Daf Yomi Sanhedrin

Here we go again...

Daf 2

The Torah commands Israel to establish courts and enforce justice, but isn't as clear on how to regulate the courts. Masechet Sanhedrin lays out the rules by which courts, both civil and criminal, are regulated. It's not immediately clear to what extent these rules are derived from the Torah or word of God transmitted orally from Sinai, and to what extent these rules are just rules that made sense to the Rabbis as being just and fair and appropriate. A mix, I think.

The first Mishna is about the number of judges required to adjudicate different issues. Typically the division is that civil/monetary/status issues are decided by a Beis Din of 3 judges and potentially capital cases are decided by a Sanhedrin of 23 judges. There are civil issues of greater import that are decided by a court of 5 or 9 judges, and cases of national significance are decided by the Great Sanhedrin of 71 judges. The Mishna is also clearly using this as an opportunity to lay out a list of all of the different kinds of court cases that can exist because rather than laying out some broad systematic principle of this is what makes a three judge case, the Mishna lists out all the different types of cases and individually says that they are judged by three judges. The first daf just goes through the whole first perek of the Mishna, which is unusual and means it's a little hard to hold onto everything when moving at daf yomi pace. I'm not going to go through all the cases mentioned, I assume a lot of them will come back in the Gemara going forward.

I do want to note that cases of raping an unmarried woman are judged by a three judge panel solely on the economic restitution due her father, which is disgusting. I could say more, but I don't intend to talk about it today.

Why 71 on the Great Sanhedrin? The Torah model is Moshe's council of elders, who numbered 70, plus Moshe makes 71. These numbers will always be odd because an even court could lead to a tie vote. Rabbi Yehuda says the Great Sanhedrin is only 70. R' Streinsaltz's gloss is that this is because Moshe did not count as part of the Zakenim, which maybe means that all Rabbi Yehuda is arguing is that similarly the Nasi has the 71st vote but isn't technically on the Sanhedrin. But he could also mean that as a matter of history the Second Temple Sanhedrin only had 70, or that the Third Temple Sanhedrin will for unclear reasons only have 70. R' Rosner brings a hasidic vort that the reason a Sanhedrin is 70 is to emphasize the significance of them being zakenim- it's ideally a group of 70 septuagenarians, because our minds grow and become wiser with time and the best justice comes from experience. And also somehow the fact that as our bodies deteriorate, our minds get stronger is a testimony to our immortal souls and a proof that therefore true justice comes from Hashem. Of course there are plenty of 70 year old assumes, it'll be interesting to see if they Gemara grapples with how to balance things with youthful perspectives. Seems unlikely.

Why 23 on a lesser Sanhedrin that decides capital cases? The basic idea comes from midrashic interpretation of the law of the goel hadam, the family avenger who is allowed to hunt down and kill the person who murdered his relative. The Torah is apparently envisioning this in a sort of tribal law setup where there aren't national courts and a stable criminal code with government law enforcement, so if someone is murdered, it's a tribal/familial obligation to execute justice or else the murderer will just go about their business. Therefore the goel makes a testimony of his intention to kill the murderer in front of his tribe, and only then can he go out and kill. The Torah uses the word edut twice in referring to this testimony, and we use the same gezerah shavah used to derive the size of a minyan to say say this means the goel's testimony must be in front of at least two minyans or 20 judges. We then jump to 22 because separately the Torah warns not to convict based on a rabim, and since that two minyanim concept would allow a person to be convicted based conceptually on a single minyan worth of people and that feels uncomfortably like convicting based on a rabim, we bump it up to 22 so that it's more than just a minimum crowd size. And that then becomes 23 so there can't be a tie.

The metahistorical concept here, though, is that the Torah is dealing with a society wracked by cycles of tribal revenge killings and comes up with a way to sanction these cycles while limiting them, and the Mishna is going a step further by trying to limit tribal violence altogether by unifying that tribal authority into a national legal system where the Beis Din is the only authorized institution that can decide if an execution will be carried out. The goel rather than being an agent of tribal rage is coopted by being deputized an authorized law enforcement official, enforcing the court's justice rather than his own personal sense of justice.

The Mishna concludes by asking how many people must there be in a town with a lesser Sanhedrin of 23 that can hear capital cases. One opinion is 120 people, with no explanation, which I assume is just a legal logic of that's enough people that you can be tried by people who are not your close friends or enemies. The other opinion is it must be a town of at least 230 people based on Moshe's rule in Shoftim that there be a shofet for every ten people, so 23 dayanim requires at least 230.

Hadran Alach Masechet Raskin

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel by Ellen Raskin

My foray into the Inheritance Games seems to have sent me down a full on Raskin reread, which is never a bad time? But this was something of a disappointment, though not a total disappointment. There are lots of delightful characters, clever wordplay abounds, and the book sustains itself on a perpetual motion machine of dark absurdities- there are many of the Raskin trademarks here. But Noel's identity and the resolution of the book's mystery just leaves too much that doesn't quite line up, because we never see how Leon became Noel and what his rejection of the family heritage means to him. At best we could say this is a book about coming to terms with the fact that sometimes mysteries don't give you satisfying answers.

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

I don't know how many dozens of times I've read this, and I always find new details. It holds up remarkably well to rereads.

I was struck this time by the way the word 'mean' recurs, and how it is something of a subtle counterbalance to Chris's conclusion that Sam Westing is a good man. Turtle openly aspires to be seen as mean, and of course this leads her down the Eastman path as much as anything. I do think that mean does not mean bad, mean is the opposite of kind rather than the opposite of bad. Mean seems to mean something along the lines of willing to act knowing that it will cause others pain, and it's not hard to imagine scenarios where this can be morally good, but it's also profoundly uncomfortable in that brilliant Raskin way.

Also, I was at a Celtics game last week and it was Armed Services week or something and they actually dug up a recording of America the Beautiful that included the May God Thy Gold Refine verse. All quotations are from the Bible or Shakespeare.

Figgs & Phantoms

I don't think I knew what to do with this one as a kid and I think I understood a little more this time around, but definitely not most. Some of it, the Capri adventure particularly, reminded me of Pinkwater's Lizard Music, which I reread a few months ago. There is surrealist energy. A lot of it, like, Mysterious Disappearance, has the same kind of puzzly vibes as The Westing Game but I'm never able to quite suss out the puzzles.

It seemed very much preoccupied with what we think others think about us, and detangling those multiple layers of perception and misperception to figure out how to be in community. But set against that is the family legend of Capri, which is ultimately about the belief that you don't belong here where you are, you belong somewhere else that is perfect for you. Somehow in the ending Mona finds some way to balance these competing ideas, but it's not as clear to me what her balance is.

The Tattooed Potato and other clues

This was always my second favorite Raskin, and still true this time around. I liked that it is set in a real place unlike Westing Game and Figgs & Phantoms- Raskin's 1970s NYC is very specific and well figured. But it is such a sad and lonely story. Everyone in the story is sad and everyone is lonely and everyone is searching for something they lost, and most of them don't find what they're looking for. In a way, Edgar Sonneborg wins and there is maybe beauty in that. This is a story about a young woman learning that adulthood means living with profound sadness.

I think this book is intricate in the way that The Westing Game is and in which I would like to believe Figgs & Phantoms is even though I can't resolve its intricacies. Everything that happens serves multiple functions and most of those secondary and tertiary functions are not obvious at first glance. But while figuring out what GarSon means is similar to figuring out that Westing = Eastman, the latter discovery feels a lot more triumphant. Sometimes you're not sure a mystery is better off solved.