Blogging Daf Yomi

A couple of dapim into Masechet Berachos there's a passage where Rabbi Meir discusses being given a minor prophecy by the spirit of Elijah while praying in a ruin of Jerusalem. The Gemara seizes on this to discuss the laws regarding going into ruins of Jerusalem, viz: You're not supposed to do it. Why?

The Gemara gives three reasons.

One: Suspicion. Which is glossed by one translator as "[Sexual] suspicion" and by another as "Suspicion [of prostitution]". The overall theory is that you're going into this abandoned building you have no reason to go into, so probably it's frequented by unsavory types and used for illicit liaisons. Therefore even if you're not going in to participate in an illicit liaison or a drug deal or selling illegal merchandise, you still shouldn't go because if you're seen, people will suspect you of being involved in something like that.

Two: Danger of falling ceilings. It's a ruined building, so it stands to reason that there might be structural failures.

Three: Demons. Apparently the ruin might be haunted by demons and you'd be putting yourself at risk by going in.

The Gemara then discusses these reasons in more detail, interrogating the rules to see where the exceptions might be. jaiwithahat posted an interesting post a week ago about assuming a worst possible scenario and using it to test your logical position, and that's basically what the Gemara does. For example, what if you enter the ruin with a chaperon, so that you're above suspicion? What if it's a new ruin, so that you know it's still structurally sound? What if you are a morally strong person the demons can't attack? This, it concludes essentially, is why three separate distinct reasons were given. The Gemara isn't concerned with suspicion, demons, or structural failure on their own terms here, or it would have warned about those things, not about entering ruins. The Gemara is trying to find an exhaustive, no-excuses reason why one should never enter ruins.


freeradical42 has argued to me (not specifically on this topic) that there comes a point in your study of the ancient Rabbis' teachings where you will just have to face the fact that these great men (and very occasionally women) were wrong about how the world worked. They didn't know physics, they didn't know biology, they were extremely superstitious, and many of the Laws they bring out are based on their inaccurate knowledge. He argues that there will be moments where the only path forward is to disregard their teachings and dismiss the Rabbis as superstitious and backwards. And this is a classic example of such a case, with the Rabbis' claim that ruins are infested by demons. I think a little more humility is in order.

There is a school of thought called Charedism (the word means 'pious ones') that says that if the ancient Rabbis wrote about demons, that means that we are obligated to believe in demons. As a Modern Orthodox Jew I reject this. There is no evidence of the existence of demons and good arguments from the Bible on why we shouldn't believe in their existence. At the same time, there are lots of reasons why you shouldn't enter an ancient ruin in Jerusalem that wouldn't be politic to mention in writing. As symbols of Jewish unity the ruins of Jerusalem were potent. If Jews were seen entering it might spark accusations that they were plotting a rebellion. At the same time, the Rabbis weren't exactly in a position to write freely about ways to hide a rebellion. It's not all that unreasonable to suppose that 'demons' are a sort of code, a way to speak about dangers the ruins posed that weren't to be mentioned aloud. Additionally, it's not all that hard to speculate that the Rabbis wrote about demons BECAUSE they were limited in their knowledge of physics, but they understood that the world held dangers they didn't understand and needed a way to codify those unspecifiable fears. Just how it's not all that hard to imagine that descriptions of rhinoceroses could lead to ancients believing in unicorns- discovering rationality underlying a superstition can let us appreciate the rational basis for beliefs that we today reject as improbable from a position of greater knowledge. One doesn't need to reject the teachings of the Rabbis just because they write about demons.

The bottom line is, the Rabbis needed a language to explain the law of not entering ruins, and they found a language they found viable. And we can be uncomfortable with the invocations of demons, if we want we can seize this as a reason to ignore the decisions of the Rabbis, or we can try to understand where they were coming from, why they came to the conclusions they did, and thoughtfully learn what we can take out of the Rabbis' teachings despite their superstitions. Very, very occasionally I'll take the former approach, but mostly I prefer to take the latter.

(no subject)

The Newsroom... is getting better. I did not like the episode where Will had therapy, but then, I did not like the episode where Dan had therapy in Sports Night or the episode where Jed had therapy in The West Wing. The only good Sorkin therapy episode was "Noel", so it's not surprising I didn't like this one. The problem is that the episodic format expects a therapeutic breakthrough at the end of the episode, and mini-therapeutic breakthroughs at the commercial breaks, and this just doesn't make any emotional sense. It worked in "Noel", I think, partly because Leo and Josh!, but mostly because there was just a single emotional breakthrough and it made sense: Josh, you have PTSD. No daddy issues, no stress and the impossible burdens of job, no relationship stuff, just a physiological/neurological response to a specific event that Josh needed to acknowledge and then accept that he would have to learn how to manage.

Both before and after that episode were really good episodes. The Egypt episode looked at the emotions behind sending reporters into a dangerous situation. I loved Neal struggling with his freelancer gone missing. It was gutwrenching to watch his pride at bringing him in turn to shame and anger and then watch all of that get subsumed by his desperate desire to somehow, anyhow, fix the situation. And Don going off the handle at Elliot and then seeing him get hurt and desperately needed to atone was the first time I felt like Sorkin actually took Don seriously as a character. In a sense, I think this has been Season Zero of the West Wing, the year they didn't show us where drawers were glued shut by the previous administration and CJ didn't know how to manage a crisis for the national media and the whole ensemble hadn't meshed yet as a team. We're watching that process happen, and it's frustrating and not what attracted me to Sports Night and the West Wing, but on the other hand I always wished I had seen that part of the West Wing and I'm growing in pleasure that Sorkin is giving it to us now. They set Don up as the enemy, and then instead of making him like JJ from Sports Night, the 'voice of the network', they let him earn his way into the fold without compromising on his belief that news has to be commercial, also.

And then Will's pot brownie and the Osama Bin Laden killing... An episode about the sheer pleasure of being able to deliver good news. Of earning the right to give good news. The first few episodes were Sorkin as Quixote on a mission to civilize, but recently he's just been telling stories about how hard it is to tell news well, and that's all I ever wanted out of this show.