[Avodah] Two kinds of humros

[David Riceman]

t613k at aol.com wrote:
> It doesn't work like having separate pots for milchig and fleishig.  
> It works more in a community-wide, cosmic way.  It makes people in 
> general aware that there a lot of people you can't marry and 
> especially that you can't marry most of the people with whom you have 
> close, family relationships, the people you run into all the time and  
> have a degree of emotional connection with -- aunts and uncles, 
> in-laws, whatnot.
But you can marry your uncle even though you can't marry your aunt (or, 
to put it another way, a man may marry his niece but not his aunt, and a 
woman may marry her uncle but not her nephew).  How is normative halacha 
easier to comprehend than the d'orayysas would be if we didn't have the 
d'rabbanans?
>   That generalized awareness of "can't marry relatives" makes people a 
> little more wary in an incest-taboo kind of way about getting 
> themselves involved romantically with MOTOS with whom they have more 
> than passing contact (precisely because they /are/ "family").
>  
David Riceman