Maseches Ketubot 23-25
Aug. 13th, 2022 11:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI've fallen a bit behind but let's do a little catchup
Daf 23
Wiiiild story here. Captive Jewish women are returned to Nehardea and the father of Shmuel stations guards to watch them while the ransom is paid to their non-Jewish captors. His son, Shmuel, says "Why bother, surely they're already considered to have been raped when they were held by the non-Jews (and therefore forbidden to marry a Kohen, and possibly owed a smaller marriage price in their ketubah)?" The father of Shmuel says "You wouldn't say that if they were your own daughters." In other words, maybe there's some loophole we can figure out to restore their status, maybe we can find a witness to testify that they were never raped in captivity, for the moment let's do everything we can to protect their status in the meantime. And probably also in other words, Shmuel you unempathetic sack of crap, we have no idea what kind of torments these women endured in captivity, the least we can do is protect them from further torment right now!
Anyway, the Gemara says that as a result of Shmuel's father's statement, it became a curse and Shmuel's daughters were in fact later kidnapped by non-Jews, who brought them to Northern Israel to be redeemed. There, the daughters being exceptionally clever and well-trained in Jewish law told their captors "Before you ransom us, please let us go talk to the elders ourselves." They agreed and the daughters went to the elders and said "We are being held captive and we were not raped." This then allowed the principle we discussed where since they testified to their own captivity before any witnesses did, it's accepted as testimony, so when the daughters were ransomed, they were considered still eligible to marry Kohanim. And the Rabbis in town were so impressed that they were like, daaaaaaaaaamn, better marry our sons off to these amazing women right away.
So many takeaways you could get from this story. Wiiild.
Daf 24
The Gemara starts to get interested in the question of doubtful Kohanim. What's interesting to me here is the historical context of the question and its significance. The Gemara is written in the time of the second exile, so the Kohanim are not being used in the Temple service. The main significance of the Kohanim, then, is as symbols of the potential restoration of the Beis Hamikdash. You need to have Kohanim so that when we return to Eretz Yisrael and rebuild the Beis Hamikdash, bimhera b'yameinu, you'll have people to recover the Temple ritual, which the Chachamim clearly considered a reasonably near term possibility, bo mashiach. In the meantime, certain of the entitlements of the Kohanim, like the reishis hageiz and challah and terumah and chatzi shekel were still observed in some form, although it was disputed whether they were still d'oraysa obligations or merely d'rabbanan. And because it's d'rabbanan, maybe you allow a doubtful Kohen who does not have great documentation of their heritage but who has some evidence of being a Kohen, to receive terumah d'rabbanan.
You can be mekil because it's d'rabbanan, but here's the problem: If you believe that in just a few years you're moving back to the Big Time in Israel and you're going to need real, fully attested Kohanim, then you worry that you're creating a sort of paper trail of evidence that the dubious Kohanim were involved in Kohanic activities, so when they return to Israel they'll be able to say "Yes, I don't have any paperwork proving I'm a Kohen, but these witnesses can say that I was duchening or receiving terumah" so maybe you don't let dubious Kohanim do those things in Bavel that will set a bad precedent when moshiach comes.
To figure out what to do, they go to the book of Ezra, which descries what happened when the Jews returned to Israel after the first exile and restored the Beis Hamikdash. There were dubious Kohanim at that time, and Ezra and Nehemiah needed to figure out what to do, and apparently what they did was rule based on a Chazakah Gedolah, which is to say if there sufficient evidence to have a reasonable presumption that a person was a Kohen, then they were elevated to actually being a full Kohen. On the one hand, this seems like a straightforward application of the principle of chazakah, so the Gemara wants to sort of back off and say that all they actually did was say that if witnesses testified that there was a chazakah, they accepted it as a chazakah, but clearly the Gemara recognizes that what Ezra and Nehemiah did was a pretty aggressive move, because the spiritual consequences, both personal and national, of having invalid Kohanim performing the Avodah are dire.
Daf 25
Continuing the same topic (I actually threw some of the Daf 25 stuff into my Daf 24 writeup for clarity), when to establish people as Kohanim when their parental documentation is unclear. In a lot of places in exile, apparently, there would be a Beis Din that would decide who counted as a Kohen for purposes of local rituals like duchening, and they would evaluate evidence and authorize Kohanim. But the daf discusses how many of them were fairly liberal with their rulings. If someone had been given the first aliyah, the kohen's entitlement, then that was enough proof that people had treated them as a Kohen. And apparently Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi would even accept the testimony of a man's father that he was a Kohen, which is pretty extraordinary since normally we don't allow a family member to testify in a way that would benefit their close family.
Daf 23
Wiiiild story here. Captive Jewish women are returned to Nehardea and the father of Shmuel stations guards to watch them while the ransom is paid to their non-Jewish captors. His son, Shmuel, says "Why bother, surely they're already considered to have been raped when they were held by the non-Jews (and therefore forbidden to marry a Kohen, and possibly owed a smaller marriage price in their ketubah)?" The father of Shmuel says "You wouldn't say that if they were your own daughters." In other words, maybe there's some loophole we can figure out to restore their status, maybe we can find a witness to testify that they were never raped in captivity, for the moment let's do everything we can to protect their status in the meantime. And probably also in other words, Shmuel you unempathetic sack of crap, we have no idea what kind of torments these women endured in captivity, the least we can do is protect them from further torment right now!
Anyway, the Gemara says that as a result of Shmuel's father's statement, it became a curse and Shmuel's daughters were in fact later kidnapped by non-Jews, who brought them to Northern Israel to be redeemed. There, the daughters being exceptionally clever and well-trained in Jewish law told their captors "Before you ransom us, please let us go talk to the elders ourselves." They agreed and the daughters went to the elders and said "We are being held captive and we were not raped." This then allowed the principle we discussed where since they testified to their own captivity before any witnesses did, it's accepted as testimony, so when the daughters were ransomed, they were considered still eligible to marry Kohanim. And the Rabbis in town were so impressed that they were like, daaaaaaaaaamn, better marry our sons off to these amazing women right away.
So many takeaways you could get from this story. Wiiild.
Daf 24
The Gemara starts to get interested in the question of doubtful Kohanim. What's interesting to me here is the historical context of the question and its significance. The Gemara is written in the time of the second exile, so the Kohanim are not being used in the Temple service. The main significance of the Kohanim, then, is as symbols of the potential restoration of the Beis Hamikdash. You need to have Kohanim so that when we return to Eretz Yisrael and rebuild the Beis Hamikdash, bimhera b'yameinu, you'll have people to recover the Temple ritual, which the Chachamim clearly considered a reasonably near term possibility, bo mashiach. In the meantime, certain of the entitlements of the Kohanim, like the reishis hageiz and challah and terumah and chatzi shekel were still observed in some form, although it was disputed whether they were still d'oraysa obligations or merely d'rabbanan. And because it's d'rabbanan, maybe you allow a doubtful Kohen who does not have great documentation of their heritage but who has some evidence of being a Kohen, to receive terumah d'rabbanan.
You can be mekil because it's d'rabbanan, but here's the problem: If you believe that in just a few years you're moving back to the Big Time in Israel and you're going to need real, fully attested Kohanim, then you worry that you're creating a sort of paper trail of evidence that the dubious Kohanim were involved in Kohanic activities, so when they return to Israel they'll be able to say "Yes, I don't have any paperwork proving I'm a Kohen, but these witnesses can say that I was duchening or receiving terumah" so maybe you don't let dubious Kohanim do those things in Bavel that will set a bad precedent when moshiach comes.
To figure out what to do, they go to the book of Ezra, which descries what happened when the Jews returned to Israel after the first exile and restored the Beis Hamikdash. There were dubious Kohanim at that time, and Ezra and Nehemiah needed to figure out what to do, and apparently what they did was rule based on a Chazakah Gedolah, which is to say if there sufficient evidence to have a reasonable presumption that a person was a Kohen, then they were elevated to actually being a full Kohen. On the one hand, this seems like a straightforward application of the principle of chazakah, so the Gemara wants to sort of back off and say that all they actually did was say that if witnesses testified that there was a chazakah, they accepted it as a chazakah, but clearly the Gemara recognizes that what Ezra and Nehemiah did was a pretty aggressive move, because the spiritual consequences, both personal and national, of having invalid Kohanim performing the Avodah are dire.
Daf 25
Continuing the same topic (I actually threw some of the Daf 25 stuff into my Daf 24 writeup for clarity), when to establish people as Kohanim when their parental documentation is unclear. In a lot of places in exile, apparently, there would be a Beis Din that would decide who counted as a Kohen for purposes of local rituals like duchening, and they would evaluate evidence and authorize Kohanim. But the daf discusses how many of them were fairly liberal with their rulings. If someone had been given the first aliyah, the kohen's entitlement, then that was enough proof that people had treated them as a Kohen. And apparently Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi would even accept the testimony of a man's father that he was a Kohen, which is pretty extraordinary since normally we don't allow a family member to testify in a way that would benefit their close family.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-15 06:58 pm (UTC)WOW. What a story!
This is full of interesting stuff!