Maseches Kesuvos Daf 19
Jul. 28th, 2022 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 19
So we're talking about legal documents. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi teaches that you are not allowed to keep a shtar parua in your house. What does that mean? Say you need to borrow some money. There's no banks in those days, there's very little in the way of, like financial system. You go to some rich guy, the rich guy says "Okay, I'll lend you the money, you need to pay me back when you can, let's get a scribe to write a shtar ( a legal contract) with the terms of the loan." Arguably according to Torah law the rich guy even has an obligation to make this loan, the whole thing works on very different moral principles than modern day borrowing, but besides that, it works on very different mechanical terms. The shtar is all the magic of the system.
Let's say the loan's term passes and you don't want to pay it back, so you say "I never borrowed that money." Well, the rich guy goes to a Beit Din and says "No, you definitely borrowed the money, I have a piece of paper right here that says you borrowed the money and promised to pay it back." So "I never borrowed that money" isn't going to get you very far, especially if the sofer testifies that he wrote the shtar. Maybe instead you say "Yes, I borrowed the money, but I paid it back already." There's no forensic accounting evidence that you made the payment, there's no credit card record or bank statement with the cashed check, there's just your claim that you paid the money back against the shtar that the rich guy has. And though the Gemara acknowledges that for this reason, it's probably better if the rich guy only accepts the payment in the presence of witnesses, according to the law if you repay without witnesses it's still a valid payment. So ideally the solution is that when you are repaid, you have another document made, a receipt saying the debt was paid. But again this is not required, probably because lots of people were illiterate and access to sofrim was limited and the Rabbis wanted to make sure that contracts were still binding even when done without paperwork.
So back to R' Yehoshua ben Levi. His rule is an ethical best practice for the financial industry. The concern is that if a rich guy keeps a shtar around for a loan that was already repaid but which he never gave a receipt to the borrower when it was repaid, he may be tempted to go to a different Beis Din and say "See, you definitely borrowed the money, I have a piece of paper right here that says you borrowed the money and promised to pay it back" and try to get a court to order him to get paid again. So to remove the temptation to fraud, R' Yehoshua warns lenders essentially to keep clear and honest paperwork that cannot be used to cheat.
In a weird way, the whole thing reminds me of a recent Matt Levine bit about cheating on the CPA ethics exam. The actual CPA exam with all the math and so on, they have elaborate anti-cheating mechanisms in place to prevent cheating. Separately, CPA candidates must take an ethics exam. This is not considered a really essential part of being a CPA, apparently, because the tests have none of the elaborate anti-cheating mechanisms in place and it turns out that lots of people cheated on the ethics part of the exam. Levine got a lot of humor out of the irony of the story, but I also think there's something related to R' Yehoshua's argument here, that ethical restraints are not just about imposing rules like "Don't commit fraud", they're also about building structures in your life so that you just aren't presented with a lot of temptation to cheat, by living your life in such a way that the opportunities to commit fraud aren't there.
Daf 20
If you walk over a burial site, you are tamei. Nowadays this is not really a problem, because there's no Beis Hamikdash so tumah does not generally lead to aveirah, but back then it was a big problem. Especially because tumah is an ineffable spiritual taint, so even if you become tumah by accident and aren't aware of it, it still means you're bringing your impure body into the Beis Hamikdash and it's still a problem.
Also, apparently back then sometimes people would just be buried willy-nilly by the side of a road. So suppose you are walking outside town and you see a big pile of dirt, like a hole that's been dug up and then filled in. Either you're seeing a construction site/mining site, or you're seeing a burial site. You have no way of knowing. So the Gemara says don't walk over it, assume it's a burial site and you'd be impure.
Hold on, says the Gemara. If it's a relatively recent hole (say, you walked the same route last month and there was no hole), you can assume that you probably would have heard if someone died and was buried along the road. And the same would not be true of random construction. So it's probably not a burial site, you can walk over it. This obviously presumes that you're a local and in the know, if you're a traveler you should not assume. The Gemara also asks if maybe this only applies in a city where it's known that sometimes corpses are buried outside of the cemetery, but if there's a cemetery that everyone always uses, you can assume it's just construction always. Also, sometimes people would bury amputated hands on the road outside a cemetery (?)
So we're talking about legal documents. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi teaches that you are not allowed to keep a shtar parua in your house. What does that mean? Say you need to borrow some money. There's no banks in those days, there's very little in the way of, like financial system. You go to some rich guy, the rich guy says "Okay, I'll lend you the money, you need to pay me back when you can, let's get a scribe to write a shtar ( a legal contract) with the terms of the loan." Arguably according to Torah law the rich guy even has an obligation to make this loan, the whole thing works on very different moral principles than modern day borrowing, but besides that, it works on very different mechanical terms. The shtar is all the magic of the system.
Let's say the loan's term passes and you don't want to pay it back, so you say "I never borrowed that money." Well, the rich guy goes to a Beit Din and says "No, you definitely borrowed the money, I have a piece of paper right here that says you borrowed the money and promised to pay it back." So "I never borrowed that money" isn't going to get you very far, especially if the sofer testifies that he wrote the shtar. Maybe instead you say "Yes, I borrowed the money, but I paid it back already." There's no forensic accounting evidence that you made the payment, there's no credit card record or bank statement with the cashed check, there's just your claim that you paid the money back against the shtar that the rich guy has. And though the Gemara acknowledges that for this reason, it's probably better if the rich guy only accepts the payment in the presence of witnesses, according to the law if you repay without witnesses it's still a valid payment. So ideally the solution is that when you are repaid, you have another document made, a receipt saying the debt was paid. But again this is not required, probably because lots of people were illiterate and access to sofrim was limited and the Rabbis wanted to make sure that contracts were still binding even when done without paperwork.
So back to R' Yehoshua ben Levi. His rule is an ethical best practice for the financial industry. The concern is that if a rich guy keeps a shtar around for a loan that was already repaid but which he never gave a receipt to the borrower when it was repaid, he may be tempted to go to a different Beis Din and say "See, you definitely borrowed the money, I have a piece of paper right here that says you borrowed the money and promised to pay it back" and try to get a court to order him to get paid again. So to remove the temptation to fraud, R' Yehoshua warns lenders essentially to keep clear and honest paperwork that cannot be used to cheat.
In a weird way, the whole thing reminds me of a recent Matt Levine bit about cheating on the CPA ethics exam. The actual CPA exam with all the math and so on, they have elaborate anti-cheating mechanisms in place to prevent cheating. Separately, CPA candidates must take an ethics exam. This is not considered a really essential part of being a CPA, apparently, because the tests have none of the elaborate anti-cheating mechanisms in place and it turns out that lots of people cheated on the ethics part of the exam. Levine got a lot of humor out of the irony of the story, but I also think there's something related to R' Yehoshua's argument here, that ethical restraints are not just about imposing rules like "Don't commit fraud", they're also about building structures in your life so that you just aren't presented with a lot of temptation to cheat, by living your life in such a way that the opportunities to commit fraud aren't there.
Daf 20
If you walk over a burial site, you are tamei. Nowadays this is not really a problem, because there's no Beis Hamikdash so tumah does not generally lead to aveirah, but back then it was a big problem. Especially because tumah is an ineffable spiritual taint, so even if you become tumah by accident and aren't aware of it, it still means you're bringing your impure body into the Beis Hamikdash and it's still a problem.
Also, apparently back then sometimes people would just be buried willy-nilly by the side of a road. So suppose you are walking outside town and you see a big pile of dirt, like a hole that's been dug up and then filled in. Either you're seeing a construction site/mining site, or you're seeing a burial site. You have no way of knowing. So the Gemara says don't walk over it, assume it's a burial site and you'd be impure.
Hold on, says the Gemara. If it's a relatively recent hole (say, you walked the same route last month and there was no hole), you can assume that you probably would have heard if someone died and was buried along the road. And the same would not be true of random construction. So it's probably not a burial site, you can walk over it. This obviously presumes that you're a local and in the know, if you're a traveler you should not assume. The Gemara also asks if maybe this only applies in a city where it's known that sometimes corpses are buried outside of the cemetery, but if there's a cemetery that everyone always uses, you can assume it's just construction always. Also, sometimes people would bury amputated hands on the road outside a cemetery (?)