daf bit: Ketuvot 40

[cellio]

(Preface: instead of doing another year of parsha bits I decided a few weeks ago to do teachings from the talmud, following the daf yomi cycle (even though I'll be doing this weekly rather than daily).)

In discussing laws related to marriage, the talmud raises the question of the precedence of positive and negative commandments. Rav Kahana says the positive commandment always supersedes the negative one, but Rabbi Zevid of Nehardea says this is only true when performing the negative commandment would make it impossible to perform the positive one. He gives the following example: it is forbidden to remove leprosy by surgery, but should it occur in a certain place, we are nonetheless required to perform the positive commandment of circumcission. (40a)

Comments

[dsrtao]

I have a suspicion that when Torah says leprosy -- tzaras? -- it's not the modern disease we call leprosy.

[cellio]

Oh, almost certainly not. (I was going to say tzara'at in my post, but that was an assumption -- I was working from a translation and hadn't hunted the word down in the Aramaic.)