(no subject)
Nov. 30th, 2020 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 9
lannamichaels's post on this daf is excellent and worth a read
The Mishna says "Okay, you've done your ritual search for chametz and removed all chametz from your house in the evening of 14 Nisan, but there's now nearly a full day between now and the seder. How much should you worry that a weasel will wander into someone's house, steal chametz from them, and then bring it into your house?" The Mishna's answer is not at all, because if you start worrying about hypotheticals like this all you'll do is make yourself crazy.
I think it's worth recognizing that the weasel is not a weasel here. I mean, it's funny to think of it as an actual weasel, and it could be an actual weasel, but the weasel is any hypothetical you're going to get yourself worked up about. What if ninjas snuck into your house in the middle of the night to stash forbidden chametz in your house? What if pirates? What if birds? The Mishna says if you're worried about any possible scenario messing with you that you have no evidence for, stop worrying. The Mishna is interested in empirical reality.
The Gemara, being the Gemara, immediately says fine, but what if you actually did have evidence? Then you go from it being a hypothetical to it being a safek, and so the Gemara spends the whole daf on the sophisticated analysis that you can apply to how you respond to a safek. Which is kind of doubly funny given that the Mishna was talking about an imaginary weasel.
If it's not an imaginary weasel but a safek weasel then you can start thinking about it in terms of actual weasel facts. So the first case the Gemara cites involves questions of weasel behavior. You buy a house from a non-Jew and want to occupy it. Apparently there was a practice among some non-Jews that if a woman had a still-birth, she would bury it inside her house. This was a problem because a still-birth creates tumas ohel so anyone going in the house would become ritually impure. But there's a safek about whether or not in this particular case a still-birth happened and it was buried in the house, and you can't exactly go ask the goy because they're a goy (lol), so you have to act as if the house is contimated with tumas ohel. UNLESS. Unless there is a hole in the wall big enough for a weasel to get in, because you can assume that if a weasel could get in, it would go in and steal the still-born and eat it.
So the Gemara asks why you can't similarly assume that the weasel in this case ate the chametz? And its answer is that a weasel always completely eats meat, but doesn't necessarily completely eat bread. Note that this is a key difference between hypothetical weasel and safek weasel, with safek weasel you can actually think about its condition, with the hypothetical weasel that might be a ninja who knows if it eats bread or not?
Then the Gemara asks the question in a more abstract, significant way- isn't the other weasel case a safek on a safek? Since you have no idea whether there even was a still-birth in the house, the question of whether the weasel took away the still-birth is a safek in the other direction. Whereas in the Gemara's case of the weasel and the chametz (not the Mishna's case), there actually was real evidence that a weasel was there, we just don't know if it left chametz behind. So, great, we go off for a while on different analogous cases of safek on safek or safek on vaday.
Then Abaye shows up and says that the weasel somehow knows that it's the 14th of Nisan and intentionally hides chametz, and Rava makes fun of him and says "What, are weasels prophets now?", and they are the best frenemies ever, I love them and want all the fic. I think it's possible what Abaye is saying is that if the weasel shows up on 14 Nisan and comes into a house where all the chametz has been removed, it can tell something is different and may behave differently in ways that are inconvenient for us.
lannamichaels's post on this daf is excellent and worth a read
The Mishna says "Okay, you've done your ritual search for chametz and removed all chametz from your house in the evening of 14 Nisan, but there's now nearly a full day between now and the seder. How much should you worry that a weasel will wander into someone's house, steal chametz from them, and then bring it into your house?" The Mishna's answer is not at all, because if you start worrying about hypotheticals like this all you'll do is make yourself crazy.
I think it's worth recognizing that the weasel is not a weasel here. I mean, it's funny to think of it as an actual weasel, and it could be an actual weasel, but the weasel is any hypothetical you're going to get yourself worked up about. What if ninjas snuck into your house in the middle of the night to stash forbidden chametz in your house? What if pirates? What if birds? The Mishna says if you're worried about any possible scenario messing with you that you have no evidence for, stop worrying. The Mishna is interested in empirical reality.
The Gemara, being the Gemara, immediately says fine, but what if you actually did have evidence? Then you go from it being a hypothetical to it being a safek, and so the Gemara spends the whole daf on the sophisticated analysis that you can apply to how you respond to a safek. Which is kind of doubly funny given that the Mishna was talking about an imaginary weasel.
If it's not an imaginary weasel but a safek weasel then you can start thinking about it in terms of actual weasel facts. So the first case the Gemara cites involves questions of weasel behavior. You buy a house from a non-Jew and want to occupy it. Apparently there was a practice among some non-Jews that if a woman had a still-birth, she would bury it inside her house. This was a problem because a still-birth creates tumas ohel so anyone going in the house would become ritually impure. But there's a safek about whether or not in this particular case a still-birth happened and it was buried in the house, and you can't exactly go ask the goy because they're a goy (lol), so you have to act as if the house is contimated with tumas ohel. UNLESS. Unless there is a hole in the wall big enough for a weasel to get in, because you can assume that if a weasel could get in, it would go in and steal the still-born and eat it.
So the Gemara asks why you can't similarly assume that the weasel in this case ate the chametz? And its answer is that a weasel always completely eats meat, but doesn't necessarily completely eat bread. Note that this is a key difference between hypothetical weasel and safek weasel, with safek weasel you can actually think about its condition, with the hypothetical weasel that might be a ninja who knows if it eats bread or not?
Then the Gemara asks the question in a more abstract, significant way- isn't the other weasel case a safek on a safek? Since you have no idea whether there even was a still-birth in the house, the question of whether the weasel took away the still-birth is a safek in the other direction. Whereas in the Gemara's case of the weasel and the chametz (not the Mishna's case), there actually was real evidence that a weasel was there, we just don't know if it left chametz behind. So, great, we go off for a while on different analogous cases of safek on safek or safek on vaday.
Then Abaye shows up and says that the weasel somehow knows that it's the 14th of Nisan and intentionally hides chametz, and Rava makes fun of him and says "What, are weasels prophets now?", and they are the best frenemies ever, I love them and want all the fic. I think it's possible what Abaye is saying is that if the weasel shows up on 14 Nisan and comes into a house where all the chametz has been removed, it can tell something is different and may behave differently in ways that are inconvenient for us.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-30 08:33 pm (UTC)The Gemara, being the Gemara, immediately says fine, but what if you actually did have evidence?
This is really quite delightful! I'm enjoying reading!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-30 09:28 pm (UTC)"actual weasel facts" is now my second laugh of the day over this daf :D
WEASEL PROPHETS
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-30 09:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-30 09:59 pm (UTC)I don't think I've ever learned that daf but now I feel I must track it down immediately.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-30 10:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-30 10:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-30 10:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-30 10:09 pm (UTC)There was an article in the New Yorker a few months ago about a Danish physicist who studied eye lenses to carbon-date specimens. He was called as an expert in a forensics case when a teenager stumbled upon the bodies of some infants in his parents' freezer (!) that had been murdered two decades before and were outside the statute of limitations (!!). Less gruesomely, he also estimated the lifespan of the very long-lived Greenland shark.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-01 12:39 am (UTC)::dying::