Sanhedrin 100

נושא: Sanhedrin

Sanhedrin 100

BET MIDRASH VIRTUALI

הַמְחַלֵּל אֶת הַשַּׁבָּת, בְּדָבָר שֶׁחַיָּבִין עַל זְדוֹנוֹ כָּרֵת וְעַל שִׁגְגָתוֹ חַטָּאת. הַמְקַלֵּל אָבִיו וְאִמּוֹ, אֵינוֹ חַיָּב, עַד שֶׁיְּקַלְּלֵם בַּשֵּׁם. קִלְּלָם בְּכִנּוּי, רַבִּי מֵאִיר מְחַיֵּב וַחֲכָמִים פּוֹטְרִין:

Desecration of Shabbat [is a capital offence] only as regards those actions whose deliberate contravention invokes excision and whose accidental contravention requires a sin-offering. One becomes guilty of cursing one's parents only by invoking the Divine Name; one who uses a surrogate Name is guilty according to Rabbi Me'ir but the rest of the sages exempt.

6:
In our last shiur we saw that Shabbat commemorates the meta-historical event of the creation of the universe. It would seem at first glance that the Creation Story of the Torah does not meld easily with the present findings of science: the Torah describes an ongoing act of creation that develops over six days and culminates in completeness on a seventh. The "Big Bang" theory, however, posits one moment of creation from which everything else developed naturally; does this not contradict the seeming message of the Torah that there were ten divine fiats – ten times God says "let it be done"? This is not a modern problem, but was already the subject of disagreement between two Tannaïm [sages from the Mishnaic period]:

Rabbi Yehudah [bar-Ilai] and Rabbi Neĥemyah disagree. Rabbi Yehudah says that the verse "And thus the heavens and the earth were complete" indicates that they became complete at that time. Rabbi Neĥemyah said to him that his interpretation contradicts the obvious meaning of another verse, "This is the account of heaven and earth when they were created", which teaches that everything came into being at the same time. Rabbi Yehudah retorted that it is Rabbi Neĥemyah's interpretation that contradicts the obvious implications of "and there was evening and there was morning a first day… a second day… a third day… a fourth day… a fifth day… the sixth day"! Rabbi Neĥemyah replied that it is somewhat like picking dates: each one appears on the tree at its appropriate time. Rabbi Berekhyah made explicit what Rabbi Neĥemyah had implied: "The earth brought forth" – what was already there. [Bereshit Rabba 12:4]

Rabbi Yehudah sees ten separate acts of creation; Rabbi Neĥemyah sees only one creative act in which everything that is was brought into being: after that it was just "natural development".

7:
To recapitulate what we said at the end of our last Shiur: Shabbat marks the completion of the creation of the physical universe. Every week, when we recite Kiddush, we declare that

The heavens and the earth and all their multitude were completed. On the Seventh Day God desisted from His creative task; on the Seventh Day He ceased labouring at his creative work; God blessed the Seventh Day and hallowed it, for on it He had desisted from all the creative task on which He had been engaged [Genesis 2:1-3].

Thus Shabbat marks the end of Creation and the start of the universe as we know it. When Israel was given the Torah at Sinai they were told to observe God's Sabbath: just as God had instituted for Himself the sanctity of the Seventh Day, so Israel was now commanded to adopt the sanctity of the Seventh Day:

Remember the Sabbath Day to hallow it: six days you may labour and perform all your tasks; but the Seventh Day is God's Shabbat: on it you shall perform no task…

How was this sacred cessation to be realized in practical terms? What format could be given to this day to realize its function as "commemorating Creation"?

8:
One of the greatest thinkers that Conservative Judaism has produced in the 20th century was Avraham Yehoshu'a Heschel [Central Europe and North America, 1907-1972]. Of his many works perhaps the finest is an essay that he wrote in 1951, "The Sabbath".

Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time… Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of the year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals… One of the most distinguished words in the Bible is the word qadosh, holy; a word which more than any other is representative of the mystery and majesty of the divine. Now what was the first holy object in the history of the world? Was it a mountain? Was it an altar? … It is, indeed, a unique occasion at which the distinguished word qadosh is used for the first time: in the book of Genesis at the end of the story of creation.

How is this great cathedral, Shabbat, created? Shabbat cannot be visited, cannot be depicted, cannot be concretized in any meaningful way. We know that Shabbat exists but we cannot indicate its place or see its likeness. Shabbat is very reminiscent of its Creator! Like God, Shabbat can only be experienced, and the true experience is the proof of its existence: you cannot experience that which does not exist! Like our understandings of God, Shabbat has be be created by us in order for us to experience it. If we do not make the effort to comprehend the divine we shall never experience it; if we, each of us separately and all of us corporately, do not make the effort to create Shabbat we can not experience it. Shabbat is not a day: true Shabbat is the hypostasis of what we make it. The more spiritual energy and religious fervour that one puts into the creation of Shabbat the greater the spiritual and religious dividends.

9:
Shabbat is created by investing a day like any other day with a special aura and sanctity. The day ceases to be a mere Saturday and becomes Shabbat for him and for her who creates it. This is achieved, from time out of memory, by making Shabbat a "virtual eternity" (to use a term from cyberspace) within the mundane limitations of temporality. This is achieved by things that we do on Shabbat that we don't do on any other day; and it is achieved by things that we don't do on Shabbat that we do do every other day. The requirements and prohibitions of Shabbat are not an irksome concomitant that spoil an otherwise pleasant day of rest: they are the very fabric of the day itself, they are the building blocks which we place on on top of the other, each week, until we have built our cathedral in time.

What are these requirements and prohibitions and how did they originate? And what is their connection with the Reisha of our mishnah?

To be continued.

The account of the saga of Penzias and Wilson that I recounted in our last shiur has prompted a lovely couple of interesting addenda. I wrote: We can cut a long story short. It was soon recognized that the noise that Penzias and Wilson had "heard" was a kind of echo of the Big Bang that marked the creation of this physical universe.

Art Kamlet writes:

Where is the pigeon incident recorded? I'm not sure if you have ever visited Crawford Hill, but it is a small little hill not far from Holmdel NJ and until Penzias and Wilson won their Nobel prize, almost no one at Bell Labs even knew about it. (Although I worked at Whippany – not a town or a village, but rather, a Post Office designation – for 7 years, I never knew of the pigeon incident.) Afterwards, Penzias became the vice president of Bell Labs in charge of research, and retired from there only quite recently. And Arno Penzias was Jewish.

I respond:

The pigeon incident: Steven Weinberg, "The First Three Minutes", Andre Deutsch, 1977, pages 52 onwards.

I wrote: I would be very surprised if Penzias and Wilson were aware that they were making theological history, but the claim of the Torah had now been given scientific corroboration: this universe was not eternal but created.

Larry Yudelson writes:

True, but you might be interested to know that Penzias' daughter was ordained by HUC a couple of years ago.