Hello Rabbi,

Yesterday I went through your article on the personal status of the convert, and I enjoyed it.

For some reason, based on what you wrote—that a convert’s disqualification from holding authority is due to the public not accepting his authority because of his problematic lineage (and this fits beautifully with all the passages you presented)—one can learn what I have long assumed: beyond the role of the religious court to bring the truth to light in the sense of clarifying the facts, an inseparable part of its role is to bring the truth to light in the sense that it has the power to impose its view on the litigants.

For that reason, I still have not understood the holy sages who think it is desirable to abolish the rabbinical courts in Israel. I fully agree that the truth-clarification component can be carried out very well outside the walls of the rabbinical courts, but I do not see how the authoritative component—which, as noted, is an inseparable part of the court’s role—is carried out by private courts.

[By the way, today I saw, to my sorrow, a notice about the annulment of the ruling that the Great Rabbinical Court in which you served was party to. Were your court’s reasons published anywhere?]

As for Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s move regarding a mamzer who is not certain, a few comments.

A. Seemingly there is proof for this from the view of Behag, that a woman whose husband was overseas and who became pregnant—the child is not presumed to be a mamzer, because perhaps he came through the Divine Name (see Beit Shmuel 4:16), even though that is an extremely remote possibility (unless it is some accepted divine practice, in which case it would be an everyday occurrence). Still, there at least he is a doubtful mamzer.

B. All of Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s words are apparently built on Rashba’s opinion that a doubtful mamzer is treated leniently by a special rule concerning mamzerim, but according to Maimonides, throughout the Torah doubts are treated leniently by Torah law.

C. According to your approach, is it possible to say that, according to Maimonides, all Torah prohibitions are subjective prohibitions?

D. Bottom line, I think that even according to the later authorities who are lenient with a doubtful mamzer even when the majority points toward prohibition, there still has to be a reasonable minority possibility. Attributing it to a gentile in certain cases is plainly unreasonable—unless you derive from Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s words that even a very remote doubt is enough to justify leniency, while fully aware that this is not a common view among the later authorities.

Be that as it may, your words open up a major door to permitting mamzerim even on the basis of a remote possibility. Maybe it would be worthwhile to publicize such an approach more.

By the way, according to the principle you wrote, one can derive a major practical ruling regarding what some writers have wondered about: nowadays, when there is the possibility of checking via DNA testing who is a mamzer, is there any need to test? According to what you wrote, it would seem there is no need.

I hope I did not disturb you while you were prostrating yourself at the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.

The medieval authorities already noted that the essence of the role of a religious court is not clarification but coercion. Clarification is only the practical means to know what to enforce and on whom. Clarification in itself is not a governmental function and does not require an ordained judge or a standing court. Anyone who knows how to learn can carry out the clarification. Just as a professor of law is not a judge—not because of lack of knowledge, but because he has no authority to enforce his rulings. Therefore the Exilarch is involved in the ordination process as well, not only the court that confers ordination (and that is what the discussion in Sanhedrin 5a revolves around, which I discussed in column 164). Rabbi Shimon Shkop also dealt with this (if I recall correctly, at the beginning of Gate 3 and elsewhere).
As for abolishing the courts, that requires a more detailed discussion. The state can enforce even without them, as happens abroad. What did they do for two thousand years? A religious court has authority within its community.
The ruling is written up and appears here on the site:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HkNizV8v8Tl5PhBlfArPiB0XwF5n64O7/view
The nonsense spoken by our current little shearing-shed court is not worthy even of a response. And certainly they have no power to annul anyone’s ruling outside the withered system under their control (the rabbinate’s court system).
A. I did not understand the proof from Behag. His words are based on the claim that so long as there is any doubt at all, however slight, there is no mamzer status. But that does not mean that mamzer status depends on doubt in the person’s knowledge-state rather than in the object itself (the mamzer himself).
B. Indeed, and that is the straightforward reading. And even regarding Maimonides, the commentators already went on at length with difficulties (because they did not know his words in the responsum, as is well known).
C. A very forced reading. According to that, Ran’s innovation regarding doubtful orlah would apply to every Torah-level doubt (meaning that I would be allowed to feed my fellow pork when he does not know about it).
D. That is exactly what I told you at the beginning of the thread. That is precisely the claim—that even a remote doubt counts as a doubt for this matter. According to this, one also cannot resolve the law of mamzer from the various laws of majority, and that is indeed somewhat strained. And if you say that a majority resolves the doubt and turns it into certainty, then in the case of pregnancy “through the Divine Name” one should also judge based on the fact that most pregnancies are not through the Divine Name.

Permitting mamzerim by attributing things to a remote possibility does not depend on my words, as I wrote in section A. You yourself opened the present thread with that.
As for DNA, it depends on whether it is considered like witnesses or not. After all, even with witnesses there is concern that they may lie, yet clearly the testimony of two witnesses is enough to establish mamzer status. There are forms of evidence that have the status of certainty in Jewish law. And as for DNA, the halakhic decisors have already discussed whether it has the status of witnesses or not.

And I will conclude by standing up reverently before the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, with eighteen rotel and a bit more in my hand, as the law of the day requires. Fire burned in my bones, and I said: thus to life—Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, he is righteous and alive. (For did the embalmers embalm him for nothing…)

Regarding the proof from Behag, it depends on how far we accept such a remote reality as actually possible. If we do accept it, then indeed there is no proof; if we do not accept it, then apparently it is code for saying that reality does not interest us—the main thing is that we can place it in the category of the unknown. (Though I assume that in earlier generations they did take this to be a viable possibility.) If I am not mistaken, Rabbi Ovadia in the latest Yabia Omer combines Behag into his argument, even though I assume he did not think such a thing was practically possible.

Regarding point C, seemingly there is room to distinguish between the assumption that the prohibition is subjective and the conclusion that therefore, even if someone knows about the prohibition, he may still give it to someone else who does not know and let him eat it. One could still argue that even for subjective commandments, the knowledge of the one causing the stumbling is enough to prohibit the stumbling block, and there is room to analyze this.

I saw the responsum about the pedophile witness. (This is the place to thank the Etrog website robot, which agreed to let me view that article despite its excessive caution in matters of holiness; you can take it as a compliment that it approves access to your site without special permission.)

There is seemingly an interesting question here in the laws of repentance: what power do texts of repentance have (the recitation of the bedtime Shema. By the way, I do not know why they did not mention the blessing “Forgive us,” and all the more so the recitation of selichot for forty days as is the custom of Sephardim. Perhaps one could say that the same scoundrel was so busy with his good deeds during the day that he had no opportunity to repent, except when he collapsed exhausted onto his bed, like Sisera in his time). Without serious intention—more accurately, without a real possibility—of repenting, it would suit the Rabbi to write about this. It touches on the whole issue of all our Yom Kippur repentance, doesn’t it?

It is not reasonable that there should be a prohibition of “do not place a stumbling block” when the person who stumbled did not transgress anything at all. Maimonides’ words about wool and linen and the parallels are clearly not based on “do not place a stumbling block” (for one does not receive lashes for that, whereas Maimonides there wrote that he does receive lashes).

The power of repentance texts is absolutely zero. I do not see what there is to write about this. And Yom Kippur also atones without repentance; not a single halakhic decisor ever wrote that a wicked man disqualified from testimony thereby returns and becomes fit again. That is nonsense. About a righteous person it is said that if you saw him commit a sin by day, you may presume that he repented by night. We have not heard that such a presumption applies to a wicked person as well. This is the far-reaching innovation of our current sitters in judgment (riders of limping donkeys). They deserve credit for having left room for others to distinguish themselves.

In the second section, second line, perhaps it should say “and only if,” because as far as I know we hold that Yom Kippur atones only for those who repent.