Sanhedrin 053

Today's shiur is dedicated by Mimi Godfrey, in honor of her having recently chanted a Haftarah for the first time, on Shabbat Ĥazon.

1:
We have already noted that the previous mishnah and the present one come to fill in the details left my the original statement of the Mishnah that a litigant may only reject the other litigant's proposed arbitrator or witness if they are "disqualified or related". The previous mishnah came to explain the scope of "disqualification" and now, our present mishnah comes to explain the scope of "related". The arrangement of this mishnah is awkward, since it includes a long parenthetical addition; I hope the above layout helps to clarify the format of the mishnah.

2:
Before we embark upon a more detailed explanation of the contents of our mishnah there is a phenomenon that must be observed and addressed. All the personalities mentioned in our mishnah are males. Previous commentators have not seen any need to remark on this fact, just as the original Tanna saw nothing untoward in his wording. However, mishnah study "in the climate of Masorti (Conservative) Judaism" most certainly must address this phenomenon before further discussion of this mishnah. Our Tanna seems to consider it to be obvious that women may not sit in judgment nor may they serve as witnesses to the fact – so obvious that it is not even discussed or seen to be in need of comment or explanation.

To be continued:

On August 10th last I wrote that this kind of transaction the sages created a very necessary loophole: where the loan was being made so that the borrower could make a profit it was only fair that the lender should be permitted to share in that profit… Such an arrangement is called "Heter Iska" [permission to do a deal] – and to this day such a document is usually displayed somewhere in most branches of Israel's banks.

Here is a message from Yiftah Shapir, which needs no comment from me:-

There is a slight problem with this arrangement: partners are partners both in profit and in loss, whereas the bank (the lender) wants his money back with the interest whether your business is successful or not. Anyone familiar with Israeli business law knows that when a business goes bankrupt the banks are always the first in line to get their money back – long before innocent losers like suppliers, customers and employees. I heard that a few years ago someone actually tried to push this point, and when his business lost money he sued the bank (one of the religious banks like "Mizrahi" or "Agudat Yisrael"), and claimed that according to their Heiter Iska they should bear their part in his loss. There is another problem – suppose I borrow money for a wonderful vacation in the Alps. Is this a deal? how can anyone say I make a profit? Apparently – it is interesting to note that Muslims also look very badly on intrerest, and they had to devise similar solutions for this problem.

---

On August 19th I wrote: Our mishnah is here referring to produce grown and or sold during the Sabbatical Year. The last year in every cycle of seven years is a Sabbatical Year. (Quite by chance, you can determine the status of the current year by dividing is value by seven. If the remainder is zero that year is a sabbatical year. If the remainder is greater than zero the remainder indicates the place of the current year in the current cycle. Thus 5758 is the fourth year of the current cycle.)

Rémy Landau writes:

It would be of great interest to me if you would explain how the timing of the sabbatical year was determined. Your brief discussion on the matter seemed to indicate that "by coincidence" such a year is any of the 7th years of the world era years… So it would be fascinating to get some insight into how the world era and the year of shmita were synchronized in the manner that you have stated.

I respond:

The timing of the Sabbatical [Shemittah] year is not determined – any more than the timing of the weekly Shabbat is determined. Just as Shabbat comes along every seventh day, so the sabbatical year comes along every seventh year. However, why any given year is sabbatical and not some other cannot be explained as we explain the incidence of Shabbat. All the calculations of the Jewish calendar presently in use (and there have been and could yet be other systems) go back to a specific moment: 11 minutes and 20 seconds past 11 pm on Sunday, Tishri 1st, almost twelve months before creation! This starting point is a chronological fiction and is called in Hebrew Molad Tohu. But, if you start counting seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years from that point, in regular succession according to Jewish calendrical calculations, you will end up at a point called "now". In that imaginary year 6th Tishri was Shabbat, and ever since all we have to do is add on seven days ad infinitum: every seventh day thereafter is Shabbat.

However, the timing of the sabbatical years did not originate at creation as did the timing of Shabbat, since it is a mitzvah whose applicability only began when Israel took up residence in Eretz-Israel. Rambam [Maimonides], in his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Shemittah and Yovel (Chapter 10), says that the first year of the first sabbatical cycle began fourteen years after our entry into Eretz-Israel under Joshua, in the 2504th year after Molad Tohu (the conquest took seven years and the distribution of the land among the tribes took another seven years). Accordingly, says Rambam, the very first Sabbatical year was in the year 2510. They then counted seven sabbatical cycles, forty-nine years, and declared the fiftieth year, which fell sixty-seven years after their entry into the land, the very first jubilee. They managed to count seventeen jubilees of 50 years, until the first Bet Mikdash was destroyed in the 36th year of the eighteenth jubilee, which was in the first year of a Shemittah cycle. (I mentioned in our last Shiur that Motza'ei Shevi'it – the year after Shemittah – often seems to have been problematic to catastrophic.)

During the whole period of the Babylonian Exile the whole system was in abeyance (but see next paragraph). The first Shemittah after the rebuilding of the Bet Mikdash, was in the 13th year after its building. By further extrapolation forwards we reach another Motza'ei Shevi'it in the year that the second Bet Mikdash was destroyed, in the summer of 70 CE. That means, writes Rambam, that "this present year, which is 1107th anniversary of the destruction – 4936 [i.e. 1176 CE – SR] – is a Shemittah year".

Rambam also says, on the authority of the Ge'onim, that during the Babylonian exile they "ghost counted" the sabbaticals, which is how they arrived at the timing of the first Shemittah year after the rebuilding of the Bet Mikdash. However, never again was the jubilee year celebrated, and from the destruction of the first Bet Mikdash the Shemittah cycles continued without the incidence of a fiftieth jubilee year (i.e. the fiftieth year was year one of the next cycle).

Thus far Rambam. Now, given modern technology (the pocket calculator) it should not be too difficult for anybody to calculate forwards and backwards from any known point. Thus, for instance, 5754 [1994] was the last Shemittah year and 5761 [2001] is the next one. It thus follows that it is "quite by chance" that these Jewish years are exactly divisible by 7.