[Avodah] Two kinds of humros

[Zev Sero]

t613k at aol.com wrote:
> From: David Riceman <driceman at att.net>
>  >> So what's the function of the gzeirah of shniyos?

>> The Maharal's answer is that shniyos are inherently immoral, but less
>> immoral that Biblical prohibitions, so the Torah left it to the Rabbis
>> to prohibit them.  But according to the normal explanation, that this
>> somehow prevents violations of Biblical law, how does the decree work? <<

> 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.  
> 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").

So then why didn't they ban uncles marrying their nieces, and in fact
encouraged it?  And why not ban cousin marriages too?  Surely they are
at least as emotionally close as some of the shniyos which they did ban.

This also goes to those who have claimed that when the outside world
comes to regard something as immoral, we should adopt that value and
not do it either.  The Xian world, at least, has long banned uncle-niece
marriages, and much of it has banned first-cousin marriages; many USAns
seem to have a deep-seated revulsion for cousin marriages.  And yet Jews
have not changed our ways, and continue to see nothing wrong with them
(though demographic changes have made them less common than they used to
be ~100 years ago).

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                     - Margaret Thatcher