The Golden Chapter – Money and Acquisition by Money – Lesson 2

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, last time we started with a general introduction to the first part of the chapter, which deals mainly with money, money acquisition, money versus commodity, money acquisition versus exchange, and so on. And I want, as I said then, to place this whole conceptual system inside some broader framework, because I think a great many of the laws, and the connections between the laws and the concepts, really arise naturally if we understand the concepts well. So it’s important to me somehow to turn this into, to place it within some kind of orderly framework. I’m doing this almost without sources; in a bit I’ll get somewhat into sources, but I think that in the end this framework also covers a great many sources. So I spoke briefly, I spoke about the development of the concept of money. It began with natural barter trade. A person wanted chairs, gave tomatoes, and people exchanged with each other in an entirely natural way, without legal regulation, without formal definitions. And at some stage they realized commerce was stuck, so they brought money into the picture. Money lubricates this process, but money created—that is, it made the commercial market, the commercial world, more efficient, but it complicated the legal aspects. In fact, it created them, created them, and afterward also complicated them. And this happened on several planes. First, the very invention of the concept of money is itself some kind of legal construction, as distinct from a commodity, which has natural significance. I need a hammer because you use it to drive nails. Money has no natural significance. Money is a matter of convention. And therefore it draws its meaning, its worth, its value, from agreement. Agreement is already something legal, meaning you need to establish something—yes, this is worth such-and-such, this is how we do it. Consequently, money acquisition also comes into being, unlike the barter trade that existed before. Money acquisition is no longer symmetrical, unlike barter trade; there is commodity versus money and not commodity versus commodity. That means we now have to define how exactly this works, what money is in this transaction, who is the side that is the money, who is the side that is the commodity, how exactly the transaction is finalized—do you have to draw the money, do you have to draw the commodity, each of them? These things already require some sort of regulation, and therefore, together with the birth of money, the legal sphere was born as well—the formal regulation of barter trade, of the concepts of acquisition, ownership, the act of acquisition, all these things that previously—rights, all these things that previously basically didn’t really exist. In one natural way or another people touched on them, but no one really saw these concepts standing in front of their eyes; they weren’t concepts that were present in their own right. So exchange acquisition, for example, sources are brought from the Scroll of Ruth, yes, “and a man drew off his shoe,” and so on, but it’s pretty clear that these are not halakhic sources, and it’s also not from the Torah, rather they’re sources documenting what used to be, that’s all. And barter trade is basically the form of commerce that once existed. But I said that after they underwent juridification, yes, conceptualization, formalization of the whole commercial and legal world, barter too carved out a place for itself within that field. And now it too became a legal, formal acquisition; it has definitions—how you do it, how you don’t do it—which it didn’t have before. But once we’re doing regulation, then if we want to preserve barter trade, it too has to be part of the regulation. And suddenly exchange becomes not barter trade but exchange acquisition, or in yeshiva language, exchange, exchange—or as the confused ones say. This thing is not the ancient barter trade; it preserves certain traits of ancient barter trade, but now it is a legal concept like any other. A matter of conceptualization and transition. Okay. We saw that money serves two purposes. Or really, on the way to creating money we had to perform a kind of abstraction and then concretization. Abstraction means taking various objects, commodities that existed until then, and understanding that they have some abstract property that we can call value or worth. Things have value. Now understand: in a world without money, there’s no point talking about value. What is value? Now it’s not that there was no value—there was value, but people didn’t talk about it. Rather, I gave you tomatoes, you gave me chairs. Now it’s not that this was one chair against one tomato. I assume even then it didn’t work like that. But there was no precise definition of how much a tomato is worth, how much a chair is worth. At most there was a relative definition: how many tomatoes equal a chair or how many chairs equal a tomato. But I couldn’t ask: how much is a tomato worth? How much is a tomato worth—what do you mean, in terms of what? In terms of oranges, in terms of chairs, or in terms of cars? Okay? So that’s not even a question one could ask. Once the concept of worth or value is created, now objects have a value that is not merely relative; it is absolute. A tomato now has a value. It’s worth a shekel. It’s no longer measured in terms of a tenth of a chair or a hundredth of a house or something like that. Rather now I have a yardstick, I have a scale, and I say this is worth one shekel, or five shekels, or three and a half shekels, and so on. So this means that the concept of value has really been extracted from natural objects and has undergone some kind of conceptualization. Now we understand that things have value. The concept of value has been born. And at the next stage, after we’ve performed abstraction and arrived at the concept of value, we concretize it. Concretization means taking something abstract and making it concrete. Yes—what does that mean? Coins and banknotes. Coins and banknotes basically represent value. Okay? So now when I talk about a value of one hundred shekels, I have a bill—here, this is a value of one hundred shekels. So value stops being an abstract concept and becomes an object. I have an object called value. Suddenly I can own it, even though that’s very strange; before, it was a property of things that I could own. Now no—I can own a certain value or a certain worth. Okay? So this is the innovation that came with the concept of money. That’s why the concept of money really has two main uses. One use is basically as the unit of measurement for the concepts of worth or value. I measure it in shekels, in dollars, it doesn’t matter which monetary system and what its unit is. But on the conceptual level, this is the unit with which you measure worth or value. The second use is that money is basically the concretization of the concept of value, and here I’m already talking about coins and banknotes, not about the concept of a shekel. Before I was talking about the concept of a shekel. Now I’m talking about a shekel as a coin, a coin worth one shekel. Okay? This thing is simply a concrete form for transferring value to someone else. When I want to pay someone else for his chairs, I no longer have to give him tomatoes; I can give him bills or coins worth money. Okay? And therefore money is not only a unit of measurement of value; it is also a way to concretize value, to make it tangible and use it in the marketplace—to pay with it, to give coins and banknotes in exchange for goods. And I said that later—we’re already familiar with this in our own day—you no longer need that. After we created the concept of value, the concretization becomes unnecessary. I can now tell you: okay, I’m transferring you one hundred shekels in the bank. They’ll simply move it from my column to your column. They’ll deduct a hundred from mine, add a hundred to yours, and that’s it. What do I need this for? After all, these are just conventional things. You didn’t receive anything by getting a one-hundred-shekel bill, right? You just need to make sure that this value is registered in your name. Fine, I’ll register it in the bank in your name. You don’t need the concretization. Once the concretization has helped us understand and conceptualize the concept of value, we can throw it away. It’s no longer necessary. It did its job, and now we can get rid of it. I said that as a result, money has a different status or significance than any other commodity. Every other commodity has a value that is not conventional, a value that is natural; it derives from the uses we have for that commodity. For money, value is conventional value. But not only is its value conventional—why is it conventional? Because it has no natural value. Money has no natural value. There’s nothing to do with money except perhaps wrap up your little flask with it, but basically there is no use for a coin or a banknote. It has no use. A hammer has a use, and that use is worth twenty shekels. But a twenty-shekel bill has no use for me. It is worth twenty shekels because that’s what we decided. That means that if with an object, some commodity—what the Talmud calls peira. Peira means commodity, as opposed to tivei’a, which is money, yes? So if a commodity has a corpus and fruits—the corpus is the thing itself, and the fruits are the uses one has from the thing. Right? A house also has fruits. The fruits of a house means dwelling in it, the use of the house—that’s called the fruits of the house. The concept of fruits is of course a general concept, and I’ll explain later that it has significance. Why did they choose specifically this term and not hammers? Why specifically fruits? But that’s the accepted halakhic jargon, and therefore when you own a house or a hammer or anything else, you can own the corpus, and in principle you could also own the fruits. That doesn’t happen. From the standpoint of Jewish law, you can’t own fruits independently. Whoever owns the corpus also owns the fruits. Sometimes there is a definition of a usage right. A usage right is something else; it’s not ownership. There are sometimes cases in which you can own the corpus for its fruits, but it always

[Speaker C] has to be a right rooted in the corpus itself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ownership of fruits by themselves is not defined on the halakhic level. Tosafot argues that renting is ownership of fruits pure and simple. That’s the innovation of the concept of rental: that you basically own the uses of the object. The object as a whole belongs to its owner; the uses belong to you. But that’s not the accepted view. The accepted view—there is a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim), but the accepted view in both disputes among the Rishonim, on both sides of the dispute, is either that this is really only usage rights and not ownership—the practical difference affects leavened food, affects many things: do you violate “it shall not be seen”? Is it only a usage right and not ownership? Or alternatively, there really is ownership here, but then it is corpus for its fruits, not fruits alone. Tosafot wants to introduce the idea that this is ownership of fruits. That is the special innovation of rental, but it’s an innovation not accepted by other halakhic decisors. So basically you can’t own fruits. You can own a corpus for its fruits, the ability to make use of the corpus. Okay? That’s the meaning of fruits. Yes?

[Speaker D] A banknote—what? A good example for a banknote is change. Foreign currency, let’s say, that’s made of silver, real silver.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whether that’s real money, I’m not talking about that. I said: when I speak here about money, I mean conventional money. Yes, because that’s the plain discussion. Once you move to real money, it’s really some combination of these two things, but in order to define the concepts themselves, I prefer to deal with them in their pure form. The mixtures come afterward. In their pure form, there is either commodity on one side or conventional money on the other. Those are the two poles. Now you can create intermediate creatures; after all, a commodity too can serve as money. Something worth money can function as money. So we’ll still see that. But those are already complications. First of all, the two theoretical concepts are either conventional money or commodity. Okay? Fine. So that’s regarding ownership. Ownership of commodity can be corpus, and perhaps corpus for its fruits or something like that. Ownership of money—there really is no such thing as ownership of money. Ownership of money is a concept that isn’t defined on the legal and halakhic level. What? Wait, we’ll get there. Ownership of money isn’t—basically it’s something undefined. Why is it undefined? Because there isn’t some specific object here that you own. If I took your one-hundred-shekel bill and put another one-hundred-shekel bill in its place, I didn’t do anything. It doesn’t depend on the question whether robbery in order to tease—does that count as theft? Yes, taking in order to return. Unrelated. With money it’s irrelevant. With money this is not called taking in order to return; you just have one hundred shekels, you had one hundred shekels, and you still have one hundred shekels. Nothing happened. So I switched your bill—so what? The bill doesn’t belong to you. The bill only symbolizes that in your possession there is an additional value of one hundred shekels. So I gave you another symbol—what difference does it make? Therefore, being an owner of money is a concept that has to be defined, if it exists at all. What does it mean to own money? So money is a symbol that there is in your possession—or under your ownership, I don’t know what to call it—a certain value or worth, and you are not the owner of the bills. Okay? At least not ownership in the usual sense. The Talmud says in our tractate on page 45b: “It was stated, Rav and Levi.” I’ll share here what we have for our friends on Zoom. Never mind, I’ll just read one line, it doesn’t really matter, I didn’t activate the thing. “It was stated, Rav and Levi. One said a coin can effect exchange, and one said a coin cannot effect exchange.” There’s a dispute whether a coin can effect exchange. Rav Pappa said: “What is the reason of the one who says a coin cannot effect exchange?” The one who says that a coin—it doesn’t say who says what, but it’s Rav and Levi. Now this is the one who says that a coin cannot effect exchange. Why not? How is it different from anything else? So he says: “Because his mind is on the form, and the form is made to be annulled.” Meaning, with a coin his mind is on the form. And the form can be annulled. Form means the king’s stamp, yes, which gives it agreed value, turning the coin into something with a certain value, and this is basically expressed by the form stamped onto the coin. That’s why it’s called coinage. Basically, something into which a form is stamped. Now unlike everything else, where in philosophical terminology there are matter and form—right? Going back to Aristotle. Matter and form, or the thing and its properties. A coin has no matter; it has only form. It is named after its form. Meaning, the fact that it is stamped, yes, stamped with a form. It has no corpus, as I said before, only fruits. It is basically a conventional thing; it has nothing. Meaning, is the form basically the value?

[Speaker C] His mind is on its value and not on—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The form of a coin is value. Not for every object. But a coin has no other form except its value. Meaning, the form—what’s written here, what the king stamps on the coin—is basically the form. When it says there “five,” that is the form. It also has the king’s symbol there, because otherwise it wouldn’t mean anything; I too could write “five.” But basically the form here means the value in the coin. Other things have many forms: a hammer—part of its form is that it has iron and you can drive nails with it. Those are properties of the hammer. It’s heavy, light, medium, and so on. A coin—its form is only the value, and that’s all it has. Now why is that a reason that a coin cannot effect exchange? So what if “his mind is on the form, and the form is made to be annulled”? In money acquisition does that not matter? So you’re basically telling me it isn’t worth anything, it’s just a fiction. So why doesn’t that interfere with money acquisition, but it does interfere with exchange? Because in exchange acquisition—

[Speaker C] in exchange you expect to look at it as objects. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because exchange acquisition is basically the remnant of ancient barter trade. And in ancient barter trade we exchanged commodities. I give you tomatoes, you give me chairs. A coin is not a commodity. A coin has no significance in itself. Barter means corpus for corpus. You take the corpus of the tomato, I take the corpus of the chair. Acquiring corpus for corpus is what is called barter trade, or exchange acquisition if you like. Barter trade is the ancient phase. And exchange acquisition too—even after it has undergone conceptualization and juridification—it still preserves the old traits of barter trade, namely an exchange of corpus for corpus. What has no corpus cannot effect exchange. Okay? Commodity can effect exchange; coin cannot. Because a commodity has corpus and a coin does not. What does a coin have? Value. So what can you do with coins after all? How do you transfer ownership or use them? Money acquisition, not exchange. So this is already the first hint as to the difference between money acquisition and exchange acquisition.

[Speaker E] But that’s only one opinion. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, I’m talking about that opinion, and that’s also the opinion ruled in Jewish law.

[Speaker E] So does the logic of the second Amora really hold that it also has corpus?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I think what the second Amora is saying is that once we’ve already done the conceptualization and value itself has become a kind of commodity, then for me this too is a commodity. The question is how far we take that conceptualization. But I still think the basic idea is certainly agreed upon, because the idea is correct. I’m bringing the Talmud here only as an illustration; I’m not learning it from the Talmud. All right? The Talmud here is an illustration. The idea is correct in itself, and that’s clear.

[Speaker C] Money acquisition means that when you give the coins, the moment you give the coins the deal is sort of valid?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not true. In money acquisition that doesn’t happen, but in principle money acquisition is an exchange of commodity for value. Or in other words, value for value. Meaning, in exchange we now understand the difference between money acquisition and exchange acquisition. In exchange acquisition… I give you the corpus of one object, and you give me in return the corpus of another object. An exchange of corpus for corpus is exchange acquisition. Money acquisition is an exchange of value for value. And therefore I give you the money and you give me the value of the object that I bought from you. After that, the object itself will follow along with that value, because once I become the owner of the object—of the commodity, sorry—then I own it completely, but the acquisition is made through its value in money acquisition. There’s no such thing as value against corpus. There’s no such thing. So I say: the value of the commodity against the bill. Yes. The corpus of the commodity is dragged along after its value. But in the laws of acquisition the exchange always involves the same type of thing on both sides. Meaning, either it’s value against value, and that is money acquisition, or it’s corpus against corpus, and then it is exchange acquisition. Now of course after I’ve acquired the commodity, I’m also owner of the commodity’s corpus, not only of its value. But the acquisitive path by which I acquired it was value against value. Clear? Therefore, for example, when I give money—I’m already hinting at what Doron noted earlier—when I give you money and you give me commodity in return, if I gave you the money I did not acquire the commodity. Except in regard to “He Who exacted punishment.” I didn’t acquire the commodity. All right? Whoever drew the commodity acquired the commodity for himself and transferred the money to the other side. That is the rule in the first Mishnah in our chapter. So what is money acquisition then? What? Money acquisition is only with fields, with immovable property. For movable property, money acquisition is ineffective—a dispute between Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish whether on a Torah-level or rabbinically. But bottom line, it does not work.

[Speaker C] And with fields too, that’s on a Torah-level, right? Isn’t it on a Torah-level?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On a Torah-level, yes. From Ephron’s field. “Four hundred shekels of silver” acquire Ephron’s field, and from there they also learn to betrothal—that is, yes, acquisition in fields, in Choshen Mishpat section 190. Huh? “Taking-taking.” “Taking-taking” from Ephron’s field.

[Speaker C] Don’t you need to do some act on the field in order to acquire it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. There is either money acquisition, or a document, or taking possession. Those are three alternatives. Sometimes—and we’ll see this later—sometimes the money is the payment given for the field, but listen carefully: sometimes the money is the payment given in the transaction, but it is not the way in which I acquire. Those are two different things. Once we create legal regulation, a distinction arises between the question of what the mutual interests are—once it used to be natural, we just exchanged the interests and that was that. Now, no. There are the mutual interests, but those are only the motivation for carrying out the transaction. But how do you carry out the transaction itself? In order to carry out the transaction itself, you need to do an act of acquisition. Without that, ownership does not take effect or come into being. Okay? It is not enough that we have interests on both sides; that is only the resolve of mind, meaning only the reason why we enter into the transaction. And therefore money really does two things here. Even in money acquisition it does two things: first, it constitutes payment in the transaction, and second—and this already depends on how we decided—it can also constitute the act of acquisition. I can acquire a field by transferring money, and then I both gave you the payment and acquired the field—that was the act by which I acquired the field, by which my ownership over the field took effect. But I can pay you the value of the field, a thousand shekels, and do the acquisition by possession or by document. Then the money functions only as payment, not as the thing that executes the transaction. Okay? And this is very important; we’ll see it later too. That’s regarding land. For movable property, money does not acquire at all. Money serves only as payment. All right? Either on a Torah-level or rabbinically—we’ll see later. But for movable property, money does not acquire at all.

[Speaker H] And exchange acquisition is what’s called today

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] barter.

[Speaker H] Right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? And exchange acquisition is… not clear, because barter is still, in the end, an exchange of the value of one commodity for the value of another commodity. And if you’re talking about the value, then the commodity is functioning here as money. We’ll see that later. After all, the Talmud says that something worth money is like money. And even in money acquisition I can give you a commodity—

[Speaker G] and that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] and that will be the money of the transaction.

[Speaker G] Wait, one second, the Zoom people, wait—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Friends, don’t interrupt there on Zoom. I can give you the money, and the money will be the transaction. The commodity, sorry—it will be the money. The commodity will be the money. Okay? So we’ll have to understand when a commodity is money and when a commodity is commodity. That already blurs the distinctions entirely, so I’m going step by step. The mixtures will come later.

[Speaker C] A commodity can be money; money cannot

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] be commodity.

[Speaker E] Right, exactly. Rabbi, just maybe because I went in a more philosophical direction, now we’ll start looking at it. So basically it could be—we said that something worth money, money is the value of value. So it’s really interesting, because when you go to buy something, even a ship, no matter how large it is, what matters is the little note that says how much it’s worth.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What matters is a matter of taste, but from a legal—

[Speaker E] no, if we’re already going in a philosophical direction, as it were. No, I—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can sell me that ship for two shekels and it will be entirely valid. If to you it’s worth two shekels, good for you.

[Speaker E] Again, I got to the ship. For the person—despite how enormous it is worth, as it were—if we were going in barter trade, what would interest him wouldn’t be the ship; it would be the note on the ship saying how much it costs.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I don’t know. Again, I don’t know what “what interests him” means. I buy the commodity in order to sail in it. I don’t buy the commodity in order to pay two shekels for it. So what interests me is the function of the ship. But it’s true that now, once there are money transactions, I have to check the value, because the concept of ownership has suddenly been created. Before there was no ownership; you simply took the ship and used it because it was by you or yours, and that was just a mode of expression. It wasn’t a legal concept. “I bought,” “I imposed ownership,” and now there is my ownership, and so on.

[Speaker E] The issue of the little note saying how much the ketchup costs—when you think about it, I worked in a supermarket, I think about how critical it is to put the value on the ketchup.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, yes, a supermarket does not operate by barter trade. So the difference between money acquisition and exchange acquisition, then, is whether we are exchanging value for value or corpus for corpus. Okay, now, the Talmud in Kiddushin says that a woman is acquired in three ways. The Mishnah: by money, by document, and by intercourse. The Talmud there on page 3 asks what about exchange—can one betroth a woman through exchange? So the Talmud asks: “The number in the first clause excludes what?”

[Speaker C] What would it mean in practice

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] to betroth a woman through exchange?

[Speaker C] To whom does he give it? The intended husband—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If it’s with the vessel of the acquirer or with the vessel of the grantor—that’s a dispute we’ll see later, it doesn’t matter. If it’s with the vessel of the acquirer, then the acquirer is the husband, the grantor is the woman. All right? So if it’s with the vessel of the acquirer, then the husband has to give the woman some object as her exchange substitute. If it’s with the vessel of the grantor, then the woman gives to the husband. Money, document, and intercourse are three ways to betroth a woman; it’s not connected to value. No, no, money, document, and intercourse are three ways to betroth a woman. All right? So the Talmud asks—

[Speaker I] Let’s still bring this in. What—

[Speaker G] what is written in the document?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is written in the document? “Behold, you are betrothed to me with this document,” with two witnesses and details. Fine. So the Talmud says there as follows: “The number in the first clause excludes what? The number in the latter clause excludes what?” What do you mean, three ways? What does that come to exclude? Specifically three and not a fourth. Yes, it comes to exclude something. The question is what it comes to exclude. The Talmud says: “And according to Rav Huna, who said that canopy acquires by an a fortiori inference, what does it exclude? It excludes exchange.” It comes to exclude exchange. “You might have thought, since we derive ‘taking-taking’ from Ephron’s field, just as a field is acquired by exchange, so too a woman should also be acquired by exchange. Therefore it teaches us otherwise.” The Talmud says: “And say that this is indeed so!” Why not, really? Why shouldn’t a woman be acquired by exchange? What’s the problem? How is that different from money acquisition? The Talmud says: “Exchange exists even with less than a perutah’s worth, while a woman is not acquired for less than a perutah’s worth.” So Rashi explains there—yes, so why doesn’t exchange work for betrothal? Because exchange works even with less than a perutah’s worth. Yes, when I perform exchange acquisition, I can give you a matchstick, even though it’s worth less than a perutah, and I can acquire through a matchstick by exchange acquisition. With money, less than a perutah’s worth is not money, yes, so it doesn’t work. What? “Exchange exists with less than a perutah’s worth”? What’s the question?

[Speaker E] He’s saying, why does it matter that a woman is betrothed in a small transaction?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So are you bringing something about a woman, is that what you’re talking about? Let’s see now. So Rashi says there: “A woman does not transfer herself, because it is degrading to her. Therefore the law of barter is nullified in betrothal, and even with a vessel worth a perutah, if he gave it to her in the language of barter, it is ineffective unless he gives it to her in the language of acquisition, taking, or betrothal.” So Rashi feels exactly the point you asked about, and he says like this: basically, it’s degrading for a woman to become betrothed for less than a perutah. And that’s why some commentators explain Rashi to mean that on the Torah level barter would work too. But rabbinically, it’s degrading to her, and therefore the Sages say that a woman is not betrothed through barter.

It’s just that Rashi has a difficulty. Fine, then betroth her through barter with a vessel. Why with a vessel? Because with a coin you can’t, right? A coin does not effect barter. So in any case we do it with a vessel. But why not betroth her with a vessel worth a perutah? Fine, a vessel worth less than a perutah is degrading, because then it’s as if she’s worth nothing. But if you betroth her with a vessel that is worth a perutah, why is that no good?

So Rashi says: we nullified the law of barter in betrothal, including a vessel worth a perutah. Why? He didn’t answer, he only noted it. Why? Maybe it’s a kind of lo plug; it could be that the Sages were concerned that if we allow barter, then you’ll also do it with barter worth less than a perutah. But in principle it really isn’t clear—why not?

Some of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) want to argue in Rashi—and this starts already among the medieval authorities (Rishonim)—that Rashi does not mean this is a rabbinic rule; he means it’s a Torah-level rule. And the fact that barter works even with a vessel worth less than a perutah is a sign, or an indication, that the woman’s degradation is not because of the value. Rather, the degradation lies in the very fact that this is barter. What, you’re exchanging me for a soccer ball? It’s that kind of degradation. And therefore the indication that there is some kind of exchange of one thing for another is that it works even with a vessel worth less than a perutah. So the woman doesn’t want that.

In ordinary money-betrothal, even one perutah can betroth a woman. Why is a perutah fine from her point of view? Because a perutah has value, and that reassures her, because she is seen as something worth a perutah? No. Rather, because in ordinary money-betrothal it’s clear that this is a formal act, not an exchange. It’s a formal act whose purpose is to effect betrothal. Barter is an exchange—meaning, you’re exchanging me for something else. So that has to be something somehow of equal weight or significance, approximately, and that is degrading to her.

That’s why I think that if that’s the case, Rashi’s answer is very understandable. Why don’t we betroth a woman even through barter worth more than a perutah? Because a woman is not willing to be exchanged for any value; it’s not a question of value at all. Even if the value were a thousand shekels—so is a woman worth a thousand shekels? That’s enough for her? A woman is merchandise worth a thousand shekels? That’s all? No. She is not willing to be exchanged as merchandise in principle, regardless of value.

The fact that barter can be done with less than a perutah is an indication that this is not a formal act but an act of trade by exchange. Because if it were a formal act, there are no formal acts with less than a perutah; less than a perutah is not money. Okay? And that is the problem in Rashi.

Now look—Tosafot on the passage writes as follows: “And a woman does not transfer herself for less than a perutah; the commentary explains because it is degrading to her. Therefore the law of barter is nullified in betrothal, and even with a vessel worth a perutah, if he gives it as barter…” And Rabbeinu Tam objects: “If so, if she stretched out her hand and accepted it, she should become betrothed for less than a perutah.” If all that’s troubling you is that it’s degrading to the woman, then if a woman comes and says: this isn’t degrading to me, this is fine with me—then she should indeed be betrothed. In other words, the whole problem is just an assessment. If you don’t know, you say: well, maybe it’s degrading to the woman, so I don’t want you to betroth her this way. But if she tells you: no problem, it’s not degrading to me, everything’s fine—then it ought to work, right?

And furthermore, since the reason is made to depend on its being degrading to her, then why doesn’t the Talmud ask about the daughters of Rabbi Yannai, who were particular about themselves and would not be betrothed for less than a tarkav of dinars, and so on, just as it later asks regarding the statement of Beit Shammai? What about women who are not willing even for less than a hundred perutot? There are also more important women for whom a perutah is not enough.

And another difficulty: since at this stage the assumption is to derive the modes of acquisition of a woman from the modes of acquisition of a field, then a woman too should be acquired by possession, like a field. And furthermore, later the Talmud asks, “From where do we know a document?” What kind of question is that? Learn it from a field.

We learn “taking-taking” from the field of Ephron, okay? We learn, in effect, that the acquisition of a woman is learned from the acquisition of a field. Therefore the Talmud says: fine, then barter should also work. Why? Because barter works for a field. So barter should also work for a woman.

What does Rashi say? Yes, but it’s degrading to her. Meaning, in principle that really is true: you could have betrothed a woman through barter, only it’s degrading to her, so she is not betrothed. So according to that, possession and document should also work, right? For a woman. Because we’re comparing the acquisitions of a woman to the acquisitions of a field, and a field is acquired by money, by document, and by possession. So document and possession should also work for a woman. Why don’t we find that they work?

Let me sharpen the question. A woman too is acquired in three ways: by money, by document, and by intercourse. Okay? Now document we find both in betrothal and in a field, so document really is similar. But the Talmud brings a source for it: “And she shall go out and become”—just as divorce is by document, so too betrothal is by document. Why do you need a source? If you’re comparing the acquisition of a woman to the acquisition of a field, then what exists for a field should also work for a woman. Why do you need a source that one can betroth a woman by document? That’s what Tosafot means here, yes? That the Talmud asks: from where do we know document? What’s the problem? Learn it from a field.

And the third thing is possession. Let’s ask why you don’t learn possession, that it should work for a woman. And here too it’s the same idea. Possession does work for a woman. If I had to define what possession that acquires a woman would be, what would I say? Intercourse, right? Because possession means using the field—locking, fencing, breaching. In other words, using the object, that’s called acquiring it by possession. And with respect to a woman, it seems to me the most natural thing is to say that intercourse is the parallel to possession.

So notice: the three ways by which one acquires a woman fully parallel the three ways by which one acquires a field. And therefore it’s very natural for the Talmud to say: fine, then barter should also work for a woman. And indeed, according to Rashi, barter doesn’t work only because of a technical point, because it’s degrading to her. But in principle, everything that works for a field should also work for a woman.

But if that’s so, Tosafot asks, then why did they bring sources that intercourse and document work for a woman in betrothal? Let them learn it from a field. Clearly not. That’s not true. We do not learn the acquisitions of a woman from the acquisitions of a field. And why not? Because the acquisition of a field is the imposition of ownership on the field. In the acquisition of a woman, the woman does not become my property—I am not buying her.

The medieval authorities (Rishonim) already write that a woman is not the husband’s property. The legal effect here is not tangible—no, not tangible and not intangible. It’s not a purchase at all. You are not buying the woman. The fact that the Mishnah says “a woman is acquired” is a manner of speaking, but it is not ownership; it has nothing to do with ownership.

[Speaker J] What do you mean?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re talking about ownership—this is not ownership. You are not owner over her in any way. Permitted to him, fine, that’s another discussion. What confuses people in this context—and I had this…

[Speaker E] Today it’s a concept, okay…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …many arguments, also in introductions. There was once an article by Rivka Lubitch, who claims—she’s a female rabbi—that betrothal means buying the woman, and that’s insulting, and so on, and therefore today it should be abolished or something like that.

[Speaker F] So—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I wrote there and we tried—

[Speaker F] to explain this in the forums there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are many who claim this.

[Speaker F] Yes, today it’s become a big problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And I argued that this is a misunderstanding of the concept of what it means that a woman is acquired. The concept of acquisition in Jewish law—you have to understand—the concept of acquisition in Jewish law is not becoming the owner. An act of acquisition in Jewish law is a formal act that creates a halakhic effect. That’s what is called an acquisition.

[Speaker E] A bond; Rabbi Altman calls it a bond. What? He calls it a bond? Rabbi Altman—a bond. Ah, okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It creates some halakhic effect. “Bond” is usually a term connected with levirate marriage, so maybe it’s not advisable to use it here. But in principle it creates a halakhic effect.

For example, I need to do something to make something into terumah, to impose on it the status of terumah, the effect of terumah. You could call that an act of acquisition. I make a contract with you—I perform an act of acquisition. What, did I buy you? No, I didn’t buy you. “And we acquired from him”—I acquire from him, not him. Meaning, what does that mean? We create the obligation by means of a legal act, part of legal regulation. In order to make a contract, to create a legal situation, you have to do an act. It isn’t enough to talk, it isn’t enough to think, it isn’t enough to want. You have to do an act; it has to be defined. From the moment you did the act, the legal effect exists—it was created. Okay?

This does not belong specifically to ownership. Ownership is one of the legal effects that can be imposed by acts. That’s all. But there are other such legal effects too. When we say that I perform an act of acquisition, what that means is that I perform an act with legal significance. That’s called an act of acquisition.

And in that sense, when they say “the woman is acquired,” the meaning is: by money, by document, or by intercourse, I perform an act that creates the effect of betrothal upon the woman. That’s all. But she is not mine. She is not my property in any way. I could elaborate on this; there are countless proofs. And not just as apologetics in response to contemporary feminist criticism. Already long ago, in the period of the medieval authorities (Rishonim), it was entirely clear to them that a woman is not the husband’s property. Meaning, you do not buy her. It simply isn’t relevant.

The use of the term acquisition is very confusing, because today when you say you buy something or someone, that means I become the owner of it. But that’s not true in Jewish law. In Jewish law, to say that I performed an act of acquisition does not mean that I became the owner of something. It means that I created a legal or halakhic effect. That’s all. In this case, it is the effect of betrothal.

This is one comparison. And the “taking-taking” from the field of Ephron tells me that the effect of betrothal is imposed in the same way that the effect of ownership is imposed on a field. Not that when I acquire the woman, I acquire her the way I acquire a field. The comparison is only with regard to what act is performed. So just as I do that by means of money, so too I impose the effect of betrothal by means of money. But there is no comparison between buying a field and imposing betrothal on a woman.

And therefore, Tosafot says, don’t try to learn document and intercourse from a field as document and possession for a woman. It’s irrelevant. There is nothing to learn; there is no comparison between these two things. Specifically regarding money, there is “taking-taking” from the field of Ephron, which tells me that the act of betrothal is also done by the transfer of money. But not that I am buying a woman. So there’s no reason to compare it to a field and say: fine, then document and possession and everything else too. Absolutely not.

The practical implication is—I’ll get to you in a second—what about barter? So according to Tosafot, there is really no reason to learn barter from a field. It does not work for a woman as a matter of basic law, not because it is degrading to her. It simply does not work for a woman at all. Why should it work? Just as the fact that document and possession work for a field does not mean they work for a woman, so too with barter. Only money works, because with respect to money there is “taking-taking,” some indication that taking a woman is done by money the way taking a field is done—but not that this is actually the imposition of ownership as with a field.

And therefore Tosafot says: yes, so he says, “Therefore Rabbeinu Tam thinks we should read: ‘For less than a perutah she is not acquired,’ and we should not read ‘does not transfer herself.'” Not that she is unwilling to transfer herself, but rather: a woman for less than a perutah is not acquired. The Torah does not allow her to be acquired—not that the woman finds it degrading and therefore is unwilling to be betrothed. The Torah does not allow a woman to be acquired for less than a perutah, “for the matter does not depend on her objection.” It is not because the woman objects or does not object.

Rather, the reason is because we learn “taking-taking” from the field of Ephron, about which “money” is written, and less than a perutah is not called money. A woman can only be acquired by money-acquisition. And barter is not money-acquisition. And what is the proof? The fact that it works with less than a perutah. If it were money-acquisition, then with less than a perutah it couldn’t work. So the fact that there is less than a perutah here is not the reason why the woman does not want to transfer herself; it does not depend on her objection. It is an indication that this is not money-acquisition.

And I would add: rather, what is it? Exchange. And therefore I argue that Rashi too basically meant something very similar to what Tosafot says. A woman cannot be acquired by exchange. By exchange you acquire merchandise. You do not impose legal effects by exchange, because exchange is not the imposition of legal effects; exchange is primitive trade. Once money-acquisition becomes a legal, formal act that can impose ownership in the monetary sense, now you can say: okay, that same formal act can be used to impose the effect of betrothal. And that is what we learn from “taking-taking” from the field of Ephron.

But you can’t now take from that also possession and document and barter and all the other things—it is irrelevant. I do not buy the woman in any way. Rather, the giving of money is the act that imposes betrothal, that’s all. Document and intercourse have separate sources, and therefore they work too. But that’s only because money is a formal, legal mode of acquisition, yes—it underwent conceptualization. Ancient barter cannot betroth a woman. The whole concept of betrothing a woman is a formal concept; it does not belong to that natural world of barter trade.

So not because it is degrading to her, but because the Torah itself does not permit it. The Torah itself does not regard such an act as an act of betrothal. And this is a very strong indication that there is a difference in the philosophy of money-acquisition and barter. Barter is exchanging merchandise for merchandise, or body for body; that does not apply to a woman. With a woman, you are not acquiring her body, and therefore you cannot give another body in exchange for her body; you do not acquire the body of the woman. And with a woman you are not acquiring value either, so this is also not money-acquisition in the sense of exchanging value for value.

So what is it? With a woman one performs a formal act to impose the effect of betrothal, just as I perform a formal act to impose the effect of ownership through the giving of money—but the giving of money not in the sense of transferring consideration. With a woman this is not the transfer of consideration, but in the sense that it is a formal act that contains ownership, imposes a legal effect. That exists with a woman too; it has nothing to do with consideration in any way. Yes, sorry.

[Speaker K] So what’s the difference between “the woman is acquired” and not “the man acquires”? Or maybe “the man betroths”? Yes, and maybe also not “is acquired.” It doesn’t relate to his feeling.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What’s the difference between “the man acquires” and “the woman is acquired”? Even with “the man acquires,” you could say that he becomes her master. Fine, but if it’s “the man acquires” and “the woman is acquired,” it’s flawed to the same extent in that sense. What did you gain by writing “the woman is acquired”? The woman’s feeling. Even if it’s “the man acquires,” he’s acquiring something, meaning something becomes his. Yes, but nothing becomes his. So I’m saying: it doesn’t become his whether it says “the woman is acquired” or whether it says “the man acquires.”

[Speaker K] Yes, but saying “the man acquires” complicates it because it sounds as if—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And “the woman is acquired” sounds to me even worse. “The woman is acquired”—she is the merchandise, she becomes his, like a business deal.

Okay. Actually the Ritva there says: “And what is the reason that barter exists with less than a perutah, while a woman is not acquired for less than a perutah?” Explanation: the assumption had been that barter acquires by the law of money, meaning: why did we think a woman could become betrothed by barter? Because we thought barter was just another kind of money-acquisition, except that here the item is movable value as the consideration in the acquisition.

He says: that’s not so. Money does not acquire with less than a perutah because it is not considered money, whereas barter acquires even with less than a perutah. And this is proof that barter is an independent category in itself, not a derivative of money. Barter is not just another type of money-acquisition; it is a separate acquisition in its own right, even when the exchanged item is worth a perutah. Therefore barter, even when it is worth a perutah, does not work for a woman. Why? Because the type of acquisition called barter does not work for a woman. It has nothing to do with a perutah’s worth; the perutah’s worth is only an indication—the fact that it can be done with less than a perutah.

And since this is so, we have no basis to include it for a woman under the law of money, since money does not acquire with less than a perutah. Perhaps the explanation is that we never had any reason at all to think that possession would acquire a woman the way it does a field, because it is obvious that possession does not acquire by the law of money. This is basically Tosafot, just spelled out a bit more. Okay?

Maybe it’s worth getting a little into this point too: why really is there this difference, that barter works with less than a perutah but money does not? According to what I’m saying here, the difference is very simple. When I exchange merchandise for merchandise, the value of the merchandise is irrelevant. Each side has value, but that isn’t what matters. The acquisition is not dependent on the value of the matter. So if I give you a match in exchange for something else, that’s perfectly fine. If you want a match, then you got what you wanted—what’s the problem?

But if we’re talking about money-acquisition, then you need to receive value. Value requires a determination that you indeed received value. Less than a perutah—even if that’s what you want, it doesn’t matter—you didn’t receive value. That’s a formal definition. It’s not a question of whether your desire was satisfied. Fine, your desire was satisfied, you were content with half a perutah, also fine. It doesn’t matter that your desire was satisfied; since on the formal level less than a perutah is not money.

For example, there is a discussion—Rashi in Sanhedrin and also the Maggid Mishneh ask—whether in robbery there is a prohibition of a partial measure: robbery of less than a perutah. There is a minimum measure of a perutah; less than a perutah is not robbery. But there is a principle in Jewish law of a partial measure. If you ate half an olive’s bulk of pork, or a third of an olive’s bulk of pork—not specifically half, but less than the required measure—you transgressed a Torah prohibition. You are not flogged, but you transgressed a Torah prohibition. This is the dispute of Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish; we rule like Rabbi Yohanan that a partial measure is prohibited by Torah law.

What about robbery? I robbed a third of a perutah or three quarters of a perutah. There are opinions that say this is meaningless—there is no prohibition at all. And it is not considered a partial measure either. Why? Because less than a perutah is not a small amount of money. It isn’t just a lower measure of money than what is required. It’s simply not money at all. Less than a perutah has no value. Value is something that begins with a perutah, and below a perutah this is not something that has value. It isn’t called value; there is no value here.

For example, an interesting implication: the Talmud says that one who betroths a woman with a date—sorry, with a date fruit—she is doubtfully betrothed, lest it be worth a perutah in Media. Here the date is worth less than a perutah. Now I betrothed the woman with a date. Seemingly she is not betrothed—less than a perutah. The date here served as money’s equivalent, not as merchandise; this is not barter, this is money-betrothal. Okay?

But the Talmud says no, she is doubtfully betrothed. Why? Perhaps it is worth a perutah in Media. Meaning, perhaps there is some country in the world—Media, for example—where this type of date is indeed worth a perutah. Here it isn’t, because we have many dates here. In a place where the date is a somewhat more expensive commodity, there it would indeed be worth a perutah.

The question is: why does it matter that in Media it is worth a perutah? Here it isn’t worth a perutah. You betrothed the woman with less than a perutah. The answer is that the threshold of a perutah is not important in order to verify that the woman actually received value of a perutah; it is important in order to verify that the woman received something that has value. Now if this thing is worth a perutah in Media, then you can’t say that this thing is devoid of value. It has value. Here it is worth less than a perutah, but you can’t say that this date has no value. In Media it has value, and for our purposes that is enough.

Because what I need is not—the woman is not receiving her own value; a perutah is not the woman’s value. Rather what? I need to give her money, something that has value. Less than a perutah has no value. Fine—but if in Media it is worth a perutah, then this date is indeed something worth money. Here it does not have the value of a perutah, but it is still considered an item of value. So if I gave this date to the woman, I betrothed her with something of monetary value, and she is betrothed.

[Speaker K] Because—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because I don’t know whether it is worth a perutah in Media. If I knew that in Media it was worth a perutah, then it would be certain. I just don’t know—maybe in Media it is worth a perutah, so I am in doubt. Okay?

So this is another indication that the whole issue of value with a woman plays in two seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, with a woman I am not exchanging body for body, so I need value. On the other hand, when I betroth a woman I am not giving her value in exchange for her own value as in ordinary money-acquisition. It’s only a formal act. And if I gave her something that has value, that is a formal act capable of imposing the effect of betrothal, just as it imposes the effect of ownership in a field. That’s all—but it is a formal act.

And therefore this could only be defined after we had already passed into legal conceptualization—that there is such a thing as acquisition, and ownership, and legal effect, and an act of acquisition, and value, and money, and all the concepts I’m talking about here. Before that, the concept of betrothal could not have existed.

Indeed Maimonides begins at the start of the Laws of Marriage: what was the situation before the giving of the Torah? A man would encounter a woman in the marketplace, and if he wanted to marry her he would bring her into his house and they were married. If they wanted to divorce, he would send her out of his house and she was divorced. There was no act of betrothal; there was only the natural matter. You want to live together, you live together. You want to stop, you stop living together. Exactly as in a game. There was the natural stage.

At some point the Torah came and formalized this legally. Now we already perform a formal act that imposes the effect of betrothal—not of ownership, but of betrothal. Okay? And from that the natural consequences also follow. But we need to precede them with the formal legal act. Therefore this can only be done once there is a legal sphere, and legal effect, and ownership, and legal concepts and all these things. And we learn from a field that there has to be a transfer of money; that is what generates this legal effect.

[Speaker D] A legal field is not a field created by the Torah. The Torah took the legal field—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] with respect to betrothal, right.

[Speaker D] —and tried to define it according to the rules of the Torah. Right, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but with respect to betrothal, yes, the Torah created it; not with ownership. Ownership already existed before the Torah—money, legal effect, legal regulation. But with betrothal, this did not exist until the Torah came. The Torah requires us to apply that same legal regulation also to betrothal, not only to ownership, where it already existed. Before the Torah was given, they saw no need to create legal regulation of—right? There was no Family Law, only Civil Law. The Torah says: no, there is also Family Law; that too undergoes legal regulation.

[Speaker D] Meaning they took the universal custom and regulated it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they took the universal custom in property law and copied it—used it also to regulate the laws of personal status.

[Speaker D] But those property laws too are something that came from worldly custom. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not “also”—that’s what came from worldly custom, period. It comes from there. And the Torah says: what comes from there will also serve us in regulating betrothal. This is the well-known Rabbi Shimon Shkop, yes? With his theory of jurisprudence—that all property laws basically precede the Torah, and the Torah merely stamps them with “you shall not steal,” but in essence property law is the result of legal regulation that precedes the Torah, in Gates of Justice—what book is that?

[Speaker E] Gates of Justice. Rabbi Shimon Shkop—that’s Gates of Justice, there isn’t another book. There are also Rabbi Shimon’s novellae, yes, on the Torah. What’s the difference between acquisition by value? I mean, you said that one who betroths with a date worth a perutah, that’s not barter—so where is the line between barter and value?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll get to that later. That’s a tangle we’ll handle properly, don’t worry. When does merchandise function as money’s equivalent, as value, and when is the merchandise itself the object of the transaction? We’ll talk about that. All these, by the way, are questions that the later authorities (Acharonim) get very tangled up in, but in my opinion they get tangled up simply because they didn’t do the conceptual analysis. In a moment you’ll see that everything is very simple once you understand this story.

The Rashba in Kiddushin, for example, is uncertain what happens if I want to make a money-acquisition and for that I use a match. The match is not worth a perutah, but for barter, if I take a vessel worth less than a perutah, that’s fine. So the Rashba wonders: well, maybe in money-acquisition too this would work. True, with money I need to give at least a perutah, but if I pay the money with matches, maybe it also works to give a match worth less than a perutah? After all, in barter that works.

What lies behind this? This is how the later authorities explain it: he thought—at least on one side of the doubt—that why does a match work in barter even when worth less than a perutah? Because a vessel has significance, and therefore even if it is worth less than a perutah it is still important enough. Because a vessel is a significant thing. Money less than a perutah is worth nothing, but a match has some kind of use, and that gives it significance. Its value is less than a perutah, but it has significance.

According to what I’m saying now, that’s not correct. Okay? The reason a vessel worth less than a perutah works in barter is not because in the case of a vessel less than a perutah it still has significance, but because significance is not needed. It’s not that its being a vessel upgrades it, so that although it’s worth a third of a perutah it is considered like a perutah if it’s a vessel. No. It is considered worth a third of a perutah; it’s just that for barter I don’t care about its value. Okay?

[Speaker E] Could a ship also be less than a perutah for purposes of barter? A ship can be worth nothing even though it’s huge.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Therefore you cannot take a match and pay with it as if it were worth a perutah in a money-acquisition, because its being a vessel does not upgrade its value but rather renders value unnecessary. The difference is not between vessel and money, as the Rashba assumes; the difference is between barter-acquisition and money-acquisition.

In barter-acquisition you do not need value. Therefore a match can effect barter. Not because the match somehow has the value of a perutah because it’s important too. No. Rather, it doesn’t need to be important. Because in barter you exchange object for object, so value is not of interest; it isn’t a relevant parameter there. In money-acquisition it is. Therefore in money-acquisition the match will not help me. Fortunate is the match.

[Speaker L] Sorry, with barter-acquisition can one betroth a woman?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—we just discussed that. The Talmud in Kiddushin that we just read says no. The Talmud later, on page 47, says this:

[Speaker C] We can’t see it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, look here with the electronics. Fine, okay? Yes. “It was taught: one acquires with a vessel even though it does not contain a perutah’s worth.” “Acquires” here means barter. When the Talmud says simply acquisition, it means barter. Whenever it says “through acquisition” or “and we acquired from him,” that’s all barter. Okay?

Why does the Talmud say that? Why do you think when they say plain acquisition they mean barter? Because—

[Speaker C] It was the ancient acquisition.

[Speaker I] Huh?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because we said that it was the ancient acquisition.

[Speaker C] It was the first acquisition.

[Speaker I] That’s the concept of acquisition; the concept of acquisition when it was born was born there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Later we broadened it, generalized it, but the term acquisition, when used without qualification, retained the old usage. In the old terminology, when they said acquisition they meant barter. So we still use that term even today; when we don’t specify which acquisition, usually it means barter, because that’s where the whole story began. Today there are already many kinds of acquisition and forms of acquisition, but the terminology comes from there.

Yes: Rav Nahman said, this was taught only with a vessel, but not with produce. Rav Sheshet said: even with produce. What is Rav Nahman’s reason? Because the verse says “his shoe”—”And a man drew off his shoe,” in the Book of Ruth. A shoe, yes; something else, no. What is Rav Sheshet’s reason? Because the verse says “to confirm every matter,” also from the Book of Ruth. Here there is a dispute over the verses and how exactly this works, but for our purposes there is a dispute here whether produce can effect barter.

[Speaker C] Yes—why distinguish between a vessel and produce? Or—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? What’s the difference between a vessel and produce? So the difference between a vessel and money I already explained. A vessel has an object-body and value; money has only value. Barter-acquisition is exchange of object for object. Money-acquisition is exchange of value for value. From this there emerges an asymmetry: with money you cannot do barter because it has no object-body, but you can do money-acquisition. With merchandise you can do both money-acquisition and barter, because merchandise has both object-body and value. Okay?

Now a third factor enters the picture: produce. It turns out that even with produce—and that’s the halakhic ruling—barter is not done with produce either. Now that’s very strange. Why? Because produce is merchandise; it has use, it isn’t something abstract. It belongs to the natural world. The first things people bought were mainly produce—they bought food, yes? So this is the classic example of a natural thing. So why shouldn’t barter-acquisition work with produce?

Look, there is a very interesting difference here. When we take a hammer—I explained this last time too—we take a hammer, it has a use, we hammer nails with it, and from that use value emerges. Right? However much that use is worth to me, that’s basically what determines the value of the hammer.

Therefore, for example, it could be that one person owns the body of the hammer, because the hammer has a body, and another person has rights of use in the hammer. I rent you the hammer, lend you the hammer, sell you ownership of the use-rights of the hammer. So I will be the owner of the body of the hammer, and you will be the owner of the use-rights, or you will have usage rights in the hammer, and so on, right?

With produce you cannot do such a thing. I give you an orange to eat—to use, not to eat, to use. Okay? Is it possible that I own the body of the orange and you own its uses? Unlike a hammer, with an orange. The use consumes it. With a hammer I hammer in the nail and afterwards return it to you. I borrowed a hammer from you, I hammer the nail, and return the hammer. But with produce, the use we make of produce is a consuming use—”the principal is consumed,” as the Talmud in Bava Kama says.

So what does that mean, basically? There is no meaning to the distinction between ownership of the body and ownership of the fruits—the uses, the fruits of the produce, yes?—the uses of the produce. Whoever owns the use of the produce is really the owner of the produce. Since you can’t say, okay, use the produce and afterwards give it back to me—the use is to consume the produce. It is not returned after use.

What happens in such a situation is that produce is basically like money. It has only uses and no body. It does have a body, but since the body is used in a consuming way, de facto produce is like money. It has only use, no body. And I said earlier: why do we call the uses of things “fruits,” just terminologically? Why are the uses of things called fruits? The fruits of the house, the fruits of the tree, the fruits of the hammer. Why?

[Speaker C] Because there’s the tree and its fruits. The tree is the body and the fruits are the use.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Meaning, when you look at an orange—not the orange tree, but the orange itself—the orange does for uses what money does for value. Money is the tangible representation of value. Produce—when you look at an orange—it is basically a representation of use.

Use is usually a property of a thing, not a thing in itself. Right? The use of a hammer is not a thing. The use of a hammer is a property of the thing, or a potential of the thing, or something one can do with the thing. In a tree, the use of the tree is itself a thing. The orange—that is the use of the tree. So use gets concretized in a concrete object. Exactly the way money concretizes value in a concrete way.

That is why all the uses of everything in the world are called fruits. Just as all value is called money. How much money is this chair worth? One hundred shekels. What do you mean how much money? What’s its value? When I say how much money it is worth, that’s like saying: what are the fruits of this house? Or what are the fruits of this hammer? Fruits are basically the tangible representation of the concept of use. Okay?

So in a tree the distinction is very clear: you have the tree, the trunk and branches and everything, and the fruits are what grows on it. But with a hammer you can’t point to what the fruit of the hammer is. The ability to hammer nails with it, the potential in it to derive uses from it—that is the uses of the hammer. So what do I call that? The fruits of the hammer. That’s why the terminology is fruits. Because fruits are the purest expression of value—they are an object that is all value. Do you see why this is exactly like money? Produce is exactly like money. And therefore just as with money you cannot do barter, so too with produce you cannot do barter, because barter is exchange of object for object. But to give you the body of the produce—there is no such thing, I can’t. When I give you produce, I give you the value of the produce, not its body. There is no ownership of the body in produce. You just have the possibility of using it, that’s all.

[Speaker C] Why is there no ownership?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They have no body. Produce is all uses of the tree. The fruits are uses of the tree; they are not a thing in themselves. Okay?

[Speaker E] So here, by produce, do you mean produce and the uses of everything, as in the marriage contract? What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the marriage contract, yes.

[Speaker E] Everywhere in Jewish law where it says use—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So—

[Speaker C] So it’s not specifically literal produce—is it any consumable thing here, according to the definition?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think so, according to what I’m explaining, yes. Anything whose use is consumptive would count as produce for this purpose. It would count as produce for this purpose.

[Speaker B] Like money, for example.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With money too, the use consumes it. Not from the world, but say I gave you one hundred shekels in order to buy yourself a chair. That bill, when I gave it to you, I gave it to you as value. But not that the body of the bill remains mine. Its use consumes it from my point of view. It passes to you; when you use it, you too… You cannot own the body of the bill and the uses of the bill separately. The use of the bill is to use its body—to consume it.

And the hammer? It isn’t consumed—that’s exactly the point. But you said fruits; the use of the hammer is considered, is called fruits. Exactly. The use of the hammer, once you used it, that use no longer exists in the world. There are future uses. You pay for a hammer because I rented it to you for a week. The uses of that week will be used up by the end of the week; that’s what you paid me for. The uses of the next year… next week I’ll rent it to someone else. Okay?

[Speaker D] And where is the value represented by the money?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not value—use. Value is represented by money.

[Speaker D] Okay, so basically—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The claim is that in this sense, with produce you can take the same thing in the opposite direction and say that produce has only body and no uses—ownership of the body. And what does ownership of the body mean? That you can consume it; that’s called using it. That is the second view. Rav Sheshet and Rav Nahman may perhaps be disputing exactly this. One of them likens it to money and says you can’t do barter—Rav Nahman. And Rav Sheshet says you can do barter with produce. Why? It could be that he too understands produce the way I described it, only his conclusion is not that produce is pure value, but that produce is pure body—only body. There is no meaning to owning the value, the use, of the produce. To own the produce means the ability to use it up and destroy it.

You can take it in the direction that it is only use, or in the direction that it is only body, and perhaps that is the dispute in the Talmud. It doesn’t matter whether it’s of the use or of the—right. It disappears from the world. Now the question is how you view it. Do you view it as pure body or as pure use? That is the dispute whether it effects barter or not.

The Rema brings a law, and the responsa Delight of the Festival goes into it at length: say I am a guest for the Sabbath at someone’s house, and he gives me a meal, and he gives me something to eat, say an orange, okay, or some other food. A nice young woman is sitting next to the table. I take this thing, give it to her, and say: “Behold, you are betrothed to me with this.” Is she betrothed? What’s the discussion? The discussion is whether, when the person hosts me for a meal, the food that he put on my plate—is it mine

[Speaker G] or not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whether I’m allowed to eat even though it belongs to him. After all, he doesn’t intend to transfer ownership of anything to me; he’s inviting me to eat what belongs to him. Right? Now, if it isn’t mine, I can’t use it to betroth a woman. If it is mine, then regardless of why, maybe I can use it to betroth a woman. Let’s say that in terms of intent he really didn’t give it to me, so maybe not—but in principle it could be that he can betroth a woman with it if it’s mine. It could be that this itself depends on the very question I discussed here. Because if someone gives me food, then it can’t be that he remains the owner and I can only use it, since the use here is a consumptive use. Food is produce; all food is produce. Okay? Use here is a consumptive use. So it can’t be that he says: no, no, this food is mine, I’m just allowing you to use it—and what exactly do you want me to do, return it to you after I use it? What? The use here is consumptive. So it could be that this itself is the reasoning of the one who says that the moment he says to me, “you can eat,” he is in fact transferring ownership to me. He didn’t really mean to transfer ownership; he says, “Eat, I’m inviting you to eat at my expense, it’s my food.” But de facto, because it’s food, the moment he invites me or gives me the right to use it, he also in effect makes me the owner. In food there’s nothing besides the ability to eat it. It’s not that he remains the owner and I can only eat it. With a hammer you can make such a distinction: I’m giving you permission to use my hammer. I’m not giving you permission to use my orange. Didn’t you get it?

[Speaker D] It’s only that once the person actually consumed it, that’s what makes it…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, from the moment it’s on my plate, it could be that it’s already designated for my eating, and now I say: okay, I don’t want to eat it, I want to betroth a woman with it. Fine. So these things sharpen the meaning of the concepts of produce and corpus. And that’s a dispute. Yes. No, I’m saying the dispute may depend on this question. Hm? Yes—no, it’s not advisable; let’s say if you did it, then afterward do the betrothal again just to be safe. And not with more food. Maybe one more remark: we talked about how money plays two roles in a transaction of acquisition by money. One role is to serve as payment for the transaction. I buy a table from you, or in our case a field, so in return for the merchandise I received from you, I give you money. Besides that, the transfer of the money is itself a formal act that applies the legal effect of the acquisition. Okay? So acquisition by money, as I mentioned—maybe it’s worth seeing this on page 47b. The dispute between Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish, just briefly, because this is general background that will also matter to us later. Rabbi Yohanan said: “By Torah law, money acquires; and why then did they say that pulling acquires? Because of a decree lest one say to him, ‘your wheat was burned in the attic.’” Yes, Rabbi Yohanan is basically discussing acquisition by money for movable property. For land it definitely works, as we saw from Ephron’s field, but for movable items the question is whether I can acquire them by means of money. Rabbi Yohanan says: in principle yes, by Torah law yes. So why did they nevertheless decide that it should not acquire? Because if I give you the money and leave the hammer with me, and a fire breaks out on my premises, I won’t bother to save the hammer, because why should I care—that hammer is already yours. Therefore we say that just because he gave the money, that did not transfer the hammer to him. The hammer is still mine, so that I’ll have motivation to take care of it until the hammer passes to you. Okay, that is a rabbinic law. But by Torah law, money acquires even movable property. Reish Lakish said: pulling is explicitly required by Torah law. Meaning, money does not acquire movable property by Torah law. Already by Torah law, pulling is required; money is ineffective. Fine. Now I’m not getting into the discussion between them about the sources and why, but that is the dispute, and you need to know it. Okay? So with land, money certainly works. With movable property, there is a dispute between Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish whether it works by Torah law. Rabbinically, for movable property it does not work even according to Rabbi Yohanan, because of the decree lest one say to him, “your wheat was burned in the attic.”

Now in Choshen Mishpat 190 appears the law of acquiring land by money, and the Sma writes there as follows: “And he gives him money worth a perutah.” Now in the Shulchan Arukh it says that if I give him money worth a perutah, I have acquired the field. Now we need to understand: a perutah’s worth is not the value of the field; a field is generally worth much more than a perutah. Okay? After all, I gave him a perutah’s worth and I acquired the field. So the Sma says: “Because less than a perutah has no significance for making an acquisition with it.” We talked about this: less than a perutah isn’t considered money, so you can’t make an acquisition by money with less than a perutah. “And this is specifically where he gave him the perutah’s worth on account of the purchase price, and the rest he carried as a debt, provided he is not pressing him for the money. And this is along the lines explained in this siman in section 10, etc., or where the entire value of the transaction is only a perutah.” What is he saying? The perutah that I gave as the acquisition money is the first perutah out of the payment that I still owe you. Let’s say this field is worth 1,000 shekels. The first shekel that I give you is the perutah with which I apply the acquisition, and then I still need to give you another 999 in order to complete the payment—but the acquisition takes effect the moment I transferred the first shekel. But that first shekel is on account of the payment; it is part of it, the beginning of the transfer of payment. Or in other words, the Sma is basically claiming that the transfer of payment and the application of the acquisition are two things that happen simultaneously in the same act. They are two different things, but they are done in the same act. When you transfer the payment, that itself also applies the acquisition. You don’t need to transfer the entire payment—that’s an additional novelty—it’s enough that you began transferring the payment, the first perutah’s worth. But it is still the beginning of the transfer of payment, and the practical difference…

[Speaker C] Wait, I don’t understand. Why, if he gives him the first shekel and it is not the beginning of the payment, would that not work? After all, the legal effect took place here. We said one acquires by money—acquisition by money.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the Sma—what does “one acquires by money” mean? You give the money as payment. The Sma identifies the two things—not that he says they are the same thing, but that they are done simultaneously. When you transfer the payment, it has two meanings: transfer of payment and application of acquisition.

[Speaker C] But—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It has to be done with the payment itself. You can’t take a perutah of money unrelated to the payment and use it as a formal act of transfer, and by that acquire the field. The practical difference is that then I would still have to give you another 1,000 shekels, not 999, because that shekel I used only to apply the acquisition; the payment I still owe you in full. So the Sma says no. His reasoning… he claims that money has no other meaning. Transferring money means bringing you the payment—except that there is a novelty here, that transferring the payment is also a formal act. And that’s what he adds. He says: “But one should not say that the case here is not money given for the value of the purchase, but rather that he gives him a perutah by means of which they become obligated to one another.” You can’t say that giving the perutah is a formal act unrelated to transferring the payment, “and that neither one can retract, similar to acquisition by document and possession and acquisition by kerchief”—that is not so. You can’t say that it’s like a document or possession, a formal act. “That is not so, because acquisition by money is learned from Ephron’s field, and the money mentioned regarding Ephron’s field was the payment equal to the field’s value.” That is our source, so clearly this must be a transfer of value.

The Taz disagrees. And the Taz disagrees with him there in that very place. He says: “What the Sma wrote, subsection 1, that whenever he did not give it as the value of the purchase, he does not acquire—I do not understand his words. For the Rema wrote: when he says, ‘my deposit,’ he acquires everything. Furthermore, acquisition of a woman by money is also learned from Ephron, as stated at the beginning of Kiddushin, and it is obvious that with a woman he acquires her through the act of giving alone, and not as the value of what she is worth.” He says: if you tell me that your source is Ephron’s field and therefore you say this must be a transfer of payment, then explain to me how they learned betrothal of a woman from there. Betrothal of a woman was also learned from Ephron’s field. What, do you give the woman’s value? A perutah? And where is the rest of the value? When is it given? Never. He gives her the first perutah and that’s it. With a woman it is clear that we are not talking about value. So you see what the Taz is really saying in subtext. Recall everything we discussed. The Taz is basically saying this: when we learn it from Ephron’s field, what is written there? What is written in Ephron’s field is that one can use the transfer of money as a formal act to apply legal effects, including the betrothal of a woman. But we see from the very same source that it does not have to be transfer of payment. Transferring money is a formal act. If so, then in the acquisition of a field too there is no reason not to do it that way. Therefore he disagrees with the Sma and claims: no, you can take a shekel, and the transfer of that shekel will be a formal act applying ownership, and afterward you will have to transfer to him the entire payment you agreed on, 1,000 shekels. Alternatively, you can do the acquisition by possession or by document and then afterward transfer him 1,000 shekels. But even if you chose to do the acquisition by money, and you gave him one shekel, you will still have to give the 1,000 shekels of payment, because that shekel is not the beginning of the transfer of payment, but rather a formal act applying the legal effect of ownership.

And in fact, in Afikei Yam, part 1, siman 16, he brings in the name of Rabbi Chaim Ozer—he was his brother-in-law. He says there various difficulties; this is the issue of “returning money,” a very tangled topic. And he says that one can distinguish between ordinary sale-money, which is money equal to the value of the item being sold, and therefore in the above case it is not called that he received money in exchange for the item—it is called giving, not sale. What is not the case with betrothal money, where one can say that it is acquisition-money and not value, as the Sma wrote of blessed memory. What is he saying?

[Speaker C] The Sma—what is he saying, that it is both acquisition and value?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s what the Sma says. He is answering the Sma against the Taz’s question. The Taz challenges the Sma: how will you, Sma, explain the derivation from Ephron’s field to betrothal? In betrothal they don’t give equivalent value, they don’t give payment. So how can you learn from Ephron’s field, if you, Sma, say that the whole source is Ephron’s field and therefore it must be giving value? So what happens with betrothal of a woman? So he says no, betrothal of a woman is different. Why? Because in betrothal of a woman, the whole transaction has no value from the outset. But where there is value and one must give payment for that value, only the giving of the payment can acquire. That is how he answers the Sma against the Taz’s question.

But for our purposes, what this means is several things. First, that in every transfer of money there are two aspects, or money can do two things. One: serve as payment for the merchandise. Two: serve as an act of acquisition. You can separate them. For example, I can acquire movable property by lifting it, or acquire a field by possession or by document, and then pay the price—that has nothing to do with the acquisition. The acquisition is already complete, the field is already mine, the item is mine, and I need to give you the payment because we agreed that you are selling it to me for 1,000 shekels. So here the transfer of payment is only transfer of payment; it does not apply the legal effect of ownership. There is a novelty that there is such a concept as acquisition by money—according to Rabbi Yohanan even for movable property by Torah law, though for land everyone agrees it works. And here it does this: when you give the money, you are also transferring payment, and if you want, it also performs the act of acquisition for you. The dispute between the Taz and the Sma is over whether this must be a transfer of payment—that is the Sma’s view—and according to the Taz, no. Even if you give some other perutah, one shekel for the purpose of the acquisition, by that you will still have to give the payment. It is possible to split the two functions of money: the act of applying ownership and the act of transferring payment. All right? It is possible to separate those two things, but they are still two different things. Okay, I’ll stop here. We’ll continue next time. Thank you very much.

[Speaker I] More power to you, more power to you. Please. Amen and amen, so may it be.