[Avodah] yovel

[Hankman]

Rn'TK wrote:
You didn't read my post carefully. I wasn't talking about the Ten LOST Tribes, which are probably lost forever, long intermarried with other nations.  I was talking about individuals from each of those tribes who lived in the SOUTHERN kingdom, the kingdom of Yehuda, at the time the Bayis Rishon was destroyed, and who have remained within the Jewish fold throughout the centuries.  It is no more improbable that a man from Naftali or Zevulun would today have thousands of male descendants than it is improbable that a kohen alive three thousand years ago would today have thousands of kohen descendants, ben achar ben.  Every man alive today is the descendant, ben achar ben, of a man who lived thousands of years ago.   (Maleness is always transmitted in the male line.)  As long as this man from Shevet X remained Jewish and remained within the fold all those years ago, there is no reason he shouldn't today have many living descendants among the Jewish people -- not far away in a distant land but right here in Miami or New York or Tel Aviv.

--Toby Katz
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CM responds:

No. I did digest the intent of your post.

Your counter argument from the existence today of kohanim or in fact of any shevet (Naftali or Zevulon of your post, or Levi, Binyamin or indeed Yehuda which demonstrably exist today) made me search for the difference to our case. In turns out (if I now understand the issue correctly) the problem is with an implicit assumption (that I did not recognize) in my initial argument. 

Your parenthetical (literally) argument, that "Maleness is always transmitted in the male line" while a true fact genetically, is a red herring and totally irrelevant to your (otherwise correct) argument. The implicit assumption that I unknowingly made seems to be the reason for the falsity of my argument. I implicitly assumed that you only have ONE child and NO MORE from which the probabilities I asserted follow. This is usually not the case. Most people do in fact have more than one child. This significantly changes the statistics and is the reason your counter examples happen and which leaves me with an incorrect line of reasoning in my previous post. Sorry.

Kol Tuv

Chaim Manaster
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