[Avodah] Pilagshuth and Xuqqim

[Jay F. Shachter]

> 
> A case too extreme for us: If every marriage were pilagshus rather
> than qiddushin, there would be no new lines of mamzeirim. But something
> THAT fundamental to Qedushas Yisrael isn't getting avoided, even though
> mamzeirus is a problem ledoros.
> 

I don't know why I'm even responding to someone who says "Yuma", but I
am.  First, a pedantic distinction, which turns out not to be a
pedantic distinction: abolishing qiddushin and nissuin (except,
presumably, for the Kohen Gadol, who is obliged mid'oraitha to marry)
and thus abolishing adultery, would not, in your words, eliminate all
"new lines of mamzerim".  There will still be incest.

Moreover, although you may be the first person who has ever thought of
reforming Jewish society in this way, I suspect that other people have
thought of it too, before you did.  And they may have considered that
abolishing qiddushin and nissuin will quite likely have the opposite
of the intended effect, because it will increase the incidence of
incest, because people will often not know to whom they are related,
on their fathers' side, and they will commit incest without knowing.

(Plus you must surely realize that people will be wife swapping in
your brave new world, leaving their common-law spouses for a night and
then returning to them the next morning.  And this may not bother you
since no adultery is involved.  But, you know, the Torah could have
permitted a man to be maxazir eth grushatho after she married someone
else, and the Torah didn't; so it is a thing that seems to have
bothered the Author of the Torah, even if it doesn't bother you.  This
can be a discussion for another time, which is why this paragraph is
in parentheses.)

These new lines of mamzerim might not trouble you, though, because in
many of those cases, they'll never know that they are mamzerim, so
what's the harm?  Well, one could say that there will be cases when
people will find out, and that the incidence of those cases will not
be negligible, especially now that we have DNA testing, so you'll have
to abolish that too, 'cause it's better not to know those things,
right?

Although another thing that one could say, is that if you don't care
about creating mamzerim who don't know it, because they'll never know,
and their children will never know, and no prophet will ever tell them
-- well, with the same logic you shouldn't care all that much either
about creating mamzerim who do know it.  Because mamzeruth status does
not, practically speaking, last forever.  It gets lost, it gets
forgotten.  Do you really know that none of your wife's ancestors was
a mamzer or a mamzereth?  Or none of yours?  It's a rhetorical
question -- you don't.  People move around, they arrive in new
communities where no one knows them, they have a xezqath kashruth, and
no one knows.  In my own family, I personally have no knowledge of any
mamzeruth in my own ancestors, but there is a member of my family who
I know is a mamzer.  His mother nebbekh married her first husband,
because she wanted to be his wife and not his concubine, and I gotta
tell you, I don't think his children know.  And if his children do end
up marrying converts because some zealous shadkhen or shadkhente
suspected something, I don't think their children will know.  There's
no genetic marker, and it doesn't last, not in practice.

Related question: Suppose you're standing on the sidewalk in your
predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and you see a truck drive down the
street with a sign that says O'Brien's Quality Pork Products, and it
hits a bump and an unlabeled packet of meat falls off the truck.  You
cannot return it to its rightful owner because by the time you catch
up to the truck, the meat will have been unrefrigerated for too long,
and the owner will not want it.  You watch as your Jewish neighbor
turns the corner and sees the packet of meat in the street, and he
picks it up.  Do you say anything?

(By the way, I am actually in favor of reviving the ancient and
honorable institution of pilagshuth.  I just want people to think long
and clearly about these things, and to understand them thoroughly, and
to discuss them publicly, and at length, because stuff isn't simple.)

As for the xoq discussion, first of all, please don't quote any more
Hirsch etymologies, just as a matter of tza`ar ba`aley xayyim, 'cause
it hurts my ears.  Second of all, the word in the Torah that means the
same thing as "xoq", in Rabbinic Hebrew, is not "xoq".  It's "xuqqah".
A "xoq", in the Torah, is something else, it's a thing that you have
coming to you that you can count on.  I'm just sayin'.


               Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
               6424 North Whipple Street
               Chicago IL  60645-4111
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               When Martin Buber was a schoolboy, it must have been
               no fun at all playing tag with him during recess.