Maseches Shekalim Daf 11-13
Apr. 5th, 2021 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 11
The Mishna continues discussing things you can buy with the half shekel funds, and also what you're allowed to do with the shirayim, the money left over at the end of the year when all the things that you needed to buy with the half shekel have been bought. In general it forms a fund used for certain Temple maintenance functions, but there's some other uses that are debated. Rabbi Yishmael says that some of the money was used to invest in goods to sell at a profit, for the benefit of the Temple, sort of like large institutions now have endowment funds. Rabbi Akiva says are you kidding me, of course the Temple didn't take holy money and gamble it on the ancient stock market. The Yerushalmi says maybe they actually agree that it's okay to invest the money provided it's properly hedged, so there's some counterparty assuming all the downside risk. In other words, Rabbi Akiva isn't concerned that the Temple is participating in base commerce, he's concerned that the Temple will lose consecrated money, and provided there's no risk of losing money he's fine. Artscroll confusingly suggests that the Bavli had a different take on this Rabbi Akiva, that he was concerned about the Temple participating in base commerce, but I thought the whole point was there was no Bavli on this masechta.
Also I am desperately resisting the urge to make a base commerce/beis commerce pun. And failing, clearly.
Daf 12
Lots of boring technical stuff about Temple offering logistics. But the gist of it that actually is kind of interesting is this: There are multiple pools of money and assets at the Temple dedicated for different functions and they're guarded not only by fiscal safeguards but also by ritual safeguards. Taking an asset dedicated to Temple maintenance and using it for a sacrifice is a violation not just of a general fiduciary duty but of the proper use of sanctified materials.
The problem with this is that sometimes assets end up in the wrong pool because of a mistake or an edge case, and then what do you do? You can't just shift something from one pool to the other, as you would a bookkeeping mistake, because the asset was sanctified for a specific purpose. You could just leave the asset to sit in a closet until it dies/rots away, but then you're wasting it.
So the Rabbis came up with workarounds that you can sometimes do. So let's say there's material in the general temple maintenance fund that you'd like to use for a purpose that must be paid for out of the Terumas Halishka, the withdrawal from the half shekel box. The general procedure is that you deconsecrate the consecrated goods by an exchange with a Temple worker who can accept Temple maintenance funds for their work and then you buy the goods back from them with the proper Terumas Halishka funds. It's procedurally more complicated than that (though at least one position in the Yerushalmi is that it isn't actually more complicated than that, halahically, but they made it more complicated in order that there would be a clear step by step procedure with less chance of error), and the discussion on this page of when you can and can't do it is clearly part of a larger topic in other masechtas (particularly Temurah, I think, the tractate on rectifying mistaken consecrations) because I barely followed a lot of it.
In some cases you can't do this deconsecration immediately, because it involves a perfect unblemished animal that if not for its misconsecration could be offered as a sacrifice. So you have to wait for it to get a blemish and then you can deconsecrate it.
Daf 13
This mishna, the last in Perek Dalet, has been alluded to earlier in the masechet, but it's laid out here in full and it is great. The Temple acts as a purchaser with the power of the state when it sends out RFQs, so the game is rigged. If the price of wheat went up after its RFQ was accepted by a seller, the seller must still sell at the cheaper price. But if the price of wheat went down, the seller must drop his price to match the new lower price. And if there's any damage to the wheat between contracting and delivery, the seller must make up for the loss. The Temple always gets the best rate no matter what.
Then the Yerushalmi cites a mitigating baraisa that says that yes, it's true that the Temple rigged the system, but the kohanim were honest and tried to pay immediately so the settlement period was as short as possible to minimize the chance of a seller getting screwed by this kind of thing. There weren't short sellers and derivatives brokers back then, you see, so the sellers weren't properly hedged.
The remainder of the daf is more historically interesting. The first Mishna of the new perek cites, for nonhalachic reasons, the 15 people who at some point held administrative roles in the Beis Hamikdash sphere of influence. There's an argument about whether it's the 15 best who ever held the job, at different points in history, or if it's the 15 who held it at the same time. One of the people is supposed Mordechai from the Megillat Esther story, so if that's the case, it would be listing the first 15 people to hold the titles in the second Beis Hamikdash, which has a certain sense to it.
And anyway this second theory leads to discussing some of the contributions of Ezra and Nehemiah to Torah scholarship and codification, which leads to asking, if Ezra and his circle were so influential in codification, what actually did Rabbi Akiva do that was so great? Klalot upratot, says the Gemara. Which I think means to say that according to this explanation, Ezra and his group did empirical codification... There are four rules that are actually eight for passing things from a private domain to a public domain, and the like. Whereas Rabbi Akiva did theoretical codification, these are the reason that these laws fall into this category, this is the overall system that explains halacha.
Then some Amoraim lament that whereas the Torah was so clear to these Gedolim, nowadays we know nothing. "If they were Angels, we are men. If they were men, we are donkeys."
I think this is really fascinating. There's a tendency in modern ultra-orthodox Talmudic scholarship to see everyone as sort of playing the same game, just teaching the laws of halacha down though the generations, but it seems clear to me here that the Amoraim here were aware of and struggling with their awareness of halachic study as an evolving art.
The Mishna continues discussing things you can buy with the half shekel funds, and also what you're allowed to do with the shirayim, the money left over at the end of the year when all the things that you needed to buy with the half shekel have been bought. In general it forms a fund used for certain Temple maintenance functions, but there's some other uses that are debated. Rabbi Yishmael says that some of the money was used to invest in goods to sell at a profit, for the benefit of the Temple, sort of like large institutions now have endowment funds. Rabbi Akiva says are you kidding me, of course the Temple didn't take holy money and gamble it on the ancient stock market. The Yerushalmi says maybe they actually agree that it's okay to invest the money provided it's properly hedged, so there's some counterparty assuming all the downside risk. In other words, Rabbi Akiva isn't concerned that the Temple is participating in base commerce, he's concerned that the Temple will lose consecrated money, and provided there's no risk of losing money he's fine. Artscroll confusingly suggests that the Bavli had a different take on this Rabbi Akiva, that he was concerned about the Temple participating in base commerce, but I thought the whole point was there was no Bavli on this masechta.
Also I am desperately resisting the urge to make a base commerce/beis commerce pun. And failing, clearly.
Daf 12
Lots of boring technical stuff about Temple offering logistics. But the gist of it that actually is kind of interesting is this: There are multiple pools of money and assets at the Temple dedicated for different functions and they're guarded not only by fiscal safeguards but also by ritual safeguards. Taking an asset dedicated to Temple maintenance and using it for a sacrifice is a violation not just of a general fiduciary duty but of the proper use of sanctified materials.
The problem with this is that sometimes assets end up in the wrong pool because of a mistake or an edge case, and then what do you do? You can't just shift something from one pool to the other, as you would a bookkeeping mistake, because the asset was sanctified for a specific purpose. You could just leave the asset to sit in a closet until it dies/rots away, but then you're wasting it.
So the Rabbis came up with workarounds that you can sometimes do. So let's say there's material in the general temple maintenance fund that you'd like to use for a purpose that must be paid for out of the Terumas Halishka, the withdrawal from the half shekel box. The general procedure is that you deconsecrate the consecrated goods by an exchange with a Temple worker who can accept Temple maintenance funds for their work and then you buy the goods back from them with the proper Terumas Halishka funds. It's procedurally more complicated than that (though at least one position in the Yerushalmi is that it isn't actually more complicated than that, halahically, but they made it more complicated in order that there would be a clear step by step procedure with less chance of error), and the discussion on this page of when you can and can't do it is clearly part of a larger topic in other masechtas (particularly Temurah, I think, the tractate on rectifying mistaken consecrations) because I barely followed a lot of it.
In some cases you can't do this deconsecration immediately, because it involves a perfect unblemished animal that if not for its misconsecration could be offered as a sacrifice. So you have to wait for it to get a blemish and then you can deconsecrate it.
Daf 13
This mishna, the last in Perek Dalet, has been alluded to earlier in the masechet, but it's laid out here in full and it is great. The Temple acts as a purchaser with the power of the state when it sends out RFQs, so the game is rigged. If the price of wheat went up after its RFQ was accepted by a seller, the seller must still sell at the cheaper price. But if the price of wheat went down, the seller must drop his price to match the new lower price. And if there's any damage to the wheat between contracting and delivery, the seller must make up for the loss. The Temple always gets the best rate no matter what.
Then the Yerushalmi cites a mitigating baraisa that says that yes, it's true that the Temple rigged the system, but the kohanim were honest and tried to pay immediately so the settlement period was as short as possible to minimize the chance of a seller getting screwed by this kind of thing. There weren't short sellers and derivatives brokers back then, you see, so the sellers weren't properly hedged.
The remainder of the daf is more historically interesting. The first Mishna of the new perek cites, for nonhalachic reasons, the 15 people who at some point held administrative roles in the Beis Hamikdash sphere of influence. There's an argument about whether it's the 15 best who ever held the job, at different points in history, or if it's the 15 who held it at the same time. One of the people is supposed Mordechai from the Megillat Esther story, so if that's the case, it would be listing the first 15 people to hold the titles in the second Beis Hamikdash, which has a certain sense to it.
And anyway this second theory leads to discussing some of the contributions of Ezra and Nehemiah to Torah scholarship and codification, which leads to asking, if Ezra and his circle were so influential in codification, what actually did Rabbi Akiva do that was so great? Klalot upratot, says the Gemara. Which I think means to say that according to this explanation, Ezra and his group did empirical codification... There are four rules that are actually eight for passing things from a private domain to a public domain, and the like. Whereas Rabbi Akiva did theoretical codification, these are the reason that these laws fall into this category, this is the overall system that explains halacha.
Then some Amoraim lament that whereas the Torah was so clear to these Gedolim, nowadays we know nothing. "If they were Angels, we are men. If they were men, we are donkeys."
I think this is really fascinating. There's a tendency in modern ultra-orthodox Talmudic scholarship to see everyone as sort of playing the same game, just teaching the laws of halacha down though the generations, but it seems clear to me here that the Amoraim here were aware of and struggling with their awareness of halachic study as an evolving art.