{"id":11599,"date":"2008-11-01T16:52:30","date_gmt":"2008-11-01T20:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/11\/01\/11599.html"},"modified":"2018-06-11T09:57:12","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T14:57:12","slug":"pirke-avot-make-a-hedge-for-th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/11\/01\/pirke-avot-make-a-hedge-for-th\/","title":{"rendered":"Pirke Avot: Make a hedge for the Torah"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We’re discussing Pirke Avot<\/I>; I started with some general ideas about the discussion before we began<\/a>, and now in order to facilitate some sort of coherent discussion that can be joined in and followed, I’ve broken the first verse into four notes. Here’s the verse:
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Moses received the Law on Sinai and delivered it to Joshua; and Joshua to the Elders; and the Elders to the prophets; and the prophets to the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be not hasty in judgment; Bring up many disciples; and, Make a hedge for the Torah<\/strong>.<\/blockquote>
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I broke out the first sentence<\/a>, and then had a separate thread for hasty<\/a> and disciples<\/a>, and then this note about the hedge to finish it off. At least I hope this will finish it off. And I hope this isn’t confusing. YHB is making it up as we go along, you know.
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Make a hedge for the Torah or a fence around the Torah, or a safeguard for the Torah. I mean, the language is hedge, in the sense of protective hedge, but the word was used to mean fence (as in fact hedges are used as fences), and then some translators want to indicate that it’s used as a metaphor, because, you know, it is. Anyway this whole hedge business is problematic for YHB, both in itself and in terms of how it played out historically.
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Rabbi Natan (an early medieval commentator) gives an example of this hedge in the rules of niddah<\/i>; men and women are not permitted to have sex while the woman is menstruating, so a hedge is put in place that not only is the sex act not permitted, but embracing, kissing and sleeping under the covers together are also forbidden, and the custom then forbids any contact whatsoever, including, say, the contact of hands when passing a plate across the table or whatnot. Now, there are lots of other issues involved in that, but it seems to me that there it’s very easy to lose sight of the actual law if the hedge is too thick. You know? Take as another example the Ashkenazic custom that considers fowl fleishig<\/I> for purposes of kashut<\/I>, despite the fact that chickens don’t give milk. Why aren’t chickens parve<\/i>? Because you get them at the butchers, where you get meat. Because they are like meat, because they look like meat sometimes, because if you sent your servant to get some meat for dinner, and he came back with fowl, you would be happy.
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But here’s the thing. You can look at this injunction two ways: as an individual applying it for yourself, or as a member of the Great Assembly applying it in rulings for everybody. I’m happy to make a hedge around the law for myself (although since I am scarcely observant, it doesn’t so much apply), and if you want to treat your gardenburgers as fleishig<\/i> for the purposes of the hedge, I respect that. More than that, I see it as a valuable lesson, or tool I suppose; if I am tempted to gamble, then I shouldn’t go to a casino. I don’t want to go right up to the edge of what is permissible and try to stop there. For myself, a hedge is a good thing in all the areas that I need a hedge, but silly and useless in the others.
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On the other hand, as a general matter, custom (minchag<\/i>) is considered binding. Or at least it has considerable weight; it doesn’t outweigh everything else, but it does outweigh mere common sense. If chicken is meat, then chicken is meat. If margarine is parve<\/I>, then margarine is parve<\/i>. And who am I to say that margarine is a lot more like butter than chicken is like goat. Or at least, when I do make that decision, I should make it deliberately, not in haste.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger has some difficulty with this thorny issue. Get it? Get it? Thorny? Hedge? Wait, where’d everybody go?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-11599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture","tag-pirkeavot"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18568,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11599\/revisions\/18568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}