Shekalim 3
Mar. 24th, 2021 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 3
One of the other administrative/ritual tasks the Beis Din did in Adar besides announcing the obligation of the half shekel was checking grave markers and making sure they were remarked if they'd been damaged over the winter. This seems to have been a somewhat more impermanent marker than we think of today- a number of marked, probably not very large, stones (at least two, but if you just do one you've fulfilled your obligation), yes, but also just some lime (the stone powder, not the fruit) laid on the outer boundaries of the burial site. So the stones could have blown over or been damaged, and the lime almost certainly washed out, and needs to be reset periodically. There's two possible reasons for doing this in Adar, first is that you do this after the winter rainy season ends, the other is that Pesach is coming up, a lot of people who most of the time don't care if they are or aren't tamei will need to be tahor to eat Korban Pesach, and those people will be traveling in unfamiliar places to get to Yerushalayim, so it's particularly important to make sure nobody accidentally walks over a grave site.
The interesting thing to me is that the exclusive reason given by the Yerushalmi for the obligation of marking graves an obligation to warn someone that they may become tamei. I would have thought there would at least be some mention of the importance of giving kavod to the dead, but nope. A kohen is forbidden entirely to get exposed to tumas mes, and an ordinary Yisroel is allowed to take on tumas mes but not to eat kodshin while in a state of tumah, and violating either of those is a very serious sin incurring kares, so it's important to warn if one might walk over a burial site. Nowadays the kohen prohibition is arguably d'rabbanan and there's no kodshin for Yisroelim to eat, so this is not a big concern of ours. But we still consider marking graves to be an important religious imperative, because it shows the honor we regard our dead.
The boundary itself you lay out and mark should be outside of the area of tumah, so that a person checking the boundaries of the line will not become tamei, but only someone who crosses over the line. If there's a sort of disruption like a plow furrow in between the markers on two sides of a burial site you can walk through the disruption and assume that it's actually two graves and the plow furrow is marking the other side. I get the impression that burial sites weren't standardized in size and shape the way they are in a modern cemetery. Also, the Yerushalmi is talking about burial processes hundreds of years earlier in the Temple period, which were not necessarily the same as its contemporary burial procedures.
But I am kind of hung up on the absolute lack of mention of the value of kavod to the dead in this discussion. It discusses burying just a skull and spinal cord. It mentions burying just some human flesh without bones. All sorts of things that we would not think of as being respectful are all presented in this technical discussion of the civil responsibilities to make sure people were able to avoid tumas mes, and no consideration of honor and dignity.
I think it is, of course, indirectly part of the discussion, though. At least in a modern context, whenever we think about tumah and taharah we're thinking about the rationales behind tumah, how tumah is associated with life force and changes in the condition thereof, and I think the whole point of being careful about how we contact the dead is that we understand that loss of life is incredibly serious and needs to be treated respectfully.
Anyway, we move on to who exactly is obligated in the half shekel. The half-shekel does two things primarily at one time, recall- It is both fundraiser to pay for repair of the Beis Hamikdash, and also it is a census. You take the number of half-shekalim you have and you therefore also know how many eligible people there are in the nation, barring cheats. So the interest in collecting as much money as possible competes with the interest in who is important and interesting enough to count. So who gives the half-shekel? Men over the age of twenty who are Jewish enough. Which is both a squishy category, and also offensive to modern sensibilities. Do women have to give a half-shekel? Of course not, they're barely people, why would the Beis Din want to count them?
Ha, I am salty. Women, minors, and Hebrew slaves are permitted to give the half-shekel, but not obligated. Which is weird in terms of the half-shekel as census, how can you have a reasonable census where you have a class of people who can be counted if they want to be counted? But I think the kinds of thinkers about Talmud I am most sympathetic to would say this shows how the Rabbis are thinking about the half-shekel in terms of identification as Jews and recognizing that in Torah terms, minors and women (I am setting aside the analysis of the slave for the moment) exist in a sort of ambiguous state of obligation and therefore an ambiguous position with respect to Jewish identity... Do they have a Jewish identity of their own, or is their Jewish identity defined entirely by their relationship to their parents or spouses?
Meanwhile, non-Jews and Kutim, the Samaritans who obey a version of halacha that sometimes overlaps with Jewish halacha and sometimes doesn't, are not permitted to offer the half-shekel. Which I think points not only to these questions of who is a Jew, but also to the fact that the half-shekel is a sort of consecrated money dedicated to the Temple service, and people who are not initiated into the covenant are not able to participate in this consecration.
The last thing I want to consider is connected to this, a Mishnaic argument about whether or not Kohanim are obligated in the half shekel. The Kohanim argue that they're not for precisely the same reason that goyim are not obligated in it- Kohanim can't participate in the national consecration of money! What? The argument is that since they're the beneficiaries of the consecration, since they will eat some of the sacrifices purchased with the money, they can't contribute to the half-shekel because you can't contribute a sacrifice you're going to personally benefit from, it's not a sacrifice. The rejection of this is fascinating, it constructs a sort of national Jewish identity outside of identity as Kohen or Levi or Yisroel, that all belong to, and which all contribute the half-shekel on behalf of, so therefore the Kohen-as-Kohen is able to benefit from the contribution of themself as Kohen-as-Jew. Which I find a really striking and powerful idea of national destiny and united interest.
There's also some good detail about Money Changers in the Temple that clearly has relevance to certain Christian tropes, but I don't feel like I have a good enough handle on the Christian side of it to be able to render these passages well.
One of the other administrative/ritual tasks the Beis Din did in Adar besides announcing the obligation of the half shekel was checking grave markers and making sure they were remarked if they'd been damaged over the winter. This seems to have been a somewhat more impermanent marker than we think of today- a number of marked, probably not very large, stones (at least two, but if you just do one you've fulfilled your obligation), yes, but also just some lime (the stone powder, not the fruit) laid on the outer boundaries of the burial site. So the stones could have blown over or been damaged, and the lime almost certainly washed out, and needs to be reset periodically. There's two possible reasons for doing this in Adar, first is that you do this after the winter rainy season ends, the other is that Pesach is coming up, a lot of people who most of the time don't care if they are or aren't tamei will need to be tahor to eat Korban Pesach, and those people will be traveling in unfamiliar places to get to Yerushalayim, so it's particularly important to make sure nobody accidentally walks over a grave site.
The interesting thing to me is that the exclusive reason given by the Yerushalmi for the obligation of marking graves an obligation to warn someone that they may become tamei. I would have thought there would at least be some mention of the importance of giving kavod to the dead, but nope. A kohen is forbidden entirely to get exposed to tumas mes, and an ordinary Yisroel is allowed to take on tumas mes but not to eat kodshin while in a state of tumah, and violating either of those is a very serious sin incurring kares, so it's important to warn if one might walk over a burial site. Nowadays the kohen prohibition is arguably d'rabbanan and there's no kodshin for Yisroelim to eat, so this is not a big concern of ours. But we still consider marking graves to be an important religious imperative, because it shows the honor we regard our dead.
The boundary itself you lay out and mark should be outside of the area of tumah, so that a person checking the boundaries of the line will not become tamei, but only someone who crosses over the line. If there's a sort of disruption like a plow furrow in between the markers on two sides of a burial site you can walk through the disruption and assume that it's actually two graves and the plow furrow is marking the other side. I get the impression that burial sites weren't standardized in size and shape the way they are in a modern cemetery. Also, the Yerushalmi is talking about burial processes hundreds of years earlier in the Temple period, which were not necessarily the same as its contemporary burial procedures.
But I am kind of hung up on the absolute lack of mention of the value of kavod to the dead in this discussion. It discusses burying just a skull and spinal cord. It mentions burying just some human flesh without bones. All sorts of things that we would not think of as being respectful are all presented in this technical discussion of the civil responsibilities to make sure people were able to avoid tumas mes, and no consideration of honor and dignity.
I think it is, of course, indirectly part of the discussion, though. At least in a modern context, whenever we think about tumah and taharah we're thinking about the rationales behind tumah, how tumah is associated with life force and changes in the condition thereof, and I think the whole point of being careful about how we contact the dead is that we understand that loss of life is incredibly serious and needs to be treated respectfully.
Anyway, we move on to who exactly is obligated in the half shekel. The half-shekel does two things primarily at one time, recall- It is both fundraiser to pay for repair of the Beis Hamikdash, and also it is a census. You take the number of half-shekalim you have and you therefore also know how many eligible people there are in the nation, barring cheats. So the interest in collecting as much money as possible competes with the interest in who is important and interesting enough to count. So who gives the half-shekel? Men over the age of twenty who are Jewish enough. Which is both a squishy category, and also offensive to modern sensibilities. Do women have to give a half-shekel? Of course not, they're barely people, why would the Beis Din want to count them?
Ha, I am salty. Women, minors, and Hebrew slaves are permitted to give the half-shekel, but not obligated. Which is weird in terms of the half-shekel as census, how can you have a reasonable census where you have a class of people who can be counted if they want to be counted? But I think the kinds of thinkers about Talmud I am most sympathetic to would say this shows how the Rabbis are thinking about the half-shekel in terms of identification as Jews and recognizing that in Torah terms, minors and women (I am setting aside the analysis of the slave for the moment) exist in a sort of ambiguous state of obligation and therefore an ambiguous position with respect to Jewish identity... Do they have a Jewish identity of their own, or is their Jewish identity defined entirely by their relationship to their parents or spouses?
Meanwhile, non-Jews and Kutim, the Samaritans who obey a version of halacha that sometimes overlaps with Jewish halacha and sometimes doesn't, are not permitted to offer the half-shekel. Which I think points not only to these questions of who is a Jew, but also to the fact that the half-shekel is a sort of consecrated money dedicated to the Temple service, and people who are not initiated into the covenant are not able to participate in this consecration.
The last thing I want to consider is connected to this, a Mishnaic argument about whether or not Kohanim are obligated in the half shekel. The Kohanim argue that they're not for precisely the same reason that goyim are not obligated in it- Kohanim can't participate in the national consecration of money! What? The argument is that since they're the beneficiaries of the consecration, since they will eat some of the sacrifices purchased with the money, they can't contribute to the half-shekel because you can't contribute a sacrifice you're going to personally benefit from, it's not a sacrifice. The rejection of this is fascinating, it constructs a sort of national Jewish identity outside of identity as Kohen or Levi or Yisroel, that all belong to, and which all contribute the half-shekel on behalf of, so therefore the Kohen-as-Kohen is able to benefit from the contribution of themself as Kohen-as-Jew. Which I find a really striking and powerful idea of national destiny and united interest.
There's also some good detail about Money Changers in the Temple that clearly has relevance to certain Christian tropes, but I don't feel like I have a good enough handle on the Christian side of it to be able to render these passages well.