Q&A: What Is the Rabbi’s Opinion on the Videos (Short Ones)
What Is the Rabbi’s Opinion on the Videos (Short Ones)
Question
https://youtu.be/Mc3Iqj6dsR4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt0SkYinDl0
Answer
Do you want artistic criticism? What kind of question is that?
Discussion on Answer
Substantive criticism of what? I don’t see a question here. Yes, these kinds of contents do appear in Jewish law. And yes, Jewish law sees them as relevant content. If someone makes fun of it, that only means he doesn’t understand the issue or he’s just joking around, which is of course legitimate. I don’t see a question here. When I see a question, I’ll try to understand it.
Okay, so the question is: how does Jewish law see these things, which seem bizarre, as relevant content?
And the answer is that they are not bizarre at all. As with any contract, marriage betrothal too is made on the basis of certain assumptions, and if they are not fulfilled it is void. That is an inseparable part of contract law. The question of what exactly counts as the essential requirements for such a contract depends on the period and society in question. In their time, apparently those were the relevant parameters, but there is nothing essential about that. What matters is not the distance between the breasts, but the basic claim that if an essential characteristic is missing, the contract is void.
What would those actors say if one of them got married and discovered that his wife was mentally ill, had no breasts, was a man in disguise, was a lesbian, and the like? Would there be room to discuss voiding the contract?
This is really nonsense.
Several times in the past I demonstrated this from the Talmudic text in Bava Batra 5a regarding the presumption that a person does not pay before the due date. See for example here: https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%98%D7%91-%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%AA%D7%91-%D7%98%D7%9F-%D7%93%D7%95
Every single time I’m amazed all over again that people buy Yadan’s nonsense.
He’s overall a nice guy, but also very shallow, or else someone whose hatred keeps him from being able to think in an orderly way.
As for the other two videos you didn’t address, don’t you feel embarrassed by the fact that the Sages deal with such bizarre topics?
It’s clear to me that if someone said things like this nowadays in a yeshiva or outside it, he’d get shamed in a way that would keep him at home for the rest of his life. So why do we respond with understanding to the Sages’ engagement with these subjects?
But the case of the snake is not a legal discussion. There the discussion is about how to remove the snake, not about discovering what the law is in this hypothetical case. Unlike the case of grounds for divorcing a woman without her ketubah payment, or even the case of the person who did what he did, where even though the case is bizarre and will never happen, there is still a point in clarifying what the law is in order to understand the Jewish law more deeply.
There, the case not only will never happen, it has no legal, halakhic, or even scientific value either, according to the science of their time. It is just dealing with something bizarre. Today, if someone claimed such a thing he would be considered bizarre and would have nothing to say in his defense. In the other cases too, one could argue that they could have understood the law in another way. But there one can still understand it.
No, substantive criticism. I’m surprised you didn’t understand the question. This is a video by two very famous Israeli actors who want to reflect to the secular public what kind of content there is in the Talmudic text. What do you think about that? That’s the question.