Q&A: The Taking Effect of Holiness and Consecration
The Taking Effect of Holiness and Consecration
Question
A long time ago we learned about “simple taking effect of betrothal” and “holiness does not lapse on its own.” I remember that proof was brought from the wood of a sukkah, which has temporary holiness, since the Talmud in Tractate Sukkah says that the Divine Name rests on it for seven days. I think it was in the Rashba.
I dug around in Kiddushin and Nedarim and came up with nothing. I also checked the binders from yeshiva and didn’t find it.
If the Rabbi remembers whether there is such a thing at all and where, I’d be glad.
Answer
You were right not to find it. It’s in Rashba on Beitzah 30, on the passage about holiness in the wood of a sukkah. See also Kovetz Shiurim there. But as far as I remember, the Rashba asks the question there on Abaye, not on Bar Padda. And I, the humble one, wondered about the Rashba: why is it not difficult for him from the fact that the holiness of the sukkah wood lapses on its own at the end of the festival? I answered that at the end of the festival it is no longer a sukkah, but rather just a pergola. The halakhic concept of a sukkah includes time within it as an essential component.
In one of our books on Talmudic logic I brought several additional examples of this idea. See chapter 11 of the fourth book in the series. The holiness of sukkah wood is one of the examples there.
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Questioner:
Regarding the counting of the Omer, similarly, Rabbi Sheinberg in Mishmeret Chaim says that the counting of the Omer depends on the Omer itself — “the sickle begins…” Therefore, if we count in Tishrei, there is no commandment, since there is no Omer. But a lulav, in principle, could also be taken in Adar and it would be a commandment; rather, time is the factor that prevents it — at this time and not another. Essentially, a commandment-act that could exist at any time and was nevertheless restricted is defined as time-bound.
Your distinction between sukkah and consecrated property is nice; I hadn’t remembered it. I had thought of it differently: with consecrated property, the time-frame is everlasting, and therefore the holiness does not lapse. In sukkah, it is a kind of Jubilee — a world with a fixed time-limit, like “and he shall serve him forever” — meaning, the servant’s “forever” is the Jubilee cycle. So too here: the eight days of the festival are the world of sukkah. Consequently, the holiness did not lapse on its own; once the eight days of the festival ended, that world ended.
Kovetz Shiurim on Beitzah distinguishes between consecrated property, which is in human hands, and sukkah, whose holiness comes from above. It does not seem that the Rashba understood it that way. The Rashba asks how there can be holiness in the wood of a sukkah in the case of a sukkah of gentiles, women, or the like, since it was not built for the sake of the holiness of sukkah. The Rashba holds that the person applied the holiness. There, in the Mahadir edition, he brings those who say that by sitting in it he sanctifies it; that implies that the person is the one who sanctifies the sukkah.
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Rabbi:
Regarding the “world” of the Jubilee, see a nice explanation in Henshke’s article in HaMa’ayan, 1977.
As for the consecration of the sukkah (whether it happens on its own or by human action), I have a lengthy discussion about this.