If the Talmud were a blog discussion
Jul. 3rd, 2009 05:37 pmThis 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 ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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. ( the case of the delayed betrothal )
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:
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.
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. ( the case of the delayed betrothal )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.
