[Avodah] Teyqu

[Jay F. Shachter]

In Volume 43 Issue 4 of our sister mailing list Areivim, someone wrote:

> 
> To: areivim at lists.aishdas.org
> Subject: [Areivim] BDE Rav Elazar Meir Teitz
> 
> As a lurker for many years, when some of the discussions were
> intense, I felt there was often a "Tayku" moment when the Tishbi
> was, in fact, Teitz putting the final chasimah on the matter.
> 
> Yehi Zichro Baruch,
> 

Teyqu is not an acronym.  It is an abbreviation, in a local dialect,
of the Aramaic word teyqum, a word cognate to the Hebrew taqum, and it
means "let it stand".  When the Sages of the Talmud declined to
resolve a dispute, and elected to let a question stand unresolved,
they sometimes ended the discussion with the word teyqu -- let [the
question] stand.

This is mildly interesting, but much more interesting (I think) is why
a reader of this mailing list has bothered to send in an article, that
you are now reading, correcting the mistake.

One possible explanation is that he has no life, that he is a man of
mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper, who has
neither the vision nor the discipline to do anything better with his
literary talents than write cranky letters to mailing lists with fewer
than a dozen readers, correcting inconsequential, small mistakes in
other people's articles, like mites in a quarrel.

But I think that this is a mistake worth lingering over.  When a Jew
accepts a bogus etymology for a word that appears more than 300 times
in the Talmud, it is not a morally neutral event, like when one of my
students told me that "swag" stands for "stuff we all get" (a true
story).  A Jew has a moral obligation to understand the words of the
Talmud, whereas a non-Jew has no moral obligation to investigate the
etymology of English words, and that means that a Jew has a moral
obligation not to repeat mindlessly the bogus etymologies he has heard
from others, without giving them any thought.

Moreover, and more to the point, this is a pernicious mistake.  It is
not just a false belief, it is a false belief of a piece with, and
reinforcing, a whole constellation of other false beliefs, all leading
us in the wrong direction.  The halakha is that Eliyahu may not
declare to us, through prophecy, the resolution of an unresolved
question in halakha.  If Eliyahu declares to us, through prophecy, the
resolution of an unresolved question in halakha, then we must put him
to death as a false prophet, because questions in halakha are not
decided by prophecy.  It is our duty to reconstitute the Sanhedrin and
resolve these questions ourselves, and not to wait for a Divine
messenger to resolve them for us.  As has been stated before on this
mailing list, Eliyahu can have one vote on the Sanhedrin, if he wants
a seat on the Sanhedrin and if we let him have one, but it is we who
have both the power, and the duty, to reconstitute the Sanhedrin, and
resolve these questions ourselves.

The belief that we have to wait for Eliyahu to resolve our unresolved
disputes is perfectly consonant with other pernicious beliefs that are
prevalent today, like the belief that we must wait for the Messiah to
come, supernaturally, and build the Third Temple, and usher in some
kind of magical period in human history when everything will be
perfect.  If you think that the coming of the Messiah will be a
supernatural, miraculous event, then you are forbidden to pray for the
coming of the Messiah, because you are not allowed to pray for a
miracle.  The fact is that we cannot wait for the Messiah to "come",
because it is the Sanhedrin who designates who the king will be, and
he is not king, until the Sanhedrin says so.  And the Messiah does not
build the Third Temple after he comes, because one of our criteria in
deciding to designate him to be the king, is that he has built the
Third Temple.  Which means that we must begin the building of the
Third Temple before we know whether we are in Messianic times or not.
And there are some of you who don't even think that the Messiah will
build the Third Temple even after the "coming of the Messiah", because
you think that the Third Temple will magically descend, fully-built,
from the sky.

There is an interesting phenomenon that has happened, not just in our
lifetimes, but in the past several months.  Jews used to say that
certain halakhoth and practices are not currently in effect, and that
they will not be effect until the majority of Jews are living in Eretz
Yisrael.  This had the effect of putting off certain inconvenient or
difficult things until never -- that is to say, "never" in the sense
that it wasn't anything you had to concern yourself with or deal with.
But in the past year -- really, it hasn't been undeniable until just
this year -- a majority of the Jews in the world, have come to live in
Eretz Yisrael.  The result of this demographic fact, a fact that has
not been true for thousands of years, not since Biblical times -- a
thing that we have been praying to rejoice over since we hung up our
harps in a foreign land, a thing that our generation, we who are alive
today, have been privileged to live to see -- the result is that I,
and you, are hearing Jews now change their psaq.  Now we are beginning
to hear that these halakhath and practices, which were formerly said
to be suspended until a majority of Jews are living in Eretz Israel,
are now to remain suspended until everyone knows what tribe he is a
member of, and every tribe is living on its ancestral tribal land.
Once again, these inconvenient or difficult things are being
conveniently put off, until never.  The stuff about the tribes was not
invented this year, it has long been part of the discussion, but it
was always a very small part of the discussion, to which few people
devoted much thought, until this year, when it has been pulled in and
elevated to prominence, because now it is needed as a convenient way
of putting off until never, matters that we could and should be
addressing now.

               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.