[Avodah] Dead-Letter Halakhoth

[Jay F Shachter]

The following is from our sister mailing list Areivim:

> 
> Please see http://tinyurl.com/7jla27g for more.
> 
> Chabad-Lubavitch will hold its 26th annual 
> community-wide Purim Seuda dinner 5:30 p.m. today 
> at the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel, 801 University Ave.
> 
> "Purim in Peking" will offer participants a 
> chance to enjoy Chinese delicacies and drink 
> royal wine according to the kings bounty ? as it 
> says in the Book of Esther. Asian attire is optional.
> 
> I wonder if they will be serving Peking duck.  YL
>

After reading the full article, cited above, it became evident that
this event was not actually going to be taking place in Beijing;
however, it does raise a question that I have thought about
occasionally over the years: Inasmuch as Beijing is an ancient city,
should not Purim in the Forbidden City be celebrated today (Friday,
Adar 15) rather than yesterday?

The question relates to a larger phenomenon, halakhoth that everyone
knows (this is a crucial component of the phenomenon, because if a
halakha is obscure, then there is a simpler explanation for why no one
observes it) and yet which are, de facto, dead letters.  One example,
perhaps not the best but certainly the most timely, is the halakha
that you should observe Purim on the 15th of Adar in Shushan, and in
any other city that was walled in ancient times.  But does any Jew
observe this halakha outside of Israel, or, in fact, outside of the
Jerusalem area?  It seems to be the case that in every city outside of
the Jerusalem area that was walled in ancient times, the Jews who live
there have decided that for some reason or another that particular
halakha does not apply to them.  I am not talking about cities that,
at some point in their history, were burnt to the ground, and then
rebuilt, perhaps in not exactly the same place.  I am talking about
cities like, e.g., Beijing, that never were.

Another example -- and perhaps there is a different mechanism at work
in this case, I haven't thought carefully and done a thorough
taxonomic classification of all these examples -- is when Jews ignore
the halakha that you can't live in a city that has no mikveh.  There
were plenty of otherwise religious Jews who lived in Skokie, Illinois,
long before there was a mikveh there.  Now, I understand that halakha
does not, in general, care about where the goyim draw their political
boundaries, and that Skokie and Chicago are the same city with respect
to, e.g., txum shabbath, but these were Jews living in neighborhoods
where they could not walk to the mikveh on Friday night.  Moreover,
there are clearer examples.  There were plenty of otherwise religious
Jews who lived in Palo Alto, California (where I lived before I moved
to Chicago) years before there was a mikveh anywhere within the txum
shabbath there, or indeed anywhere closer than Berkeley or San
Francisco.  I never heard of any Jew there who learned the halakha,
realized that he or she was forbidden to live there, and therefore
left.  They all decided that for some reason that particular halakha
did not apply to them (as I admitted two sentences ago, I lived there
myself, although not after I was married).

Consider another halakha that has, de facto, been defined out of
existence, the halakha that you aren't allowed to mourn for a suicide.
I have never seen anyone behave as if this halakha existed.  Whenever
there is a suicide in the religious Jewish community, he or she is
buried in a Jewish cemetery together with everyone else, and the close
relatives sit shiva.  In every case, the mourners consider their own
deceased to be an exception to the halakha.  If they enter into a
conversation on the subject, and many are unwilling to do so, they say
something incoherent about how their child suffered -- as if the Sages
did not know that every suicide suffers -- and should be treated as an
"oness", someone who sins under extenuating circumstances.  (What kind
of suicide do they think the Sages were taking about?  The kind that
doesn't suffer?)  This is said about every suicide in the religious
Jewish community, without exception, reducing the set of suicides to
whom the halakha "really" applies to the empty set, which is
preposterous.

And as long as we are talking about funerals, consider the halakha
that you're not allowed to deliver a eulogy on, e.g., Xol HaMo'ed.  I
have never seen anyone behave as if this halakha existed.  There is a
slightly different mechanism involved in this case: people admit that
the halakha applies to them; they deny that they are violating it.
Practically speaking, this halakha has only a single consequence: the
sole difference between a funeral conducted on Xol HaMo`ed and a
funeral conducted on a regular day of the year is that at a funeral
conducted on Xol HaMo`ed, every speaker begins his remarks by saying,
"hespedim are forbidden on xol hamo`ed" and there is no other
perceptible difference.

A thoughtful taxonomy of these dead-letter halakhoth would be welcome,
as would be an elucidation of their distinguishing characteristic.  My
first impulse was to assert that Jews just don't observe halakhoth
that are difficult (fasting on Yom Kippur is easy; desisting from
thirty-nine categories of labor on Shabbath is easy; not mourning for
your son is hard).  But that is a facile conclusion that does not fit
the facts.  There is nothing more difficult than the laws of nidda;
and yet, a woman tells her husband that she has seen something that
resembles a red rose, and he separates from her, which is a marvel,
more marvelous than the way of a vulture in the heavens, or a serpent
over a rock, or a ship on the high sea.  It is a marvel that it
happens even once, and yet it has happened millions of times.

So it is not simply a matter of Jews not observing the halakhoth that
are difficult.  There is something else going on here, perhaps it is
more a matter of Jews not observing the halakhoth that are out of the
ordinary, that require you to revise your expectations, that require
you to do something different from what you had pictured yourself
doing in your circumstances.  As I write these words my eyes wander
and alight on a copy of "The Cognitive Control Of Motivation" by my
old professor Phil Zimbardo (a promising researcher before he was made
useless by fame and celebrity) and I wonder whether doing something
different from what you had pictured yourself doing is, perhaps, the
most difficult thing of all.


                Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
                6424 N Whipple St
                Chicago IL  60645-4111
                        (1-773)7613784
                        jay at m5.chicago.il.us
                        http://m5.chicago.il.us

		"The umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house"