[Avodah] O vs pharisee

[Zev Sero]

On 1/09/2011 5:37 PM, Lisa Liel wrote:
> I don't know where you get the idea that they were shomer mitzvot.  I'm not even convinced they existed at all at that time.

 From their own stories.  There are too many details that survived the
retelling by people who had no clue about yiddishkeit, and therefore
couldn't have made up, for them to have no basis in fact.  The people
who passed these stories on, and eventually wrote them down, often
completely misunderstood the import of these details, but they're there
if you read them with a Jewish eye.

For instance, the fact that the "Pharisees" gave J mussar because his
talmidim were lax about netilas yodayim.  From this we learn several
things: 1) that they were keeping almost everything else, so that this
was the big fault the critics found; 2) J himself was washing properly,
or they would have confronted him with it; 3) He doesn't excuse his
talmidim's laxity; he just tells the critics off for complaining.  But
while the rest of the story is not recorded, I speculate that once the
critics were gone he turned to his talmidim and gave them some mussar
too, because however hypocritical the critics were, they had a point.

There's also the so-called "chilul shabbos" incident in the field; from
the answer he gave it's pretty clear what this was about. The fact that
this was the answer he gave shows that the story is really about pikuach
nefesh, and thus he quite properly cited the proof from Dovid eating the
Lechem Haponim.  By the time the story was recorded, the nochrim and
amei ho'oretz had forgotten what it was about, but they remembered this
argument and included it in the record.

-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
zev at sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
		                            - Yitzchak Rabin