Maseches Shekalim Daf 6-8
Mar. 29th, 2021 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretHappy Passover, hope everyone had meaningful and joyful Sedarim!
Daf 6
The whole big deal of chatzi shekel is that it's a regressive tax. Everyone, regardless of income and assets, pays the exact same half shekel coin. The Mishna considers a case where a person is poor enough that they have to struggle to set aside their chatzi shekel, so they get a box and whenever they have a bit saved they put a smaller coin into the box so that hopefully by the time it comes to give the half shekel they'll have enough in the box. Unfortunately they lost track of how much money they put in the box and by the time it comes time, they have too much money in the box. Why is this a problem? In effect, the putting money in a box was a vow about a future donation to the Beis Hamikdash, so you can't just redirect the excess to other things. All agree that if you phrase your vow carefully, saying "I will take the money for my half shekel from the money in this box," you're fine, the leftover is just money. But if you were less careful and just said "In this box I'm saving for my shekel", then all the money in the box is for the shekel. But you can't just give the excess for the shekel, because you're not allowed to give extra for the shekel. So instead you give the money to pay for extra sacrifices in the Temple, according to Shammai, and according to Hillel you can keep the extra money because as a general principle Hillel holds that if you make a vow about a donation to the Beis Hamikdash in error, you get the money back.
Daf 7
Continuing from the last daf, having gone through the halacha of having leftover money for the shekel, the Mishna detours to the halacha of having leftover money committed to other sacrifices. It depends on the exact sacrifice. For offerings that get classified as chatas offerings, the leftover money can't be used for anything else and it can be recovered the way according to Hillel the shekel leftover can, so it has to be given to the pool of money for extra sacrifices. And then money leftover for olah, has to be used for an olah, money for a shlamim must be used for a shlamim, and money fundraised for poor nazirs' redemption offerings must be used for other nazirs' offerings, but money dedicated to a specific nazir's offerings must be given to the pool of money for extra sacrifices.
It then moves on to really important, relevant questions about what happens when you raise money for a specific person and then the person doesn't need the money. There is a tension between several different issues- on the one hand there's all the issues surrounding vows, and there's an interest in not stealing money either from the donor or the donee, and there's also general questions of the best way to allocate charity funds in a community. The Yerushalmi says this fascinating thing, that you do not take money specifically raised to redeem one captive and use it to redeem another captive, but... if the leaders of the community decide to take the money and do something else with it, we don't object. There seems to be a sense that a donor should be aware that all money given to a third party fundraiser for tzedaka is inherently contingent the judgement of the fundraiser, it's not fully committed until it's in the hands of the oni! That's obviously hugely problemaic with respect to minimizing corruption, so there have to be limits, but negotiating the limits of that is really tricky and beyond the scope of the Yerushalmi's discussion.
Daf 8
The Mishna describes the process by which the money was donated in Yerushalayim. There were three large boxes, marked Aleph, Bet, and Gimel, or Alpha, Beta, Gamma according to R' Yishmael, and they were at different points in the city, and those were the places you could contribute your chatzi shekel. The boxes were three se'ah in size, which is a volume that Artscroll says is about 4-5 gallons.
The Yerushalmi then uses this sizing to solve a mystery from another Mishnah. There's a rule that on Shabbos you're allowed to move boxes of a certain size as long as it's for the purpose of making space for guests, but it's not clear what size the boxes are. The same word for box is used here, so the Yerushalmi concludes that the boxes are 3 se'ah here, too.
This then leads to discussing other places where you conclude the size restriction on some other halacha based on a different halacha. Relevant to Pesach, they discuss a halacha involving carrying an amount of concentrated wine on Shabbos outside an eruv. You're allowed to carry an amount of wine such that if you diluted it three to one with water, you'd fill a cup. How big is a cup? Well, that's answered by a different halacha involving the four cups of wine on Pesach.
The Gemara then asks if you have to drink the four cups in the way we normally do during a Seder, with various interruptions between the cups, and two cups before the meal and two cups after. The answer is no, because in Pesachim there's a place where it teaches that if you hear Hallel in shul on Erev Pesach before the meal, you're exempt from saying it during the Seder. So therefore you could drink them all in a row and meet your obligation. My dad was saying he thought that might actually be easier, to just chug all four cups and plow through the Seder blitzed.
Daf 6
The whole big deal of chatzi shekel is that it's a regressive tax. Everyone, regardless of income and assets, pays the exact same half shekel coin. The Mishna considers a case where a person is poor enough that they have to struggle to set aside their chatzi shekel, so they get a box and whenever they have a bit saved they put a smaller coin into the box so that hopefully by the time it comes to give the half shekel they'll have enough in the box. Unfortunately they lost track of how much money they put in the box and by the time it comes time, they have too much money in the box. Why is this a problem? In effect, the putting money in a box was a vow about a future donation to the Beis Hamikdash, so you can't just redirect the excess to other things. All agree that if you phrase your vow carefully, saying "I will take the money for my half shekel from the money in this box," you're fine, the leftover is just money. But if you were less careful and just said "In this box I'm saving for my shekel", then all the money in the box is for the shekel. But you can't just give the excess for the shekel, because you're not allowed to give extra for the shekel. So instead you give the money to pay for extra sacrifices in the Temple, according to Shammai, and according to Hillel you can keep the extra money because as a general principle Hillel holds that if you make a vow about a donation to the Beis Hamikdash in error, you get the money back.
Daf 7
Continuing from the last daf, having gone through the halacha of having leftover money for the shekel, the Mishna detours to the halacha of having leftover money committed to other sacrifices. It depends on the exact sacrifice. For offerings that get classified as chatas offerings, the leftover money can't be used for anything else and it can be recovered the way according to Hillel the shekel leftover can, so it has to be given to the pool of money for extra sacrifices. And then money leftover for olah, has to be used for an olah, money for a shlamim must be used for a shlamim, and money fundraised for poor nazirs' redemption offerings must be used for other nazirs' offerings, but money dedicated to a specific nazir's offerings must be given to the pool of money for extra sacrifices.
It then moves on to really important, relevant questions about what happens when you raise money for a specific person and then the person doesn't need the money. There is a tension between several different issues- on the one hand there's all the issues surrounding vows, and there's an interest in not stealing money either from the donor or the donee, and there's also general questions of the best way to allocate charity funds in a community. The Yerushalmi says this fascinating thing, that you do not take money specifically raised to redeem one captive and use it to redeem another captive, but... if the leaders of the community decide to take the money and do something else with it, we don't object. There seems to be a sense that a donor should be aware that all money given to a third party fundraiser for tzedaka is inherently contingent the judgement of the fundraiser, it's not fully committed until it's in the hands of the oni! That's obviously hugely problemaic with respect to minimizing corruption, so there have to be limits, but negotiating the limits of that is really tricky and beyond the scope of the Yerushalmi's discussion.
Daf 8
The Mishna describes the process by which the money was donated in Yerushalayim. There were three large boxes, marked Aleph, Bet, and Gimel, or Alpha, Beta, Gamma according to R' Yishmael, and they were at different points in the city, and those were the places you could contribute your chatzi shekel. The boxes were three se'ah in size, which is a volume that Artscroll says is about 4-5 gallons.
The Yerushalmi then uses this sizing to solve a mystery from another Mishnah. There's a rule that on Shabbos you're allowed to move boxes of a certain size as long as it's for the purpose of making space for guests, but it's not clear what size the boxes are. The same word for box is used here, so the Yerushalmi concludes that the boxes are 3 se'ah here, too.
This then leads to discussing other places where you conclude the size restriction on some other halacha based on a different halacha. Relevant to Pesach, they discuss a halacha involving carrying an amount of concentrated wine on Shabbos outside an eruv. You're allowed to carry an amount of wine such that if you diluted it three to one with water, you'd fill a cup. How big is a cup? Well, that's answered by a different halacha involving the four cups of wine on Pesach.
The Gemara then asks if you have to drink the four cups in the way we normally do during a Seder, with various interruptions between the cups, and two cups before the meal and two cups after. The answer is no, because in Pesachim there's a place where it teaches that if you hear Hallel in shul on Erev Pesach before the meal, you're exempt from saying it during the Seder. So therefore you could drink them all in a row and meet your obligation. My dad was saying he thought that might actually be easier, to just chug all four cups and plow through the Seder blitzed.