(no subject)
Dec. 2nd, 2020 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 11
So on the second night of Pesach, which is the second Seder in Galus and just the second night of Pesach in Israel, we begin to count the Omer, the count of 49 days leading up to Shavuos. In modern practice, it's just a pure calendrical count, but in Temple days there was a Temple ritual that linked the Omer cycle to the harvest cycle. New wheat from the new harvest, an omer of it, was brought to the altar with a sacrifice. We'll deal more with that later, but while we're takling about removal of chametz the key point is that the new wheat harvest is potentially happening coincident with Pesach, when we're forbidden to eat leavened wheat. And this new wheat hasn't been watched with shemurah to make sure it's not leavened, so we're prohibited from eating the new wheat until after Pesach ends.
Rabbi Yehuda teaches at the end of the previous daf that there are three times when you search for chametz. The Gemara isn't clear if this means you must search three times, or you optionally can search up to three times. According to the latter opinion the idea of his teaching is that after the windows for the three searches are over, you can no longer search, as a chumra to make sure you don't handle chametz after the prohibition on eating it goes into effect. is this a valid chumra? But people handle the Omer grain before he second day of Pesach and that comes after the prohibition on eating chametz is in effect, so perhaps it's not a valid chumra.
The Gemara says there is a machlokess between Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda on that issue, but opposite to how you'd expect. Rabbi Meir says the people who handle the Omer grain on 14 Nisan are violating the wishes of the Chachamim, which would be in agreement with the other statement of Rabbi Yehuda. But Rabbi Yehuda here says it's okay for them to handle the Omer grain, so it seems there he has no problem with people handling chametz after they're forbidden to eat it? Rava says that he considers the Omer grain different because there are extra precautions in place to keep you from mistakenly eating it, but bedika would presumably be performed the same way either before or after the prohibition on eating it goes into effect, so Rabbi Yehuda considers his chumra valid.
What kind of extra precautions? Rava learns that the omer grain must be both harvested and then processed in special ways, first by hand-harvesting without tools and then grinding using a hand mill. Since one is doing it in the unusual way, they'll remember that it's special grain and not mistake it for food they can eat. I think that very like the idea is also that since one is using hand tools and not automating the process one will feel an extra connection to it and understand the holy status of the grain as destined for a Temple ritual.
Meanwhile, Abaye instead says that since the new grain of the omer is prohibited altogether until after the Omer ritual, people will inherently treat it separately, as opposed to ordinary chametz which doesnt have the special rules except on Pesach.
Okay, fine, we think Rabbi Yehuda believes you need to create an extra prohibition of separation unless there's already some distinction of separation inherent in the way a task is carried out... The Gemara wants this to be a general principle of Rabbi Yehuda, but there's a bunch of places where Rabbi Yehuda was lenient and didn't create such an extra prohibition. The Gemara goes through several examples in Shabbos or Chagim of Rabbi Yehuda's leniencies and explains why there's a distinction of separation already. I'm not going into all that detail.
I don't entirely understand the Gemara's intention here. The category of rules we're talking about is basically the entire conceptual space of Wall around the Torah, it seems to be asking if Rabbi Yehuda believes in that concept at all, which can't be right. It may be that there's some finer distinction they're trying to draw about when a law already is set up in a way that minimizes the risk of being led astray to violation by proximity to temptation and when you need an extra level of prohibition, but there isn't a clear conclusion. So I think what may be happening here is that the Gemara just wants to bring a bunch of unrelated laws and is using Rabbi Yehuda's opinions as a reason as a reason to bring them together.
The next Mishna is the timing of destroying your chametz. Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehuda, and Rabban Gamliel agree that you destroy it by the sixth hour of the day, but Rabbi Meir holds that you can eat up through the whole fifth hour, and Rabbi Yehuda holds that you can only eat through the fourth hour and then you hold it for the fifth hour to burn at the sixth hour. Rabban Gamliel says you stop eating chullin in the fourth hour but can keep eating terumah (if you're allowed to eat terumah) into the fifth hour, since you're not allowed to destroy it anyway.
The first Gemara on this is pretty cool. Remember, I've written about Talmudic timekeeping before, they didn't have digital watches so when they say hour what they mean is you take the day from sunup to sundown and divide it into twelve equal parts. And you're not going to be minute precise in your timekeeping ever, but by solar timekeeping and possibly with water clocks and things like that you can have a sense of what hour you're in at any given time.
The Gemara cites an unrelated Mishna on witnesses with slightly variant testimony. To prove any facts in court you need two witnesses who need to agree to combine their testimony, we won't convict on a single witness. What if two witnesses show up and their testimony agrees, but one says it happened on the second day of the month and one says it happened on the third? We accept their testimony as being in agreement by making the assumption that since calendrical alignment back then was not automatically calculated but was based on the rulings of the Beis Din, it's possible the two witnesses believed the dates were different when it was actually the same day. But if one says it happened on the third of the month and the other on the fifth, we don't combine their testimonies because there's no calendar mistake that could have them off by two days.
Similarly, if two witnesses testify and their testimony is in agreement but they differ by an hour in the time they say the events happen, we say fine, we don't have wristwatches, an hour is close enough to assume they saw the same thing and just calculated the time differently. But if they're off by two hours, Rabbi Meir says you disallow their testimony. Rabbi Yehuda says you allow their testimony even if it's off by two hours, unless the two hours are hour 5 and hour 7, because one is before mid-day and the other is after mid-day, and whereas it may be hard to judge the difference in the sky between hour three and hour five since they're just a question of how high in the sky the sun is, it's easy to tell whether the sun is in the East or the west.
Do you see where this is going? So the Gemara is trying to ask if this is the same machlokess between Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda, where Rabbi Yehuda believes it's possible to mistake times that are two hours apart and so he builds in an hour gap in the middle to make sure you're not eating chametz too late.
So on the second night of Pesach, which is the second Seder in Galus and just the second night of Pesach in Israel, we begin to count the Omer, the count of 49 days leading up to Shavuos. In modern practice, it's just a pure calendrical count, but in Temple days there was a Temple ritual that linked the Omer cycle to the harvest cycle. New wheat from the new harvest, an omer of it, was brought to the altar with a sacrifice. We'll deal more with that later, but while we're takling about removal of chametz the key point is that the new wheat harvest is potentially happening coincident with Pesach, when we're forbidden to eat leavened wheat. And this new wheat hasn't been watched with shemurah to make sure it's not leavened, so we're prohibited from eating the new wheat until after Pesach ends.
Rabbi Yehuda teaches at the end of the previous daf that there are three times when you search for chametz. The Gemara isn't clear if this means you must search three times, or you optionally can search up to three times. According to the latter opinion the idea of his teaching is that after the windows for the three searches are over, you can no longer search, as a chumra to make sure you don't handle chametz after the prohibition on eating it goes into effect. is this a valid chumra? But people handle the Omer grain before he second day of Pesach and that comes after the prohibition on eating chametz is in effect, so perhaps it's not a valid chumra.
The Gemara says there is a machlokess between Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda on that issue, but opposite to how you'd expect. Rabbi Meir says the people who handle the Omer grain on 14 Nisan are violating the wishes of the Chachamim, which would be in agreement with the other statement of Rabbi Yehuda. But Rabbi Yehuda here says it's okay for them to handle the Omer grain, so it seems there he has no problem with people handling chametz after they're forbidden to eat it? Rava says that he considers the Omer grain different because there are extra precautions in place to keep you from mistakenly eating it, but bedika would presumably be performed the same way either before or after the prohibition on eating it goes into effect, so Rabbi Yehuda considers his chumra valid.
What kind of extra precautions? Rava learns that the omer grain must be both harvested and then processed in special ways, first by hand-harvesting without tools and then grinding using a hand mill. Since one is doing it in the unusual way, they'll remember that it's special grain and not mistake it for food they can eat. I think that very like the idea is also that since one is using hand tools and not automating the process one will feel an extra connection to it and understand the holy status of the grain as destined for a Temple ritual.
Meanwhile, Abaye instead says that since the new grain of the omer is prohibited altogether until after the Omer ritual, people will inherently treat it separately, as opposed to ordinary chametz which doesnt have the special rules except on Pesach.
Okay, fine, we think Rabbi Yehuda believes you need to create an extra prohibition of separation unless there's already some distinction of separation inherent in the way a task is carried out... The Gemara wants this to be a general principle of Rabbi Yehuda, but there's a bunch of places where Rabbi Yehuda was lenient and didn't create such an extra prohibition. The Gemara goes through several examples in Shabbos or Chagim of Rabbi Yehuda's leniencies and explains why there's a distinction of separation already. I'm not going into all that detail.
I don't entirely understand the Gemara's intention here. The category of rules we're talking about is basically the entire conceptual space of Wall around the Torah, it seems to be asking if Rabbi Yehuda believes in that concept at all, which can't be right. It may be that there's some finer distinction they're trying to draw about when a law already is set up in a way that minimizes the risk of being led astray to violation by proximity to temptation and when you need an extra level of prohibition, but there isn't a clear conclusion. So I think what may be happening here is that the Gemara just wants to bring a bunch of unrelated laws and is using Rabbi Yehuda's opinions as a reason as a reason to bring them together.
The next Mishna is the timing of destroying your chametz. Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehuda, and Rabban Gamliel agree that you destroy it by the sixth hour of the day, but Rabbi Meir holds that you can eat up through the whole fifth hour, and Rabbi Yehuda holds that you can only eat through the fourth hour and then you hold it for the fifth hour to burn at the sixth hour. Rabban Gamliel says you stop eating chullin in the fourth hour but can keep eating terumah (if you're allowed to eat terumah) into the fifth hour, since you're not allowed to destroy it anyway.
The first Gemara on this is pretty cool. Remember, I've written about Talmudic timekeeping before, they didn't have digital watches so when they say hour what they mean is you take the day from sunup to sundown and divide it into twelve equal parts. And you're not going to be minute precise in your timekeeping ever, but by solar timekeeping and possibly with water clocks and things like that you can have a sense of what hour you're in at any given time.
The Gemara cites an unrelated Mishna on witnesses with slightly variant testimony. To prove any facts in court you need two witnesses who need to agree to combine their testimony, we won't convict on a single witness. What if two witnesses show up and their testimony agrees, but one says it happened on the second day of the month and one says it happened on the third? We accept their testimony as being in agreement by making the assumption that since calendrical alignment back then was not automatically calculated but was based on the rulings of the Beis Din, it's possible the two witnesses believed the dates were different when it was actually the same day. But if one says it happened on the third of the month and the other on the fifth, we don't combine their testimonies because there's no calendar mistake that could have them off by two days.
Similarly, if two witnesses testify and their testimony is in agreement but they differ by an hour in the time they say the events happen, we say fine, we don't have wristwatches, an hour is close enough to assume they saw the same thing and just calculated the time differently. But if they're off by two hours, Rabbi Meir says you disallow their testimony. Rabbi Yehuda says you allow their testimony even if it's off by two hours, unless the two hours are hour 5 and hour 7, because one is before mid-day and the other is after mid-day, and whereas it may be hard to judge the difference in the sky between hour three and hour five since they're just a question of how high in the sky the sun is, it's easy to tell whether the sun is in the East or the west.
Do you see where this is going? So the Gemara is trying to ask if this is the same machlokess between Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda, where Rabbi Yehuda believes it's possible to mistake times that are two hours apart and so he builds in an hour gap in the middle to make sure you're not eating chametz too late.