Giyyur 013

Today's shiur is dedicated by Edie Freedman
in memory of her mother,
Seema Pulier, Seema bat Ozer z"l,
whose Yahrzeit was yesterday, Elul 7th.

(For the Hebrew text of this passage please click here.)

1:
In Part Three we discussed the process whereby a non-Jew becomes a Jew as set down by the sages of the Talmudic era. A person enters the waters of a mikveh as a non-Jew and emerges from them as a Jew. From that moment they are obligated to observe the mitzvot and to be a loyal member of the Jewish people. To begin with this will probably be difficult even for the most positively motivated person and inevitably there will be moments of failure. But that is true of any Jew. The author of the biblical books of Ecclesiastes [Kohelet 7:20] warns us that

There is no point in our discussing in what way a Jew by choice is rewarded for observance of the mitzvot or punished for their non-observance because in this he or she is no different from any other Jew. They were warned about this before they undertook to become Jewish. You will remember that we learned in Giyyur 006 that the Bet Din was required to warn the prosepctive Jew that

2:
So, what we must now discuss is not how the new Jew by choice relates to Judaism but rather how the rest of the Jewish people are expected to relate to a person who has newly joined the Jewish people. The Torah relates to this issue on many occasions. Here are just a very few examples.

The Hebrew word for a convert and the Hebrew word for a stranger are identical. The sages understood the commands that concern our relationship to a 'stranger' as referring to our relationship to a convert. But it is all very well for the Torah to instruct us that we must love the convert, but that is no easy matter. More often than not we fail in our duty to love our fellow-Jew because the requirement to love someone else as we love ourselves is almost impossible to fulfill. Maybe it is for this reason that she sages concentrated their attention on how we are not to relate to a Jew by choice.

3:
A very long midrash expatiates on this verse in the Torah:

The Mekhilta, a midrashic exposition of the book of Exodus, comments:

The sages almost always understood the verb in the Torah 'to wrong' someone as referring to insulting behaviour towards them or a rude and overbearing superiority (ona'ah). Quite often they also understood the verb 'to oppress' as referring to economic wrongdoing (laĥatz), as they do here. The midrash now gives an example of 'wronging with words':

The trinity of gods "Bel, Kores, Nevo" to which the midrash refers is due to a misunderstanding of Isaiah 46:1, but the intention of the midrash is very clear. We have already seen (Giyyur 010) that the sages saw Israel at Sinai as econverting to Judaism, thus in Egypt they too were 'converts' as it were.

To be continued.

In Giyyur 011 we learned a section of Gemara. We noted that the orginal barayta had already stated that the halakhah was not according to Rabbi Eli'ezer nor according to Rabbi Yehoshu'a but rather according to 'the rest of the sages' who maintain that both circumcision and bathing in a mikveh are essential to the conversion process. Nevertheless, the Gemara adds:

The Gemara is quick to point out that this recapitulation is quite superfluous, so what is its point? In response the Gemara suggests that the recapitualtion is in order to identify the individual sage who is represented in the original barayta as 'the rest of the sages' – Rabbi Yosé.

Avram Reisner suggests a new interpretation of this section:

You present the gemara on Yevamot 46b fairly, but here I have a preference for freeing us from the gemara in favor of a more historically aware understanding. The gemara asks, why would R. Yochanan say "it has to be both" if that
was already the majority opinion recorded in the Mishnah, and answers that it was not a majority opinion, but rather that of an individual sage – R. Yose. But the answer is ahistorical, in that a debate in the days of Eliezer and Yehoshua would not likely have had Yose as its third party. Rather, that R. Yochanan had to say that is an indication that the debate had not been settled in the days of R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua, despite the fact that a majority may have expressed its opinion (in the gemara's understanding that would mean that there was no real majority, but that it remained an "individual" opinion). The debate of Yehudah and Yose proves that in fact no consensus had been arrived at in the
previous generation, so that they were still debating the matter in their day. That R. Yochanan had to put his foot down indicates that the matter was still alive.

I respond:

I can understand why my esteemed colleague describes the answer of the Gemara as ahistorical. It is the nature of the sources of the Talmud – Mishnah, Barayta, Gemara – to relate to the sages of multiple generations as if they were discussing a matter among themselves. Rabbi Yosé was active in the generation that came to maturity during the difficult years of 'reconstruction' that came after the ignominious end of the Bar-Kokhba revolt against the Romans in 135 CE. That was about half a century after the heyday of Rabbi Eli'ezer and Yehoshu'a. And yes, the issue was still open in his time – Rabbi Yosé and Rabbi Yehudah were contemporaries. Indeed, I would imagine that the issue was still open in the succeeding generations – possibly even at the time of the publication of the Mishnah.

Avram is, of course, absolutely right in pinpointing the rôle not of Rabbi Yosé in this matter, but of Rabbi Yoĥanan. There was a distinct preference among the great Amoraïm of the first generation – both in Eretz-Israel and in Babylon – to solidify halakhic issues that had been left open after the Mishnah. I have found Rabbi Yoĥanan 93 times in the Babylonian Gemara stating "the halakhah is…" as he does in the section we have been studying. He is thus quoted a further 37 times in the Talmud of Eretz-Izrael – and my check on this was very cursory! But not only Rabbi Yoĥanan in Eretz-Israel: We find the same phenomenon with Rav (92 times) and Shemu'el (114 times).

It does seem, therefore, that the matter was open, as Avram suggests, until the time of Rabbi Yoĥanan in the latter half of the 3rd century CE. From his time onwards the opinion of Rabbi Yosé has been accepted halakhah in the matter of conversion.

Please note that the next shiur in this series will be on Monday, September 22nd (Elul 22nd).