Tuesday morning (part 2)

[cellio]

(Email post. LJ seems to be down?)

Another mishna we looked at Tuesday morning was Eduyot 5:6-7: Akabya ben Mehalalel made four rulings. (The two we could find were pickyune.) The rabbis told him to retract them and they'd put him in charge. He said "no can do; it'll look like I did it for the wrong reasons". So they ostracized him (the verb is "nidu"). As he was dying he told his son to retract those teachings; when the son asked "why didn't you do it?" Akabya gives a different answer: that he learned those teachings from a majority and was thus bound to follow them, but the son is not so bound. The son asks for an introduction (a reference?) to the rabbis and Akabya says no, you'll sink or swim on your own actions.

So, a few thoughts. First, the rabbis put him in an awful position; he couldn't accept that offer and got in trouble for declining. But there's got to be more to it; rabbis disagree with each other all the time in the talmud. (Even Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi, who compiled the mishna, is sometimes recorded as a minority opinion by it!) Shouldn't it have been sufficient for Akabya to stop teaching the things that had fallen out of favor? Why did he need to actively renounce them? I presume this is not the case of the elder who teaches falsely to inspire practice (which we talked about yesterday), because (1) they don't try him for a capital offense and (2) they're ready to make him their leader.

And why didn't Akabya make the same argument to them that he did to his son -- that he learned from a majority, and we follow the majority, and it's not his fault that a different majority is in charge now?

In sticking to his original teachings he seems to be saying that you've got to stand by what you see as truth -- but then he tells his son that he can do something different, that truth isn't absolute. I think it's not about truth; he's giving his son a legal out, perhaps making sure that his son never heard the teachings under the same conditions that he did.

We then turned to Yevamot 1:4, which resonates more strongly today. The jumping-off point is convoluted and I don't understand it (I'm not the only one), but we bypassed that to get to the meatier part. (Our professor described this tractate as kind of a "shell game"; it's about family relations and sometimes you have to diagram it to understand the issue of the second cousin's wife's half-sister's son, or whatever. Err, I made that example up.) Anyway...

Hillel and Shammai disagreed about almost everything, even in matters of who could marry whom, but yet there were still marriages between their houses. And they disagreed about kashrut, but they did not avoid handling each others' utensils. (For example, if a Hillel pot ended up mixed in with your Shammai pots and they touched, you didn't worry about whether your pot was at risk of being treif.)

The point seems to be that we treat people by the standards of their own traditions, not ours, if they are acting in good faith. If Hillel says his daughter is allowed to marry Shammai's son, Shammai has to consider her elligible. If Shammai eats in Hillel's house and Hillel says the food is kosher, that's good enough for Shammai. In both cases, this is true even if, in your house, the daughter wouldn't be elligible and the food wouldn't be kosher. This is a huge issue today, with people from one strain of Judaism saying that those from another aren't good enough (or their food isn't good enough or their prayer isn't good enough). We're used to judging others by our own standards, but what would happen if we all tried to judge each other by the others' standards? There might be a lot more harmony.

I asked if this was just about schools (or strains) of Judaism, or if the same argument applied to individuals. If someone of Beit Hillel says the food is kosher by Hillel standards, great. If Ploni says the food is kosher by his standards, do we similarly consider the food kosher? I asked the question but didn't get an answer. I know that some of my friends have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy and others use their own standards in that situation. I'm not sure what's right; Beit Hillel has the weight of Beit Hillel behind it, and the Satmar Chassidim have the weight of Satmar behind them, and the Reconstructionist movement has the weight of Reconstructionism behind it, but what has good old Ploni got? Is the difference in how well the standards are articulated? (That is, you can consult sources to understand what Hillel considers kosher, but not what Ploni does.)