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Maseches Shabbos Daf 13
May. 28th, 2020 07:45 amThe first night of Shavuos has been one of my favorite Jewish observances the past few years because my town does it so well. The tradition is to stay up all night learning Torah, and all of the shuls in town have programs, with space to learn alone or with friends, but also with lectures on different aspects of Torah. In my town what that means is that each of the shuls' Rabbis prepares a single shiur, which they then wander around town delivering three or four times at different shuls. You can choose to stay in one shul and listen to whoever is speaking, or you can look at the overall town schedule and come up with a personal plan to catch all the speakers you want to catch. It's incredibly unifying, and I've grown to love wandering through town at 3 in the morning saying Gut Yom Tov to people bouncing from program to program.
Alas, we're not doing that this year, so last night they arranged for a Zoom learning session where each Rabbi in town spoke for half an hour. It was not the same, but it was lovely, and spiritually nourishing.
Daf 13
Ooh, this is a really interesting one. This starts the discussion of the 18 Enactments of Beis Shammai.
Shammai and Hillel were the leading sages of their Tannaitic generation. Says Wikipedia, Shammai lived approximately 50BCE - 30 CE, and Hillel lived approximately 110 BCE to 10 CE, so we're talking Roman conquest era but pre-destruction of the Temple. We're also talking overlap with the life of Jesus, so everyone knows just how politically contentious this period of history was. Hillel was also the, um... Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather of Yehuda HaNasi, who codified the Mishnah.
There was in general, says the Talmud, tremendous respect between Hillel and Shammai, but also significant disagreement between their schools of halachic thought, called Beis Hillel and Beis Shammai- the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. We just talked about a dispute between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammai about whether you can kill a louse on Shabbos on the last page. In general, Judaism holds by Beis Hillel's position on nearly everything that was disputed between the two schools.
But the Mishna on Daf 13 says that one day followers of both Rabbis got together in the house of Hananiah ben Hezekiah ben Garon, apparently an admired scholar and leader of the people. And for whatever reason, there were more members of Beis Shammai there than members of Beis Hillel, and that day they enacted 18 Rabbinic gezeirahs that, one presumes, otherwise we would have poskened according to Beis Hillel's position.
There is so much here that's fascinating. The insistence on privileging the position of the majority, even over the position that has seemingly better logical support, is a value that goes through much halachic literature, but it's almost never framed as "Let's just take a vote of whoever happens to be there." Majority in modern halachic thought is about consensus building, communicating ideas and trying to win supporters to your position until it's an unassailable fact that most people agree with your position.
But this was happening in a time of Jewish turmoil. Under the Romans, Jewish authority to administer their own laws was diminishing, there was a lot of pressure to collaborate or rebel, and there were lives at stake in the choices. A lot of the 18 Enactments of Beis Shammai have to do with decisions about ritual purity in the increasingly political Temple rite (Think about stories both in Christian scripture and in the Talmud of corruption and ignorance of the law among the hereditary Kohanic priesthood), and a lot of the rest have to do with decisions about the interactions between Jews and non-Jews. So this was a theological fight, but clearly the context of it was much more about choosing the path forward for Judaism under conquest. In those terms, it clearly seems to represent a precursor and opposition to the council of Yavneh, which shifted Judaism back in the other direction, toward a deemphasis on ritual purity and the Temple rite, in order to invent a decentralized Judaism to survive the loss of the Temple.
Alas, we're not doing that this year, so last night they arranged for a Zoom learning session where each Rabbi in town spoke for half an hour. It was not the same, but it was lovely, and spiritually nourishing.
Daf 13
Ooh, this is a really interesting one. This starts the discussion of the 18 Enactments of Beis Shammai.
Shammai and Hillel were the leading sages of their Tannaitic generation. Says Wikipedia, Shammai lived approximately 50BCE - 30 CE, and Hillel lived approximately 110 BCE to 10 CE, so we're talking Roman conquest era but pre-destruction of the Temple. We're also talking overlap with the life of Jesus, so everyone knows just how politically contentious this period of history was. Hillel was also the, um... Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather of Yehuda HaNasi, who codified the Mishnah.
There was in general, says the Talmud, tremendous respect between Hillel and Shammai, but also significant disagreement between their schools of halachic thought, called Beis Hillel and Beis Shammai- the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. We just talked about a dispute between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammai about whether you can kill a louse on Shabbos on the last page. In general, Judaism holds by Beis Hillel's position on nearly everything that was disputed between the two schools.
But the Mishna on Daf 13 says that one day followers of both Rabbis got together in the house of Hananiah ben Hezekiah ben Garon, apparently an admired scholar and leader of the people. And for whatever reason, there were more members of Beis Shammai there than members of Beis Hillel, and that day they enacted 18 Rabbinic gezeirahs that, one presumes, otherwise we would have poskened according to Beis Hillel's position.
There is so much here that's fascinating. The insistence on privileging the position of the majority, even over the position that has seemingly better logical support, is a value that goes through much halachic literature, but it's almost never framed as "Let's just take a vote of whoever happens to be there." Majority in modern halachic thought is about consensus building, communicating ideas and trying to win supporters to your position until it's an unassailable fact that most people agree with your position.
But this was happening in a time of Jewish turmoil. Under the Romans, Jewish authority to administer their own laws was diminishing, there was a lot of pressure to collaborate or rebel, and there were lives at stake in the choices. A lot of the 18 Enactments of Beis Shammai have to do with decisions about ritual purity in the increasingly political Temple rite (Think about stories both in Christian scripture and in the Talmud of corruption and ignorance of the law among the hereditary Kohanic priesthood), and a lot of the rest have to do with decisions about the interactions between Jews and non-Jews. So this was a theological fight, but clearly the context of it was much more about choosing the path forward for Judaism under conquest. In those terms, it clearly seems to represent a precursor and opposition to the council of Yavneh, which shifted Judaism back in the other direction, toward a deemphasis on ritual purity and the Temple rite, in order to invent a decentralized Judaism to survive the loss of the Temple.