[Avodah] kamztah and bar-kamztah

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, July 15, 2007 4:04 am, R Eli Turkel wrote:
: The Jews on the contrary always act without thinking of the
: consequences (see last Tosafot Gittin 65b).... In the last two
: stories the Jews start up with the Romans over minor customs that
: certainly are not within "yehareg ve-al ya-aovor".

Except that besha'as hashemad, you can't even cave in on shoelace
color, no? Is that because one is hiding Jewish identity, or because
in times of shemad, every hanhagah is yeihareig ve'al ya'avor?

On Sun, July 15, 2007 9:12 am, Rich, R Joel wrote:
: There's a similar issue where the Roman's sent 2 emissaries to
: determine whether the torah was biased against non-Jews.  They were
: taught all of torah and found 2 examples but decided not to report.
: Why didn't chazal simply leave these out? IIRC R'Bleich explained
: that ziyuf hatora must override pikuach nefesh even on this scale...

RZbA wasn't avoiding ziyuf haTorah, he was avoiding a shema yomeru
that would be mezayeif. RZbA wasn't simply unthinkingly machmir. He
was over-thinkingly machmir, worried for the wrong things.

And besides, how would that be anvanuso?

It would seem his problem was inappropriate modesty. The simple take
that he was afraid to take a stand. Judging from his words, it was a
fear of being an inadvertent machti. But perhaps R' Gamliel is saying
he came up with seemingly valid explanations of behavior that had a
flawed underlying motivation.

On Tue, July 17, 2007 8:02 am, RAMkennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
: R' SBA asked [in reply to RJR, above]:
:> What about all the changes made by the chachomim involved with
:> translating the Septuagent

: The answer I've heard to this is that the Septuagint changes were not
: severe enough to count as ziyuf. See the sugya in Megilla 9a-9b. It
: seems to me that they simply included the perush as part of the
: translation. A good example of this was translating "vaychal bayom
: hashvii" as "He completed on the sixth day and rested on the seventh
: day."

Is ziyuf haTorah limited to misrepresenting halakhah? Or perhaps
misreprestenting TSBP? In either case, it would explain why the
emendations to the translation in Targum LXX.

Or we could just explore the impossibility of exact translations, in
which case the question is how loose a translation can be and still
count as not modifying. I think this is slightly more extreme than
RAM's notion that they put TSBP into the TSPK; I'm adding the point
that it is altogether impossible to do otherwise -- one can't
translate TSBK without entering TSBP territory.

But I'm curious about the halakhah of ziyuf, and if it requires a
nafqa mina lema'aseh to fall under the issur.

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             Spirituality is like a bird: if you tighten
micha at aishdas.org        your grip on it, it chokes; slacken your grip,
http://www.aishdas.org   and it flies away.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                            - Rav Yisrael Salanter