Avodah Zarah 063

1:
Chapter five is still concerned with the intricacies of yeyn nesekh. While to us this might seem trivial it was clearly a matter of great social and economic importance to the Jews living in the mixed society of Eretz-Israel in the time of the sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud.

2:
As usual, when we supply the right subject for a verb in the mishnah we can make sense if it quite easily. You will recall that it is forbidden for a Jew to derive any benefit whatsoever from yeyn nesekh – not just is he forbidden to drink it but he may not use it or make a profit from it. Our mishnah is concerned with a situation in which a non-Jew employs a Jew. If the Jew is required to work with yeyn nesekh (bottling it, moving it – any form of activity that involves direct contact with yeyn nesekh) he may not collect his salary: because by doing so he would be deriving benefit from yeyn nesekh.

3:
However, if the Jew is employed to perform other tasks which would not necessarily involve contact with yeyn nesekh he may collect his salary even if he was required incidentally to move some bottles or pitchers of wine from one place to another. A passage in the Tosefta [AZ 8:4] helps to explain this matter:

In Talmudic times most workers were hired for the day and expected to be paid for their work at the end of the day (even if they were re-hired to continue working the following day). Both the Mishnah and the Tosefta explain that the Jewish worker may not accept payment for work that involved some halakhically forbidden acts. Now the passage from the Tosefta continues:

This passage clarifies what is not made clear in our mishnah. The Jewish labourer was contracted to perform tasks for his non-Jewish employer that he knew were permitted. However, just before the end of the day the employer tells him to do something that is forbidden him as a Jew. This order does not make it impossible for the Jew to collect his wages for the day.

4:
The Gemara [AZ 65a] quotes a barayta which clarifies the second clause of our mishnah (i.e. a situation where a Jewish worker finds himself required incidentally to perform some prohibited task).

Two situations are presented in this barayta. In the first situation the Jew is hired to transport one hundred casks and will be paid one hundred prutot for his efforts. In other words he will be paid one sum for all his efforts. Should it transpire that all the casks contained oil but one contain yeyn nesekh the whole amount of his repayment is forbidden him. In the second situation the Jewish labourer is hired to do piece-work. He is to transport one hundred casks and will be paid one prutah for each cask moved. In such a case if one of the casks should eventually prove to contain yeyn nesekh he may accept the payment (and should dispose of the proportional amount that covers the work he did that was forbidden).

5:
The second part of our mishnah is now easier to understand. If a non-Jew hires from a Jewish contractor a donkey and it transpires that the donkey was used specifically to transport casks of yeyn nesekh the Jew must forfeit the remuneration. However, maybe the deal was that the non-Jew was hiring the donkey to ride on it from place A to place B. In such a case, should it transpire that the non-Jew took with him his bottle of wine (which is, of course, yeyn nesekh) the Jewish contractor may accept payment.

In AZ 059 we learned:

Sherry Fyman asks:

How was it known that a neighbor was ritually impure?

I respond:

I suppose that such things were known either from eye-witness or from some incidental discovery. In other words: we must not understand our mishnah as assuming that the status of every person vis-a-vis the rules and regulations concerning ritual purity was known; our mishnah is referring to a situation where such a matter has become known. Let us take the simplest of examples: a baker is observed handling dough without previously washing his hands. As we learned in tractate Yadayyim, his hands are ritually impure and that impurity is transferred to the dough (and by a kind of chain reaction to the loaf, to the shopkeeper, to the consumer – and so on).