[Avodah] D'rabanan vs. D'oraita

[Glasner, David]

The assumption of the Dor Revi'i is that God does not prohibit anything
just so that He can punish someone for violating the prohibition. You may
disagree, but that is what he says. So, if there is a prohibition, it is
because at a physical level or a spiritual level (or at some inersection
of the two levels) the prohibited act causes damage to the person doing
the act or damage to others. However, the prohibition applies only in
the normal course of business, so ha-okhel she-lo ke-derekh hana'ato has
not violated the prohibition, because the Torah assumes that people will
not perform prohibited acts in this way often enough to cause damage to
themselves (damage to others is not an issue in this context). Similarly,
the situation in which a person eats a prohibited substance because
it was halakhically nullified in a rov is too remote for the Torah
to have worried that the cumulative damage resulting from ingesting
the prohbited substance would cause damage to the person eating the
prohibited substance. So your hypothetical is simply not one that the
Dor Revi'I would entertain. Can you suggest any set of circumstances
in which it would be a practical as opposed to a concepual possibility?

The point of sakanta hamira is that if you eat poison it may kill you
because the damage done has an immediate effect. The damage associated
with issur does not happen immediately but only over time as a result
of repeated, independent, actions. So there is no danger with allowing
a person to eat issur that was nullified halakhically in a rov, but the
physical danger of eating poison is not nullified by rov and therefore
eating it remains halakhically prohibited despite the rov. Presumably
any non-physical sakana does not have an immediate catastrophic effect,
so rov can nullify it. If you can specify a case where the non-physical
sakana could have an immediate catastrophic effect, then I would assume
that it is not halakhically nullified by the rov.

-----Original Message-----
From: Micha Berger [mailto:micha at aishdas.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 3:15 PM
...

A bunch of disjoint thoughts:

A person eats three pieces of meat a day, one of which causes timtum and
he knows which one it is. Another person eats three pieces of meat daily,
and he doesn't know which is assur. The first is a mumar, the second
didn't do a single issur. They both ate the same amount of cheilev,
so I presume the D4 would say that they incur the same timtum. So, how does
this explanation resolve my question:
> I already cited the problem of 2 chatichos shuman, 1 cheilev, if we
> understand timtum haleiv as a causal consequence of eating cheilev,
> we can't play rov -- and certainly not of all three pieces at three
> different times. And yet, it's mutar AFAIK without a warning from
> anyone.

 --

There are two possible causal connections between the cheit and the
timtum (and by parallel between hanging a mezuzah and the shemirah,
and so on for our other examples) -- assuming that they are connected,
IOW, that timtum is a kind of onesh:
Treif food is dangerous, therefore Hashem prohibited it.
Because Hashem prohibited it, the act of being an avaryan is dangerous.

In general, I think that people today find the concepts of mitzvah,
sechar va'onesh more appealing in the first way. Hashem gives us
"tarya"g itin" (eitzos) as the Zohar puts it in order to protect us
from soul-damaging activity. The onesh is the damage we were warned to
avoid.

Would the D4 say there's a causal connection between the cheit (as
opposed to the cheftzah in-and-of itself) and the timtum? At first,
I thought he couldn't possibly. However, either would work with what
RDG (the D7?) summarized -- if we presume that the danger is not in
the issur but in being a mumar ledavar zeh. And thus it's like being
prohibited from smoking the first cigarette lest it becomes a habit,
which causes measurable damage.

 --

Chamira saqanta mei'issura: is it invoked on non-physical sakanos?