[Avodah] Minhag Yisroel and Gra on 2 Matzos vs.3 Matzos/Rabbi shopping

[Arie Folger]

On Sunday, 28. October 2007 13.31:03 Chana Luntz wrote:
> Or they did teshuva I guess.  I am not sure that this is really a case
> of manipulating reality though.  Here the women have demonstrated two
> things to the beis din a) they have somehow sufficient control of the
> captors to be able to get them to wait at a distance and b) their state
> of purity was important enough for them to arrange for all this to
> happen and they were clever enough to do so.

No, in the case of the women who originally came to Neharda'ah, it was Mar 
Shemuel's father who arranged for the women to come sans captors to beit din.

BTW, manipulating reality isn't necessarily bad. If Avuha diShemuel did it, it 
was right (as the Gemara implies with the story how Shemuel's own daugthers 
eventually were taken prisoners).

Regarding the captors, I frankly doubt they did teshuvah, otherwise the sugya 
would have been about whether a captor-turned-BT can testify about things he 
did before repenting, and how ein adam meissim 'atzmo rasha' applies here. I 
am rather inclined to believe that this was a standard practice by the 
government appointed tax collector or otherwise some form of Jew harrasment 
by government forces.

Regarding your [here unquoted] argument that we should not only worry about 
the yirat shamayim of the shoel, but also of the meishiv, I am sure we all 
agree. However, that would not bear as much on the general issue of the 
nature of pessaq, which we have been discussing here (remember, we started 
with the fact that there can be two seemingly conflicting rulings given to 
two similar people, and yet both are valid. This was to research whether 
pessaq halakhah is "mathematical" or not), but rather on a different issue, 
of whether an erroneous pessaq renders it nonbinding, which is treated in the 
halakhic literature. (ta'a bidevar mishnah etc.)

[now really back to lurking...]

-- 
Arie Folger
http://www.ariefolger.googlepages.com