[Avodah] Should Shiurim be Corrected to Archeological Data

[Arie Folger]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 7:57 PM Micha Berger <micha at aishdas.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 05:03:06PM +0100, Arie Folger via Avodah wrote:
> : RMB asked whether we should revise the size of our shiurim, and gave
> three
> : possible answers. Implicit in his trichotomy is that all shiurim are
> : connected (he mentions olive and arm and dirham in one fell swoop, even
> : though the arm and the dirham actually clash).
>
> If shiurim do depend on today's arms and olives, they wouldn't need to
> remain in the ratios they were in when Chazal stated how they related
> in their forearms, finger-widths and olives.


Well, since I am not reporting my own views or research, but rather the
view of one notable TC I visited, let me correctly state his views. For Rav
Zalman Koren, the olive is an olive, perhaps even a contemporary olive and
subject to change, but an amah is a fixed measure.

Furthermore, Rav Koren remarked that even though people have grown taller
as our public health has improved, fists have not grown broader. If
anything, our fists are smaller than those of our forebears, since we do
not do as much hard menial work. Hence, his argument goes, an etzba cannot
be less than a contemporary actual finger breadth. Same for tefach.

This insistence that the shiurim are meant to match realia leaves me with
some questions. First of all, if we take the fingers and fists literally,
the eggs become unrealistically large. The Chazon Ish's kebeitzah is almost
twice as large s a large egg; it's even larger than a so called jumbo egg
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes). Also, a zeres,
defined as half an amah, is really problematic, as I know of no one with a
thumb to pinky spread of thirty centimeters. I assume some giant basket
ball players may have such hands, but they are so unsually tall that they
cannot possibly be the standard setting example.

Arie Folger
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