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Couple of interesting stories lately.
First up, a fine scholar, upstanding pillar of the community I expect, one who leads a highly virtuous life, dies young. His distraught widow goes around to the rabbis and asks them, he did all the right things! why did he die young?! Most of them ignore her, except Eliyahu, who quizzes her: How did he behave when you were niddah? Oh, says she, he was super-frum, didn't touch me at all. Very well, says Eliyahu, how did he behave during the week after you were niddah?* We ate together and drank together, she says, and we slept in the same bed whilst not wearing very much. Hurrah! says Eliyahu. That proves it! God is great! Why is God great? Because he punished the chappie suitably with an early death for behaving so badly, and didn't let him off on account of what a good chap he was.
* during which time there is, strictly speaking, no actual problem with touching, but there is a custom to be as strict about that interval as for niddah itself
Which is partly interesting for its utter lack of sympathy, and partly interesting for what it says about reward-and-punishment doctrines. Apparently credits aren't transferable.
We then move into a long discussion of various halachot, which were all enacted during a monster halachic jamming session in Hananiyah ben Hezekiyah's attic (his mum wouldn't let them do it in the bedroom - no, just kidding).
A lot of it is rather hardcore, but one fun bit has to do with the book of Ezekiel. Now, if you ever bother to read the book of Ezekiel, you see it contains a lot of Weird Stuff, amongst it some prescriptive law. The problem is, the prescriptive law doesn't always match up 100% to what's in Torah, which is a bit of a problem. The usual trick in this case is to find a clever way of reading the problematic text, in order that the two may harmonise. Hananiyah ben Hezekaiyah sat in his attic and worked out a way to reconcile the texts...and it took him so long that he got through three hundred barrels of lamp-oil...
First up, a fine scholar, upstanding pillar of the community I expect, one who leads a highly virtuous life, dies young. His distraught widow goes around to the rabbis and asks them, he did all the right things! why did he die young?! Most of them ignore her, except Eliyahu, who quizzes her: How did he behave when you were niddah? Oh, says she, he was super-frum, didn't touch me at all. Very well, says Eliyahu, how did he behave during the week after you were niddah?* We ate together and drank together, she says, and we slept in the same bed whilst not wearing very much. Hurrah! says Eliyahu. That proves it! God is great! Why is God great? Because he punished the chappie suitably with an early death for behaving so badly, and didn't let him off on account of what a good chap he was.
* during which time there is, strictly speaking, no actual problem with touching, but there is a custom to be as strict about that interval as for niddah itself
Which is partly interesting for its utter lack of sympathy, and partly interesting for what it says about reward-and-punishment doctrines. Apparently credits aren't transferable.
We then move into a long discussion of various halachot, which were all enacted during a monster halachic jamming session in Hananiyah ben Hezekiyah's attic (his mum wouldn't let them do it in the bedroom - no, just kidding).
A lot of it is rather hardcore, but one fun bit has to do with the book of Ezekiel. Now, if you ever bother to read the book of Ezekiel, you see it contains a lot of Weird Stuff, amongst it some prescriptive law. The problem is, the prescriptive law doesn't always match up 100% to what's in Torah, which is a bit of a problem. The usual trick in this case is to find a clever way of reading the problematic text, in order that the two may harmonise. Hananiyah ben Hezekaiyah sat in his attic and worked out a way to reconcile the texts...and it took him so long that he got through three hundred barrels of lamp-oil...
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