If the Talmud were a blog discussion

[liv]

This is the Talmud I've learnt this week. On Monday I had no idea what was going on, I had to look up nearly every word in the dictionary and even when I'd done that I still couldn't really follow the argument. On Tuesday I could decipher the individual arguments, but not put them together to understand the overall structure. On Wednesday I got to the end of the section and started to have some idea where the argument was going. On Thursday I just got it, thanks to a brilliant question by hatam_soferet when she was going over it with me, as well as the fact that I've been arguing and revising and dreaming about this text all week, and our brilliant class teacher has explained all the technicalities. By the end of the morning the argument was right there in my head, I could remember every detail, and I could fit the whole thing together and just reproduce the entire train of argument as a whole. There's no feeling like it, the sense of achievement from having made that much progress in such a short time, but also the profound conviction that I really really understand this on multiple levels.

hatam_soferet suggested that I should reproduce this amazing knowledge as a diagram. And I figured that the clearest way to do it would be as a threaded discussion, and then I had a brainwave: I already have a way of making threaded discussions visually pretty: threaded comment discussions. So here you go, my learning from this week in the form of a DW post.

Bavli (gemara) wrote, @ 500 CE-00-00 00:00:00

Supposing someone agrees to betroth a woman "after 30 days"

Excerpt from Kiddushin 3 Mishnah 1 (c 50 CE

Supposing a person says to a woman, using the ritual formula for betrothal: Behold, you will be betrothed to me after 30 days, and within that 30 days another man comes along and betroths her, in that case she is officially betrothed to the second man and not the first.

Gemara's discussion of this Mishnah (page nun-tet, amud A)

How about if they agree on a betrothal with a 30-day delay, and even though no new man comes along within the 30 days, she simply changes her mind? What happens then?

---

	She can change her mind rabbi_yochanan c 250 CE
	A word can come and cancel out another word. If she changes her mind within 30 days, there's no marriage.

	Oh no she can't resh_lakish c 250 CE
	A word can't come and cancel another word. It's too late for her to change her mind, she already committed to the marriage even though there was a delay.

A word can come and cancel out another word rabbi_yochanan c 250 CE

I can think of a case where a word cancels another word. How about this one (Mishnah Terumot, 3:4): If a man appoints an agent to separate out the priestly portion, Terumah, from his produce, and then he changes his mind, as long as that happens before the agent actually separates the Terumah, it's cancelled. Even if the agent goes ahead and separates the Terumah anyway, not knowing that the original owner changed his mind, it doesn't count. See, a word can too come and cancel out another word!

	A word can't come and cancel an action resh_lakish c 250 CE
	Your case isn't analogous to the one we're talking about. When the betrothal money was given into the woman's hands, and she accepted it, that wasn't just a word or a decision, that was a legally binding action. You're certainly not going to try to argue that a mere change of mind can come and cancel out a legally binding transaction, are you?

A word can come and cancel out an action rabbi_yochanan c 250 CE

I can think of a case where a word cancels a legally binding action. How about this one (Bavli on Gittin, lamed-bet A): If a man appoints an agent to give his wife a bill of divorce, and then changes his mind, and chases after the agent to stop him, or sends a second agent to cancel the first, all he has to do is say "That bill of divorce which I gave you is cancelled", and that's it, it's cancelled. Giving the bill of divorce to the agent was a legally binding action, just like giving the woman the betrothal money in the original case, but the husband can still cancel it just by saying that he's changed his mind.

	A word can't come and cancel an action resh_lakish c 250 CE
	This case isn't analogous to the one we're talking about either. Simply giving the agent the bill of divorce isn't a legally binding action, it only becomes legally binding when the wife receives it. So your case only demonstrates that a word can cancel out an earlier word. But I can prove that even that doesn't work.

A word can't come and cancel a word resh_lakish c 250 CE

I can think of a case which proves that a word can't cancel a word (Mishnah Kelim 25:9): You can convert a natural object into a utensil simply by designating it for a purpose. When it's a natural object, it can't become impure, but if you designate it, it has the potential to become impure. But if you want it to go back to being just a natural object, you can't just change your mind about what you want to use it for, it still has the potential to become impure until you perform an action which physically changes it. That means that a physical action can reverse either another physical action, or a mental decision, but a purely mental decision can't reverse a physical action or another decision. See, if you were right that a word can come and cancel out another word, this ruling from the Mishnah wouldn't make sense. But since we have that ruling, you must be wrong.

	A word can come and cancel out another word rabbi_yochanan c 250 CE
	That case is irrelevant, because it's about impurity, and impurity is a special case. The kind of decision that designates something a utensil is not just a mental decision, it has the status of more or less an action, legally speaking.

Impurity is a special case rav_pappa c 400 CE

Rabbi Yochanan is right, impurity is a special case. After all, produce becomes susceptible to impurity when it gets wet, but we use a spelling irregularity in the Torah text to prove that just accidentally getting wet only changes the status of the produce if its owner had the intention of washing it, even if he didn't physically perform the washing action. And that's pretty weird, you can't really say that marriage transactions work that way.

---

Rav Zvid (rav_zvid) wrote, @ 400 CE-00-00 00:00:00

My tradition says this whole argument refers to a different case

Hey, you know that post from Gemara about a woman changing her mind about a betrothal? It was actually like this: suppose a woman appoints an agent to accept a betrothal on her behalf, and then changes her mind. There's no other person involved, she just doesn't want to get married any more. If the agent hasn't reached the potential groom yet, what happens?

---

	She can change her mind rabbi_yochanan c 250 CE
	A word can come and cancel out another word. If she changes her mind before her agent reaches the groom, there's no marriage.

	Oh no she can't resh_lakish c 250 CE
	A word can't come and cancel another word. It's too late for her to change her mind, she already committed to the marriage even though the agent hasn't finished the transaction yet.

A word can come and cancel out another word rabbi_yochanan c 250 CE

I can think of a case where a word cancels another word. How about this one (Mishnah Terumot, 3:4): If a man appoints an agent to separate out the priestly portion, Terumah, from his produce, and then he changes his mind, as long as that happens before the agent actually separates the Terumah, it's cancelled. Even if the agent goes ahead and separates the Terumah anyway, not knowing that the original owner changed his mind, it doesn't count. See, a word can too come and cancel out another word!

	You've misunderstood the case rava c 400 CE
	Look, what's actually going on in that case is not that the owner of the produce cancels the assignment simply by changing his mind. In fact, the only way that he can cancel the assigment of the agent is if he goes himself and separates the Terumah portion. That's why the Mishnah says that what the agent does after that will have no effect. So in this case it takes an action to cancel a word.

A word can't come and cancel a word resh_lakish c 250 CE

I can think of a case which proves that a word can't cancel a word (Mishnah Kelim 25:9): You can convert a natural object into a utensil simply by designating it for a purpose. When it's a natural object, it can't become impure, but if you designate it, it has the potential to become impure. But if you want it to go back to being just a natural object, you can't just change your mind about what you want to use it for, it still has the potential to become impure until you perform an action which physically changes it. That means that a physical action can reverse either another physical action, or a mental decision, but a purely mental decision can't reverse a physical action or another decision. See, if you were right that a word can come and cancel out another word, this ruling from the Mishnah wouldn't make sense. But since we have that ruling, you must be wrong.

	A word can come and cancel out another word rabbi_yochanan c 250 CE
	That case is irrelevant, because it's about impurity, and impurity is a special case. The kind of decision that designates something a utensil is not just a mental decision, it has the status of more or less an action, legally speaking.

Impurity is a special case rav_pappa c 400 CE

Rabbi Yochanan is right, impurity is a special case. After all, produce becomes susceptible to impurity when it gets wet, but we use a spelling irregularity in the Torah text to prove that just accidentally getting wet only changes the status of the produce if its owner had the intention of washing it, even if he didn't physically perform the washing action. And that's pretty weird, you can't really say that marriage transactions work that way.

A word can come and cancel a word rabbi_yochanan c 250 CE

I can think of a case which is exactly analogous to the one we're discussing, where a word cancels a word. How about this one (Bavli on Gittin, lamed-bet A): If a man appoints an agent to give his wife a bill of divorce, and then changes his mind, and chases after the agent to stop him, or sends a second agent to cancel the first, all he has to do is say "That bill of divorce which I gave you is cancelled", and that's it, it's cancelled.

	I give in resh_lakish c 250 CE
	You know what, Rabbi Yochanan, you're right. If the man can cancel his bill of divorce by simply speaking to the agent he sent, then a woman can equally well cancel her prospective marriage by simply speaking to her agent before he reaches her potential husband.

Where this goes after this bit is really striking, by the way. It does something that Talmud almost never ever does, which is to state categorically that Resh Lakish was WRONG WRONG WRONG and the official practice follows Rabbi Yochanan's opinion. Not just in the second case, but in the more ambiguous original case. In Rav Zvid's version, it looks like Rabbi Yochanan won the argument pretty conclusively, since he found a previously decided case that was absolutely in every respect analogous to the one being discussed. It also seems intuitive that if you send an agent to conduct a transaction, then if the agent hasn't reached their destination, there is no transaction, so you're totally entitled to change your mind. In the original case posed by the Gemara, Rabbi Yochanan has a real problem, we have to admit. The marriage has already been conducted, the bride has accepted the money, so it's very hard to justify how she can get out of it by changing her mind just because there was a delay built in to the original deal. Also the cases he brings are rather weak, and Resh Lakish has quite an easy time picking holes in them.

My flash of insight with what's going on here goes like this. hatam_soferet asked me why on earth Talmud presents two near-identical arguments, the first of which is full of leaks, and then says that the law in both cases works according to the argument which is convincing in the second case only. I think that the reason is that Talmud wants to do the humane thing, and make sure women don't end up getting married against their will.

Biblical marriage, taken literally, pretty much happens at the whim of men (the same is true for divorce). If a man pronounces the ritual formula of betrothal, as long as the woman doesn't actively resist, she is permanently bound to him. This means that it's a capital offence for her to have sex with any other man for the duration of the marriage, and it also means that she's economically dependent on him. Equally, if he chooses to divorce her, she's out, she has no protection. So the rabbinic system tries to work this law into a form which provides as much security as possible for women and restricts men from exercising their theoretical right to imperiously trample all over women's lives. Part of how they did this was by ritualizing the woman's lack of objection to a betrothal such that the transaction takes place only when she actively accepts the physical token of the betrothal.

So you have the Mishnah, the earliest work of legal decisions based on shaping the Bible into a viable legal system. They discuss a large number of cases where the basic marriage transaction has twists and variations. (The basic transaction goes like this: the man says, in front of witnesses: Behold, you are betrothed to me with this object according to the law of Moses and Israel. The woman accepts the object, and they are then betrothed. She can't leave the marriage unless the husband grants her a divorce. A few more things have to happen for them to be fully married and allowed to have sex, but they're not relevant to the discussion here.) However, if marriage is treated as a transaction, you can put conditions on it, and once you put conditions on the basic marriage transaction, there's room for people to propose stupid or excessively baroque conditions, so Mishnah tries to deal with which sorts of conditions are valid. They propose some delightful scenarios, too: what if the man says "Behold, one or other of you two is betrothed to me"?

The Gemara takes some of these scenarios, and tries to bend the system to give women more protection, and at the same time to establish general principles about what a transaction is, how status changes work, what sort of conditions can reasonably be imposed in a transaction, and so on. In this section Resh Lakish takes the legalistic view. The thing you have to know about him is that he started out as a highwayman, and repented and became a rabbi as a result of falling in love with Rabbi Yochanan, who is described as being the most beautiful man in all of history. Resh Lakish has the typical convert's zeal, he wants the law to be absolutely logical and consistent in every way. That's why he says that a woman who has already accepted the betrothal token can't change her mind, because logically she shouldn't be any more free than a woman who has been betrothed with immediate effect. Rabbi Yochanan looks at the situation from a human perspective, he is prepared to make extremely tenuous arguments in order to get women out of marriages if they're at all reluctant. And R Yochanan wins, because ultimately the Talmud wants a humanly viable legal system.

Comments

[lavendersparkle]

Interesting synchronicity.

On Friday night I was chatting to Rabbi Reuven about the effect of new media on the way we think and communicate (he's very into Twitter). I said that I thought one of the differences is that you don't have to be so linear, you can write a blog post with lots of links off to other places and discussions on threads coming of from each other. He commented that that was a lot like a page of gemara.

[jack]

Ah! I think I didn't see this the first time round, or didn't follow it before hearing your in-person explanations. The blog-thread is awesome.