Masechet Keritot Daf 2
Aug. 26th, 2019 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 2
Keritot (Kerisos) is about the Biblical punishment of karet and the atonements for the sins that incur it. What is karet? It's not entirely clear. It means "cut off", and in general it's a punishment inflicted by Hakadosh Baruch Hu rather than by an Earthly court. Some say it means dying young, some say it means dying childless, some say it's a social excision, meaning a person is cut off from their community. It could also mean being cut off in the the World to Come. It's a miraculous punishment that doesn't look miraculous. (Rabbi Linzer spoke urgently about the importance of not getting trapped in the logical fallacy of saying that since karet may take the form of someone dying young, that just because they died young it must be because they committed a sin and incurred karet. That would itself be a dire sin of lashon hara.)
There's a variety of sins that incur it, most of which involve conceptions of kedusha or are otherwise in some way essential to what it means to be a Jew. Some of these sins also incur the death penalty or lashes, some exclusively incur karet. In the cases where there is another penalty inflicted by a temporal court, it's a question of if karet still applies, or if karet only exists to cover cases where there aren't adequate witnesses or evidence for a human court to convict. Is the point of karet that even when human courts exact punishment, God still exacts true and just punishment as well, or is the point that in the cases when human courts fail, God is still providing true and just punishment in their place?
Masechet Keritot is located in the Seder of Kodashim almost in spite of itself. If one commits a sin that would incur karet if done intentionally (b'mezid), but one does it accidentally (b'shogeg), then it can be atoned with a chatat offering, a sin offering. So Masechet Keritot isn't entirely about sins that incur karet, it's significantly about the accidental commission of such sins. And I think it also covers other cases where the Chatat offering is incurred, leaving one to sort of wonder why it's not called Masechet Chatat, which would be a more appropriate name for a tractate in Kodashim.
The Mishna opens with a list of the sins that will under discussion. A numbered list. This leads to the Gemara's first question, which is why the list is numbered. A purely formal, procedural question, but kind of an interesting one because the Mishna has numbered lists a lot.
One answer is that it's to teach that each of the sins listed is a separate enumerated entity. This is taught in the context that if one has a lapse of memory of halacha and commits all thirty six sins, one incurs thirty six chatat offerings of atonement. Whereas I think karet is a thing that can only happen once, either you're in a state of spiritual excision from the nation or you're not, so you might think that it needn't matter if you commit one sin from the list or multiple. Thus the Mishna teaches that each sin on its own is a dire violation of the law, separate from any of the others. The comparison is drawn, which I think is more obvious, to Shabbos, which also in the Mishna has an enumerated list of the 39 forms of forbidden melacha. Here, you might think that the chet is being mechalel Shabbos, so the Mishna by separately enumerating all 39 forms of melacha teaches that each is a separate chet that does get combined for purposes of punishment.
A different answer is that the enumeration exists to exclude other possibilities. Discussion of this idea lets the Gemara bring in several related cases of chatat that will be discussed later in the tractate in more detail, but involve disagreements about whether there are five scenarios or four scenarios of a particular edge case about offering chatat. The Mishna in these cases specifically identifies four scenarios, in order to rule against the minority opinion.
Keritot (Kerisos) is about the Biblical punishment of karet and the atonements for the sins that incur it. What is karet? It's not entirely clear. It means "cut off", and in general it's a punishment inflicted by Hakadosh Baruch Hu rather than by an Earthly court. Some say it means dying young, some say it means dying childless, some say it's a social excision, meaning a person is cut off from their community. It could also mean being cut off in the the World to Come. It's a miraculous punishment that doesn't look miraculous. (Rabbi Linzer spoke urgently about the importance of not getting trapped in the logical fallacy of saying that since karet may take the form of someone dying young, that just because they died young it must be because they committed a sin and incurred karet. That would itself be a dire sin of lashon hara.)
There's a variety of sins that incur it, most of which involve conceptions of kedusha or are otherwise in some way essential to what it means to be a Jew. Some of these sins also incur the death penalty or lashes, some exclusively incur karet. In the cases where there is another penalty inflicted by a temporal court, it's a question of if karet still applies, or if karet only exists to cover cases where there aren't adequate witnesses or evidence for a human court to convict. Is the point of karet that even when human courts exact punishment, God still exacts true and just punishment as well, or is the point that in the cases when human courts fail, God is still providing true and just punishment in their place?
Masechet Keritot is located in the Seder of Kodashim almost in spite of itself. If one commits a sin that would incur karet if done intentionally (b'mezid), but one does it accidentally (b'shogeg), then it can be atoned with a chatat offering, a sin offering. So Masechet Keritot isn't entirely about sins that incur karet, it's significantly about the accidental commission of such sins. And I think it also covers other cases where the Chatat offering is incurred, leaving one to sort of wonder why it's not called Masechet Chatat, which would be a more appropriate name for a tractate in Kodashim.
The Mishna opens with a list of the sins that will under discussion. A numbered list. This leads to the Gemara's first question, which is why the list is numbered. A purely formal, procedural question, but kind of an interesting one because the Mishna has numbered lists a lot.
One answer is that it's to teach that each of the sins listed is a separate enumerated entity. This is taught in the context that if one has a lapse of memory of halacha and commits all thirty six sins, one incurs thirty six chatat offerings of atonement. Whereas I think karet is a thing that can only happen once, either you're in a state of spiritual excision from the nation or you're not, so you might think that it needn't matter if you commit one sin from the list or multiple. Thus the Mishna teaches that each sin on its own is a dire violation of the law, separate from any of the others. The comparison is drawn, which I think is more obvious, to Shabbos, which also in the Mishna has an enumerated list of the 39 forms of forbidden melacha. Here, you might think that the chet is being mechalel Shabbos, so the Mishna by separately enumerating all 39 forms of melacha teaches that each is a separate chet that does get combined for purposes of punishment.
A different answer is that the enumeration exists to exclude other possibilities. Discussion of this idea lets the Gemara bring in several related cases of chatat that will be discussed later in the tractate in more detail, but involve disagreements about whether there are five scenarios or four scenarios of a particular edge case about offering chatat. The Mishna in these cases specifically identifies four scenarios, in order to rule against the minority opinion.