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Mar. 25th, 2021 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 4
So I briefly mentioned the moneychangers yesterday but I think the big point is this:
The Torah says you have to pay a half-shekel as this tax. By the time of the Tannaim, this would be like if the Constitution said that you had to pay a tax in 18th century colonial shillings. Where the fuck are you getting shillings? Nobody cool is using ancient Israelite shekalim in the Tannaitic period.
So a business sprung up of selling people half-shekels. Moneychangers. You give them whatever the going rate for a half-shekel is, in modern currency, and they give you a half shekel. And then you give the half-shekel to the priest. And then you get clever and say wait a minute, these moneychangers are experienced at handling money, they do it professionally. Why add friction into the transaction by giving the half-shekel back to each individual and having every individual person do two transactions with two different people? Why not consolidate these two steps into one step where you give the moneychanger the money in modern currency and they put your name on a list and promise that they'll give your half-shekel to the priests, and give all the half-shekalim to the priests in one go? Much simpler.
Except not quite that. There's no money in this for the moneychangers in this model, so you don't just give them the going rate for a half shekel, you also give them a commission, called a kalbon. But the Rabbis weren't implementing evil death spiral capitalism so it was a regulated commission. Or rather, the whole point of chatzi shekel is that everyone in the nation who is obligated i giving the same amount, so you if different people are paying different commissions you lose the main theological lesson of thetax ritual. Today's daf discusses the regulation on the transaction fee.
There's a machlokess between the Tanna Kamma and Rabbi Meir about whether it was a per transaction rate, so if you paid for two people with one payment, could you be charged two fees (Rabbi Meir), or just one (Tanna Kamma). The Tanna Kamma's rule makes sense if it's a commission, it's reasonable to try to keep commission costs under control. If it's one transaction, it shouldn't cost the changer more if it's for two people, because they only have to change the money once. But we get some weirdness, because all agree that if someone who is permitted to give the half-shekel but not obligated in giving the half-shekel, like a woman, does an exchange, they can't be charged a fee at all. This doesn't make sense in understanding the kalbon as a commission, but it's consistent with Rabbi Meir.
Rabbi Meir think the kalbon may in practice serve as a commission, but that's not its fundamental function. Its fundamental function is a fudge to make sure that you've given the minimum amount of money if the going rate has been set too low. He says there's some Theoretical Ideal Amount of Gold that God showed Moses in a vision that is an actual HALF SHEKEL, and everyone is supposed to give that amount, but how are we supposed to know that our conversion rate to ancient Israeli half-shekels is perfectly accurate? It's just a market rate, it has no divine blessing. So everyone needs to give just a tiny bit more to make sure they didn't cheat God, and that's the point of the kalbon. Therefore if you have an actual chiyuv you need to pay the kalbon to make sure you paid a sufficient amount, and if you have no chiyuv you don't need to pay extra because you had no obligation to begin with. It's similar to a sugya in Maseches Kerisos I wrote about about the ketores, where you have a specific amount of each spice you burn, but you make sure you have an indefinable amount extra to meet the obligation.
Then Rav shows up in the Yerushalmi and says he has the solution to this apparent machlokess. If you pay for two people, you should pay three kalbons! This seems to contradict both previous opinions. Here's how he makes it work. He says the original Rabbi Meir position of two is actually based on a commission model after all. He says you create a Ticketmaster-style fiction that when you give a single full Shekel in payment to cover two people, the moneychanger theoretically gave you change and then took the change as payment for the second person. Two transactions in one, so two kalbuns. THEN you take Rabbi Meir's other rationale, that you need an extra indefinable amount to make sure you have the right weight, and you put that on top as the third kalbon, covering both people. And the Tanna Kamma agreed with Rabbi Meir about the first two kalbons, but when the Tanna Kamma said you only pay one kalbun, they were only talking about that third kalbon. Sounds machmir but okay.
Actually the problem with this is that it seems like you ought to apply this logic to the person who just gives their own chatzi shekel, and make them pay two kalbons as their commission, one as the commission and one for the indefinable extra. Not sure how to square this.
So I briefly mentioned the moneychangers yesterday but I think the big point is this:
The Torah says you have to pay a half-shekel as this tax. By the time of the Tannaim, this would be like if the Constitution said that you had to pay a tax in 18th century colonial shillings. Where the fuck are you getting shillings? Nobody cool is using ancient Israelite shekalim in the Tannaitic period.
So a business sprung up of selling people half-shekels. Moneychangers. You give them whatever the going rate for a half-shekel is, in modern currency, and they give you a half shekel. And then you give the half-shekel to the priest. And then you get clever and say wait a minute, these moneychangers are experienced at handling money, they do it professionally. Why add friction into the transaction by giving the half-shekel back to each individual and having every individual person do two transactions with two different people? Why not consolidate these two steps into one step where you give the moneychanger the money in modern currency and they put your name on a list and promise that they'll give your half-shekel to the priests, and give all the half-shekalim to the priests in one go? Much simpler.
Except not quite that. There's no money in this for the moneychangers in this model, so you don't just give them the going rate for a half shekel, you also give them a commission, called a kalbon. But the Rabbis weren't implementing evil death spiral capitalism so it was a regulated commission. Or rather, the whole point of chatzi shekel is that everyone in the nation who is obligated i giving the same amount, so you if different people are paying different commissions you lose the main theological lesson of the
There's a machlokess between the Tanna Kamma and Rabbi Meir about whether it was a per transaction rate, so if you paid for two people with one payment, could you be charged two fees (Rabbi Meir), or just one (Tanna Kamma). The Tanna Kamma's rule makes sense if it's a commission, it's reasonable to try to keep commission costs under control. If it's one transaction, it shouldn't cost the changer more if it's for two people, because they only have to change the money once. But we get some weirdness, because all agree that if someone who is permitted to give the half-shekel but not obligated in giving the half-shekel, like a woman, does an exchange, they can't be charged a fee at all. This doesn't make sense in understanding the kalbon as a commission, but it's consistent with Rabbi Meir.
Rabbi Meir think the kalbon may in practice serve as a commission, but that's not its fundamental function. Its fundamental function is a fudge to make sure that you've given the minimum amount of money if the going rate has been set too low. He says there's some Theoretical Ideal Amount of Gold that God showed Moses in a vision that is an actual HALF SHEKEL, and everyone is supposed to give that amount, but how are we supposed to know that our conversion rate to ancient Israeli half-shekels is perfectly accurate? It's just a market rate, it has no divine blessing. So everyone needs to give just a tiny bit more to make sure they didn't cheat God, and that's the point of the kalbon. Therefore if you have an actual chiyuv you need to pay the kalbon to make sure you paid a sufficient amount, and if you have no chiyuv you don't need to pay extra because you had no obligation to begin with. It's similar to a sugya in Maseches Kerisos I wrote about about the ketores, where you have a specific amount of each spice you burn, but you make sure you have an indefinable amount extra to meet the obligation.
Then Rav shows up in the Yerushalmi and says he has the solution to this apparent machlokess. If you pay for two people, you should pay three kalbons! This seems to contradict both previous opinions. Here's how he makes it work. He says the original Rabbi Meir position of two is actually based on a commission model after all. He says you create a Ticketmaster-style fiction that when you give a single full Shekel in payment to cover two people, the moneychanger theoretically gave you change and then took the change as payment for the second person. Two transactions in one, so two kalbuns. THEN you take Rabbi Meir's other rationale, that you need an extra indefinable amount to make sure you have the right weight, and you put that on top as the third kalbon, covering both people. And the Tanna Kamma agreed with Rabbi Meir about the first two kalbons, but when the Tanna Kamma said you only pay one kalbun, they were only talking about that third kalbon. Sounds machmir but okay.
Actually the problem with this is that it seems like you ought to apply this logic to the person who just gives their own chatzi shekel, and make them pay two kalbons as their commission, one as the commission and one for the indefinable extra. Not sure how to square this.