Pesachim 15b - Put your money where your heart is

Said a certain old man to him: They cared about a substantial loss, but they did not care about a slight loss.

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.

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.