Avodah Zarah 061

1:
In order to understand our present mishnah we must think of an analogous situation. Today, many non-Jewish manufacturers want their products to be bought by Jews, so they take care to receive an authorization from a recognized rabbinic source that the product is kosher and may be eaten (or used) by Jews.

2:
Our present mishnah is concerned with a non-Jewish vintner who has hired a Jew to process his wine for him. The Jewish employee makes sure that during the whole process of making the wine it has not been touched by any non-Jew; it is, therefore, not yeyn nesekh, and may be bought and drunk by Jews.

3:
The non-Jewish vintner owns a building which fronts the main street of the town. The Jew displays the wine he has processed in a shop (our mishnah calls it a house) in this building.

4:
Our mishnah rules that in such circumstances the wine is kosher, even though it belongs to a non-Jew. A Jew may purchase this wine from the shop if it is in a city with mixed inhabitants, both non-Jews and Jews. The reason is simple: we may assume that, having gone to all this trouble to make it possible for Jews to buy his wine the non-Jewish proprietor will not risk a Jew seeing him touching the wine, because he knows that it will thus become yeyn nesekh and the Jews will not buy it from him. So, for him to touch his wine would not make economic sense.

5:
However, if the city is a non-Jewish city the only way that the proprietor can assure Jews that his wine is kosher is for him to set a Jew on guard in the shop. The Jewish guard guarantees to any possible Jewish customer that no non-Jew has touched the wine. Without the presence of the guard the non-Jewish proprietor would have no qualms at touching the wine since the likelihood that a passing Jew would see him do it can be ignored.

6:
Our mishnah also points out that the Jewish guard does not have to be on duty all the time. It is enough that he is liable to appear at any given moment to ensure that the proprietor will not touch the wine.

7:
We must now consider the caution of Rabbi Shim'on ben-El'azar. His ruling that "all non-Jewish premises are the same" means that if the shop in which the wine is sold does not belong to the proprietor but to some other non-Jew, a Jewish guard is required even in a city where Jews may well be passing by at any time.

8:
In his commentary of our present mishnah Rambam notes as follows:

In this he has based himself on a barayta in the Gemara [AZ 61a-b].

I try to present the comments and queries that participants send me as close as possible to the shiur in which the matter was originally raised. However, this is not always possible, because often I feel that a certain topic that we are studying should not be spread over too many shiurim. The message below was sent by Mark Lautman quite some time ago. It relates to AZ 054, and you may wish to take another look at that shiur before reading what he has to say.

In the past we have been asked to offer participants situations in modern living that are connected with idolatry. During our recent trip to Israel we visited the burial caves in Bet She'arim, where Rabbi Yehudah, the President of the Sanhedrin, is buried. In these caves there are burial caskets that have been wonderfully preserved. On one of them is carved the sign of the Greek goddess Nike. There can be no doubt that there is a direct connection between the goddess Nike and fashion products of modern day Nike. The goddess Nike represents victory and, of course, the global company adopted this sign and shows it on their shoes, shirts, hats and all the other dress items. It seems that we are talking here of modern idolatry! The directors of the Nike company do not worship the goddess but they do use her original meaning. They do not cancel the icon as we have learned but take care to enhance it and preserve all rights connected with it. In this case, is there not here a place to forbid Jews from wearing dress items on which are emblazoned such an icon? We would not wear items of dress on which is emblazoned a cross. Is there a difference in the case of Nike products?

I respond:

This sounds very much like the ĥumrah (stringency) of the week! It seems to me that it all depends on what meaning the icon has both for the company using it and for those who wear their products. If the icon still has a religious meaning then it is obviously forbidden for an observant Jew to have anything to do with those products: he may not wear them nor even trade in them. But, if the icon has been divested of its religious meaning it seems to me that it would be an unnecessary stringency to act as if it still had religious significance. Think of the number of countries who still have a cross emblazoned on their flag. That emblem may originally have had a religious significance but it no longer has such a significance. For example, many schools in the United Kingdom require that their students wear a strict uniform; in many cases the jackets bear an emblem of the cross of St George (England) or of St Andrew (Scotland) and so forth. But Jewish children wear these jackets because these crosses are now the emblem of the school and have no religious significance whatsoever. Time and circumstances have cancelled the idol, as it were.