Two Years of Yoreh De’ah Don’t Necessarily Enlighten More Than One

by R. Gidon Rothstein

The concern I raised last time applies even more to Yoreh De’ah, which we saw only seven times this year. Worse (for my project, not in terms of the quality of the Torah), three were about issues within nedarim, vows, where there is a great deal of overlap with nazir, a topic in last week’s review of Halachot Shonot. Some tentative thoughts, nonetheless.

The Power of Words: More of the Same

Nedarim obviously continue the theme of the power Hashem gave our words, our ability to create halachic realities with our commitments. Within that, again a repeat, we were confronted with the importance of clarity, the difficulty of ascertaining what an unclear neder meant, such as whether it included absolutely all benefit or not (could a son provide minimal benefits to a parent who had forsworn them, such as bringing groceries from the store, or vice verse, the father for the son?). Clarity and intent perhap also underlay the vows a Jew would not have to fulfill, made as part of a business negotiation, or under certain kinds of duress.

Writing a Torah scroll gave us new examples. The scribe had to read the words aloud from an existing scroll and only then write, the letters had to be written clearly, distinguishable from other, similar letters.

Still, mostly ground we’ve trodden before. Let’s look at some new ideas.

Money Always Matters

Not a new idea, but our Yoreh De’ah chapters did provide more cases of halachah’s concern with money, and rules about it. The nedarim were often about banning use or benefit of some or all a person’s possessions. For many reasons, including to push someone to study Torah more single-mindedly. Money can help and money can hurt.

A sub-topic here was whether a father can ban an inheritance from a son, and how the existence of a grandchild might mitigate the issue.

Moving away from vows, who gets charity had clear financial elements (although not exclusively so, given the cases where wealthy people qualify as temporarily poor), as did the exemption of the Torah scholar from paying certain taxes.

We phrase life in money terms, sometimes or often.

What Kind of Person/Object Are You?

It seems to me much of what we spent the Yoreh De’ah part of our year on had to do with defining what something is. For vows, we distinguished tangible from intangible, noted that a vow to prohibit an action could only take effect if it addressed the physical object that would produce the action (“My eyes should be prohibited in sleep if…”).

Vows aside, the right of a Torah scholar not to pay certain taxes extended from his status as a Torah scholar, independent of financial need or concerns. We had to establish who qualified, what level of exclusivity of involvement with Torah he needed (how much time, for example, could the scholar spend securing a livelihood).

For charity, we had to know who was poor, with different scales depending on the type of support the community was going to provide. Even wealthy people could qualify, depending on the circumstances exerting financial pressure.

Similarly, a baby who was ill might be able to be circumcised as soon as he recovered, or might have to wait seven days, a function of how we define the issue now cleared up.

Standing Up to Wrongdoing

We had a few examples of Jews’ reacting to others’ misdeeds, material to include if we ever have enough to articulate a principle. Some vows expressed ordinary annoyance with another (not a model to adopt), others focused on a value, such as the target’s Torah study or good deed involvement, the vow a way to encourage or push to better behavior.

Torah scholars had to know to stand up to those who mistreat them (in a chapter about their right to have their merchandise sold first, as well as their various exemptions). A Torah scholar who failed to respond forcefully was to be admonished to do better.

The people who disburse funds to the poor had to refuse to give undeserving poor (an issue that arises today, when many people say, a shekel here or there doesn’t matter. AH was clear that we should be giving only those legitimately needy). On the flip side, we are supposed to manufacture ways to give or lend to the resistant needy.

It’s not enough to do what’s right, we can be put in a position to react to others who are doing right or wrong.

Compared to Last Year

To compare to what we took away from last year’s Yoreh De’ah again shows how this section of SA has (so far) defeated my attempt to find running themes linking disparate areas of halachah (that would say something new and unexpected; it’s easy to speak so generally it covers everything).

Last year, we discussed how to prepare meat properly for eating, how to determine when a woman was a niddah, and a bit about nedarim. There were some status questions—what animals are considered terefot, are wounded in a way preventing kosher slaughter, what knives are fit to kill in a kosher way, when a woman becomes a niddah.

Within those, we had examples of how difficult it can be to find clarity, how to evaluate knives, wounds, and instances of a woman’s bleeding/menstruation. Beyond that, not much overlap.

Those, overly general or not, seem to be what we have out of Yoreh De’ah so far, the need and challenges of establishing status of people and objects for various purposes, the value of clarity, where we can find it, and how to handle ambiguity, when we meet it. With money, and relationships, and promoting a world of right and wrong, as we can.

For me, Yoreh De’ah, a puzzle not yet solved.