Seeking Ferret

Daf 17

There were thirteen tables in the Beis Hamikdash for various purposes. Some of them were used for preparing sacrifices to be offered on the altar, others were used for holding the tools used in offering sacrifices. Two of the tables were used for the shulchan for the lechem panim, the loaves of bread that always sat in the Beis Hamikdash. One of these two shulchanim was marble, the other was gold, and the Mishna says that they first put the bread on the marble shulchan and then transferred it to the gold one.

The loaves of bread were left out in the Temple for a week, and famously they never got stale because of a miracle. The Yerushalmi cites a baraisa claiming that the marble shulchan was actually silver, which seems to be because silver was a precious metal and the author of the baraisa believed that it was more appropriate to honor the lechem panim by putting it on silver rather than marble. But R' Yose teaches in the name of R' Shmuel ben Yitzchak that it was actually marble for practical reasons: Silver is a better conductor of heat than marble, in the hot sun the silver shulchan would heat the bread faster and make it go bad.

But wait a minute. Silver, gold, or marble, bread is going to go stale in a week of sitting out on a table in the open. It's not per se a 'bigger miracle' if God makes the lechem panim not go stale on a silver table. R' Yehoshua ben Levi answers Ein mazkirin ma'aseh nisim. We don't depend on a miracle. Which I love so much. They're in the Beis Hamikdash, where miraculous things happen on a daily basis, where you are closer to God than anywhere on the planet, but you don't go fishing for a miracle, you put the bread in the place where it has the best chance of not getting stale on its own and miraculously the bread doesn't go stale.

Daf 18

If you're a zavah, or if you've given birth, before you're able to become ritually pure and permitted to your husband again, you have to offer a pair of birds as a sacrifice. Apparently for the sake of efficiency, it wasn't like you just brought your birds and handed them to the Kohen and he offered them right then and there. You put money in a bin and got a token and you gave your token to a clerk, and the clerk gave all the tokens to the Kohen and the Kohen offered all the bird sacrifices for the day in one go. We're discussing this because we're discussing all the money collecting bins in the Beis Hamikdash that weren't for the Chatzi Shekel.

Rabbi Yehudah gets very concerned about the problem of intermixing the coins. As is discussed elsewhere, if you designate birds as a bird sacrifice and then before you can offer them, you die, the birds can't be offered as a sacrifice, and they need to be set aside to die. But what if we're in this efficient scenario where you collect all the money for the birds to be offered in one go, and in between the money collection and the sacrifice, one of the women who put money in dies?

You're not permitted to offer her sacrifice, but how do you know which coins were hers, which birds were hers, which sacrifice is forbidden among all the permitted sacrifices? So potentially you have to say that since one of the sacrifices is forbidden and you don't know which one, you can't offer any of the sacrifices involving money in the collecting bin. This is an especially big problem because apparently the Kohanim went around telling women don't worry, you can rely on the sacrifice being performed, so at nightfall you will be tahor. What if this scenario happens, a woman dies before her sacrifice can be offered, all of the sacrifices are therefore not offered, and numerous other women have relations with their husbands when they are not actually tahor? Serious problem.

The Rabbis have no problem by basically saying look, the money's fungible. All the money in the collecting bin is the same, pluck out four zuzim and declare "These were the ones that were going to buy the birds for the woman who died, we will destroy them and use the rest for sacrifices." Rabbi Yehudah has a big problem with this! He says you can't do that, each woman's money has individual sanctity toward their offering. His solution is to say don't have a collecting bin at all for these bird offerings, have everyone individually deal with their own bird. The Rabbis seem to have dealt with it by ignoring Rabbi Yehudah and just making a communal announcement that if this ever happens, this is what they'll do, so that everyone putting money in the bin has kavanah that their money sort of counts for everyone and if someone dies it's okay. Rabbi Yehudah seems unhappy.

Daf 19

What if you find a coin on the floor in the Beis Hamikdash, which is apparently full of different collecting bins full of money, each of which has a different dedicated purpose and many of which are considered meilah if used for some other purpose? You look for the nearest bin and say "Ah, it must have been intended for that bin!" If it's equidistant, you go for the bin that does the least halachic damage. The Mishna goes through a lot of scenarios in all cases trying to figure out what the least halachic damage means. So for example, if it's between the new Shekel bin and the bin for shirayim, the shekels left over from last year used for Temple repairs, you put it in the bin for shirayim because it was possibly going to end up there anyway if it was intended for the Shekel bin but didn't end up being used, whereas you're not allowed to take shirayim and put it in the Shekel bin.

I'm not really sure it's mathematically possible to be 'equidistant' in reality, so maybe it's a question of the lack of precision in their measurement instruments, or maybe the point isn't actually to resolve what to do in the equidistant case, the point is to establish these orders of priority to demonstrate how these bins of money interrelate in terms of accounting.

Daf 20

Continuing on what to do with stuff found on the ground, the Gemara retreads some stuff from Maseches Chullin on what you do when you find unmarked meat on the ground. I think this discussion provides good clarity on the fact that there are actually two safeks here:

1. Is the meat owned by a particular person, or can you take it?
2. Is the meat kosher?

This can become confusing because both are questions of circumstance, and in some cases a particular circumstance can influence the answer to both questions. So some of the cases the Gemara discusses, it sort of answers both questions at once, making it harder to tease out the specific issues that it is weighing.

Daf 21

More on stuff found on the ground. Spit! Saliva is a liquid that transmits tumah. If someone spit in the street and you stepped in it, how do you know if you have become tamei? Says the Mishna, you do it based on a chazakah depending on where you are and when you are. If you're in Jerusalem, and it's a festival, you can assume pretty much everyone has purified themselves for the festival and so the spit if it's found in the middle of the street is tahor, because anyone with the misfortune to be in Jerusalem during a festival but who has become tamei will take to the sides of the street to avoid contaminating anyone else. But apparently during the rest of the year, people who were tahor would take to the sides of the street to avoid potentially running into someone who was tamei in the middle of the street, so if you step on spit in the middle of the street you presume you are now tamei.

Tomorrow I"YH we finish Shekalim. Virtual siyum y'all?

Daf 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.

Daf 9

Rabban Gamliel, who was Nasi and also just generally incredibly rich, and who was famously so disrespectful that the other sages removed him as Nasi and replaced him with Rabbi Elazar "I am like a man of seventy years" ben Azarya until he apologized to Rabbi Yehoshua... had a special annoying custom involving Chatzi Shekel. See, the whole point of Chatzi Shekel is that everyone's coin, no matter how rich they are, counts equally. Even if they don't actually use your coin to buy sacrifices and it just becomes part of the leftover money used for the maintenance of the Beis Hamikdash, your contribution still earns you equal zechus. Not good enough for Rabban Gamliel. He still needs to get special consideration as a rich and powerful and important person. So when did he give his Chatzi Shekel? He waited until they were withdrawing the money to buy the sacrifices, and he made eye contact with the person withdrawing the money, and then he tossed his coin so it would land on top of the pile and would be clearly his so the person withdrawing would be sure to use his coin to buy sacrifices with. Even though technically it didn't matter, he still had to throw his weight around to get special treatment. Proving that the 1% play by different rules than the rest of us.

Daf 5

lannamichaels made the point that she conceptually thinks of 'tithes' different from 'taxes'. In at least one sense, this is right. Maaser is hekdesh, there are special rules about how you can handle it and what you can do with it. Taxes are just money, they're treated like money.


Anyway, a lot of tithes you can just deal with locally by giving them to your nearest Kohen or Levi, and some tithes you need to deal with personally by bringing the animal or food to Yerushalayim to eat/sacrifice/etc... But the Chatzi Shekel needs to go to the Beis Hamikdash, so it can be used for the expenses of the Beis Hamikdash, but you can send it indirectly with a shaliach.

What happens if the shaliach carrying all the money for a bunch of townsfolk is robbed on his way to the Temple? Is it considered as if the half-shekel has already been given to the Beis Hamikdash, or do you need to pay another half-shekel?

The halacha is that two weeks before each of the shalosh regalim, the Kohanim withdraw money to buy sacrifices. At that point, it's considered that all money given for chatzi shekel, even money that hasn't actually physically been put into the Temple treasury, is considered given to the Kohanim. But before that, it's still the person's money until it reaches the Temple treasury. So if the shaliach is en route robbed before the withdrawal, the senders need to contribute again. After the withdrawal, they don't. The Gemara then starts to figure out what the shaliach is responsible for in terms of making good on the loss, and to whom.

As is usually the case in this kind of halacha, it depends on whether the shaliach is paid or not... If paid, they have a greater level of obligation to protect what they're transporting. But there's an added wrinkle in the case where the withdrawal has happened already because then the money is the property of the Temple treasury, a sort of corporate identity, and that's a different (lesser) kind of obligation than a shaliach's obligation to an individual person. The Gemara ultimately concludes that there's a Rabbinic gezeirah to treat it the same way as a loss to an individual person.

Daf 3

One of the other administrative/ritual tasks the Beis Din did in Adar besides announcing the obligation of the half shekel was checking grave markers and making sure they were remarked if they'd been damaged over the winter. This seems to have been a somewhat more impermanent marker than we think of today- a number of marked, probably not very large, stones (at least two, but if you just do one you've fulfilled your obligation), yes, but also just some lime (the stone powder, not the fruit) laid on the outer boundaries of the burial site. So the stones could have blown over or been damaged, and the lime almost certainly washed out, and needs to be reset periodically. There's two possible reasons for doing this in Adar, first is that you do this after the winter rainy season ends, the other is that Pesach is coming up, a lot of people who most of the time don't care if they are or aren't tamei will need to be tahor to eat Korban Pesach, and those people will be traveling in unfamiliar places to get to Yerushalayim, so it's particularly important to make sure nobody accidentally walks over a grave site.

The interesting thing to me is that the exclusive reason given by the Yerushalmi for the obligation of marking graves an obligation to warn someone that they may become tamei. I would have thought there would at least be some mention of the importance of giving kavod to the dead, but nope. A kohen is forbidden entirely to get exposed to tumas mes, and an ordinary Yisroel is allowed to take on tumas mes but not to eat kodshin while in a state of tumah, and violating either of those is a very serious sin incurring kares, so it's important to warn if one might walk over a burial site. Nowadays the kohen prohibition is arguably d'rabbanan and there's no kodshin for Yisroelim to eat, so this is not a big concern of ours. But we still consider marking graves to be an important religious imperative, because it shows the honor we regard our dead.

The boundary itself you lay out and mark should be outside of the area of tumah, so that a person checking the boundaries of the line will not become tamei, but only someone who crosses over the line. If there's a sort of disruption like a plow furrow in between the markers on two sides of a burial site you can walk through the disruption and assume that it's actually two graves and the plow furrow is marking the other side. I get the impression that burial sites weren't standardized in size and shape the way they are in a modern cemetery. Also, the Yerushalmi is talking about burial processes hundreds of years earlier in the Temple period, which were not necessarily the same as its contemporary burial procedures.


But I am kind of hung up on the absolute lack of mention of the value of kavod to the dead in this discussion. It discusses burying just a skull and spinal cord. It mentions burying just some human flesh without bones. All sorts of things that we would not think of as being respectful are all presented in this technical discussion of the civil responsibilities to make sure people were able to avoid tumas mes, and no consideration of honor and dignity.

I think it is, of course, indirectly part of the discussion, though. At least in a modern context, whenever we think about tumah and taharah we're thinking about the rationales behind tumah, how tumah is associated with life force and changes in the condition thereof, and I think the whole point of being careful about how we contact the dead is that we understand that loss of life is incredibly serious and needs to be treated respectfully.



Anyway, we move on to who exactly is obligated in the half shekel. The half-shekel does two things primarily at one time, recall- It is both fundraiser to pay for repair of the Beis Hamikdash, and also it is a census. You take the number of half-shekalim you have and you therefore also know how many eligible people there are in the nation, barring cheats. So the interest in collecting as much money as possible competes with the interest in who is important and interesting enough to count. So who gives the half-shekel? Men over the age of twenty who are Jewish enough. Which is both a squishy category, and also offensive to modern sensibilities. Do women have to give a half-shekel? Of course not, they're barely people, why would the Beis Din want to count them?

Ha, I am salty. Women, minors, and Hebrew slaves are permitted to give the half-shekel, but not obligated. Which is weird in terms of the half-shekel as census, how can you have a reasonable census where you have a class of people who can be counted if they want to be counted? But I think the kinds of thinkers about Talmud I am most sympathetic to would say this shows how the Rabbis are thinking about the half-shekel in terms of identification as Jews and recognizing that in Torah terms, minors and women (I am setting aside the analysis of the slave for the moment) exist in a sort of ambiguous state of obligation and therefore an ambiguous position with respect to Jewish identity... Do they have a Jewish identity of their own, or is their Jewish identity defined entirely by their relationship to their parents or spouses?

Meanwhile, non-Jews and Kutim, the Samaritans who obey a version of halacha that sometimes overlaps with Jewish halacha and sometimes doesn't, are not permitted to offer the half-shekel. Which I think points not only to these questions of who is a Jew, but also to the fact that the half-shekel is a sort of consecrated money dedicated to the Temple service, and people who are not initiated into the covenant are not able to participate in this consecration.

The last thing I want to consider is connected to this, a Mishnaic argument about whether or not Kohanim are obligated in the half shekel. The Kohanim argue that they're not for precisely the same reason that goyim are not obligated in it- Kohanim can't participate in the national consecration of money! What? The argument is that since they're the beneficiaries of the consecration, since they will eat some of the sacrifices purchased with the money, they can't contribute to the half-shekel because you can't contribute a sacrifice you're going to personally benefit from, it's not a sacrifice. The rejection of this is fascinating, it constructs a sort of national Jewish identity outside of identity as Kohen or Levi or Yisroel, that all belong to, and which all contribute the half-shekel on behalf of, so therefore the Kohen-as-Kohen is able to benefit from the contribution of themself as Kohen-as-Jew. Which I find a really striking and powerful idea of national destiny and united interest.



There's also some good detail about Money Changers in the Temple that clearly has relevance to certain Christian tropes, but I don't feel like I have a good enough handle on the Christian side of it to be able to render these passages well.