cellio | Tuesday morning

Tuesday morning started with davening, which was optional. (They made a point of saying that this is a study program and they don't assume everyone is religious and that's fine.) We got a minyan by the t'filah. The leader ended with a beautiful poem by Solomon ibn Gabriel (11th centuury Spain). I have a copy in Hebrew; I'll translate and post when I get home.

In the morning session we looked at several passages from mishna. (We're working forward in time in this class; tomorrow we'll do some gemara.) There are two broad approaches to text, the professor said: you can go verse by verse through scripture elaborating and deriving law, which is thorough but results in a hodge-podge, or you can gather up the various derived lessons and sort by topic, which is what the mishna set out to do. It's a worthy goal, but then the gemara came along and commented on each of those mishniyot, so the full talmud is back to the original chaos. :-) But hey, I enjoy the study either way, and if you actually want to jump straight to the answer (look something up), that's what law codes are for.

We began with Avot 5:17, which says that disputes for the sake of heaven (like Hillel versus Shammai) endure, but those not for the sake of heaven (like Korach) do not. What does it mean for a dispute to endure? The word for dispute -- makhleket (vowels approximate; I didn't writ them down) could also be translated as division or separation. There was some question of whether the dispute itself endures (remains unresolved), or just the significance of it. (We still talk about Hillel and Shammai, but not so much -- and rarely positively -- about Korach.)

We've got a couple Korach sympathizers in class, by the way. It made for a lively discussion. :-)

We went on to Eduyot chapter 1 (I don't have a mishna number), which asks why we record opinions that are overruled. It turned out that I asked the $64,000 question here: since people can sometimes follow minority opinions (legitimately), do we have to be consistent? If you say that you follow Rabbi Ploni in matter X, do you also have to follow Ploni in Y and Z? If so, it would be important to attribute everything. As I suspected, this is exactly the case -- and the instructor pulled out the gemara for Eiruvim (6b-7a), which says that if you follow Hillel you must always follow Hillel and likewise for Shammai. If you take the leniencies of both you are a rasha (evil person), and if you take the strictures of both you are a fool. (Heh. I think we all know people who should consider that last bit.)

Then we got to a juicy one: Sanhedrin 11:1-4, which talks about who is worthy of (a particular flavor of) the death penalty. There are, in fact, four methods of execution specified by the rabbis; this wasn't our focus, but I assume each group of crimes has some overriding theme. My study partner and I spent a little time trying to tease out what these ones (death by strangulation) had in common, but the larger group didn't talk about it. Here's the list: one who strikes his father or mother; one who kidnaps an Israelite; an elder who rebels against the court; the false prophet; a prophet for idolatry; one who lies with another's wife; one who testifies falsely about the daughter of a priest; one who lies "with such a one" (not sure what's meant here). (The best I could come up with for commonalities is that many, but certainly not all, of these can be characterized as people in positions of power who steal or deceive (deceit = theft of truth?).)

The passage we looked at goes into more detail on the elder who rebels against the court. This is one who, after hearing a judgement of the court, teaches to instruct practice. If he merely expounds an opinion contrary to the court's, or if he teaches something with no practical outcome, he's not liable to the death penalty. Further, if he teaches falsely about the content of torah he is not liable, but if he teaches falsely about the prescriptions of the sages, he is. Someone in our group thought that was arrogance, placing the value of rabbinic law above the written torah, but I think there's a simpler explanation (confirmed by the professor): everyone has access to the torah (if nothing else through the regular public readings), but most people don't have access to the rulings of the sages. If you say (to use the example given in the mishna) that there's no such thing as t'fillin, people will think you're stupid or crazy. If you say that each one has five (rather than four) compartments, a matter covered only in rabbinic law, you're likely to fool some people.

(This passage seems to shed more light on the earlier one about Hillel/Shammai versus Korach. Korach was definitely trying to instruct practice, but the Hillel-Shammai disputes were often for the sake of heaven.)

The mishna goes on to describe the timing of the sentence. Rabbi Akiva says that the guilty is held in Jerusalem until the next festival (when everyone makes pilgrimage) and executed then (on the festival!), with the proof-text "All the nation shall hear and fear and do no more presumptuously" (Deut 17:13). Rabbi Yehudah says to carry out the sentence and send out messengers to publicize it. The excerpt we were given does not include his reasoning; a response to Akiva's proof-text seems obvious to me and I'm wondering why it wasn't used. That is, the verse says "[they] shall hear", not "they shall see", so this does not imply a requirement for eye-witnesses.

Y'know, this stuff is completely esoteric, unlikely to have direct practical applications for me, and I don't care. I love trying to follow the paths through this system of reasoning all its own. It is irrelevant to me that the Sanhedrin (the only court that can carry out these sentences) has been disbanded for over 1900 years.

There was one more interesting passage this morning, Eduyot 5:6-7, and more midrash this afternoon, but it's getting late so I'm going to have to save that for later.

Oh, one tidbit in the category of "things I would have known if I'd thought about it": you know how the torah tells us that Paro's daughter named Moshe that for "I drew him out of the water"? The word "moshe" is an active participle, not a passive one; it means "he who draws out [of water]". You know, like Moshe leading the people through the sea of reeds later. :-)

This helps illustrate why people who grew up with a Jewish education sometimes don't know, or realize, things I've learned. Yes, learning as an adult is more thorough, but it's also the case that you often don't stop to question things you think you already know. When I learned that bit of torah I didn't know any Hebrew, so I internalized the explanation without examining it. By the time I'd learned enough Hebrew grammar to understnad participles, I'd long since forgotten the application of that to Moshe's name -- until someone pointed it out to me. I don't know more than some of my friends; I point things out like this, often in the form of questions (because I am far more likely to have questions than answers).

Tuesday morning

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