point do we just say they disagree with one another?
And once we know what the rabbis think about testimony, how does this relate to non-legal settings, such as eating chameitz on the 14th of Nissan? Can the same rules about making mistakes over time apply from the legal field to the domestic?
Abaye suggests that we cannot learn from one area to the other, that in legal matters people take great care to ensure that their testimony is accurate, realising that they will be cross-examined, that there is an enormous amount at stake based on their words.
But in matters of chameitz, the domestic life, it's not just careful people that the law has to account for, all Jews must be able to participate in the ritual of pesach, all Jews must consider themselves as if they had been personally redeemed from Egypt. Therefore the law must be stricter, because it must account for all the people, in a way that laws of testimony do not need to.
There is also a tendency, I think, to take legal matters more seriously than domestic rituals - after all, in a court case there are judges asking you questions, checking the facts. Many of us think of the home as a quite different space, the private sphere in which we are not being judged.
Hence we read in Pirkei Avot 2:1 "Contemplate three things, and you will not come to the hands of transgression: Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds being inscribed in a scroll."
And yet people make mistakes, forgetting that there is always a Judge that is watching. The law must accommodate this tendency, making stricter regulations for ritual life at home to help people remember.
You may not be testifying before a court, no human being may see you, but what you do at home matters.
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Pesachim 9b - My favourite question in the Talmud
No profound insight here, but Raba's rather sarcastic response to Abaye has to rank among my favourite questions of all time.
Now I'm imagining a weasel that is a prophet, and what they would say...
Pesachim 9-10 - Entering into Doubt
"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.
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.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Pesachim 8b-9a - Danger, danger!
But Rabbi Eleazar said: "Those sent [to perform] a religious duty do not suffer harm"! — Said Rav Ashi: "He may have lost a needle and come to look for it." ... "Where the injury is probable it is different"
In discussing searching holes for leaven, the gemara says that one is exempt because of danger. But surely those in the process of doing a mitzvah are protected by God's aegis, says Rabbi Eleazar. Surely someone actively engaged in doing God's will is safe from accidental injury!
This viewpoint seems rather naive, albeit appealing. We know that anyone can suffer harm, even in the process of doing the greatest of mitzvot. The gemara in Chullin 142a, for example, has a striking story of the origin of Elisha ben Avuya's heresy, when he sees a boy obeying his father's command to send away the mother bird before taking the eggs, that tragically falls to his death. Not only was this boy fulfilling two mitzvot, but these are two mitzvot that the torah promises long life for. Our naive sense that God looks after someone doing a mitzvah just does not cohere with the universe as we experience it.
But the gemara offers us two ways of holding this view, while trying to reconcile it with the messy world where even those doing mitzvot suffer. Rav Ashi suggests that no one can guarantee they are exclusively doing a mitzvah. Other motivations always creep into your mind, self-centred or even selfish thoughts may lie behind even the most important of mitzvot, leaving one vulnerable.
The Talmud later limits the principle still further, stating that when injury is likely, the principle doesn't apply at all.
It seems to me that the Talmud wants us to hold the principle as a serious one, as a motivator to take some risks for the sake of fulfilling mitzvot. Take risks, have faith in God! Chase after the mitzvot! But don't be stupid about it. The world is still a dangerous place, and there is still danger out there.
In discussing searching holes for leaven, the gemara says that one is exempt because of danger. But surely those in the process of doing a mitzvah are protected by God's aegis, says Rabbi Eleazar. Surely someone actively engaged in doing God's will is safe from accidental injury!
This viewpoint seems rather naive, albeit appealing. We know that anyone can suffer harm, even in the process of doing the greatest of mitzvot. The gemara in Chullin 142a, for example, has a striking story of the origin of Elisha ben Avuya's heresy, when he sees a boy obeying his father's command to send away the mother bird before taking the eggs, that tragically falls to his death. Not only was this boy fulfilling two mitzvot, but these are two mitzvot that the torah promises long life for. Our naive sense that God looks after someone doing a mitzvah just does not cohere with the universe as we experience it.
But the gemara offers us two ways of holding this view, while trying to reconcile it with the messy world where even those doing mitzvot suffer. Rav Ashi suggests that no one can guarantee they are exclusively doing a mitzvah. Other motivations always creep into your mind, self-centred or even selfish thoughts may lie behind even the most important of mitzvot, leaving one vulnerable.
The Talmud later limits the principle still further, stating that when injury is likely, the principle doesn't apply at all.
It seems to me that the Talmud wants us to hold the principle as a serious one, as a motivator to take some risks for the sake of fulfilling mitzvot. Take risks, have faith in God! Chase after the mitzvot! But don't be stupid about it. The world is still a dangerous place, and there is still danger out there.
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