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.

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.

The pleasure of doing mitzvot - Pesachim 4b

"They asked: What if one rents a house to his neighbour in the presumption of its having been searched, and [the tenant] finds that it has not been searched? Is it as a mistaken agreement or not? — Come and hear! For Abaye said: It is unnecessary of a town, where payment is not made [to others] for searching that a person is pleased to fulfil the mitzvah personally; but even in a town where payment is made for searching [it is okay], because one is pleased to fulfil a precept with his money."
-Pesachim 4b

Abaye divides towns into two types - those who do not pay people to fulfil mitzvot for them, and those who do. One could imagine that this is to say that there are those who love doing God's commandments, and those who find it onerous, or too difficult, and would rather just pay and be done with it.

In fact Abaye is not making this distinction - he assumes that all Jews are excited to fulfil God's word, in this case the commandment to search one's house for chametz, and thus even those who pay for other people to do it for them, are still excited to spend their money in this way.

I like that Abaye does not put a value judgement on paying others to do things for you, but recognises that people live in different socio-economic realities, with different cultural norms about how to fulfil one's obligations. Nevertheless these distinctions don't affect what should be at the heart of every Jewish person - a love of God and God's mitzvot.

While I am among the many people that complain that being Jewish is too expensive (and see my post yesterday about the nature of complaining), I hope that I can live up to Abaye's assumption, and be pleased to use my money for the sake of fulfilling the commandments.

What better use could there be?