Q&A: From the Leniencies of Beit Hillel and the Leniencies of Beit Shammai
From the Leniencies of Beit Hillel and the Leniencies of Beit Shammai
Question
Hello Rabbi, and may we make a good choice (to avoid bitter tears).
Recently the Penal Law was amended regarding homicide offenses, and it includes a series of sweeping changes, both lenient and stringent (for example, leniently: in a significant portion of murder cases there is no longer a mandatory life sentence; stringently: a level of recklessness is enough to classify the act as murder).
There is a well-known principle that when a legal change is lenient, it also applies retroactively. For example, if for the offense of burglary the maximum sentence was amended from 10 years maximum to 7 years maximum, then even for a burglary committed before the amendment came into effect, you cannot impose a 9-year prison sentence.
With regard to the amendment to the Penal Law, there is also a transitional provision concerning acts committed before the amendment but adjudicated afterward (both regarding the very question of guilt and regarding the punishment). The idea is that a more favorable arrangement in the law also operates retroactively, but when there is a whole series of matters involved—you cannot take one component from here leniently and one component from there leniently; rather, you have to view the arrangement as a whole.
This probably recalls the Talmudic passage that in the same matter one may not act according to “the leniencies of Beit Hillel and the leniencies of Beit Shammai” (Rosh Hashanah 14b).
I thought it might also resemble a prohibition I have seen mentioned—that one should not decide in advance that one has a rabbi who is lenient in area A (kitniyot…) and a rabbi who is lenient in area B, if the second rabbi is stringent on the first issue.
Do you know the source of that “prohibition”? Any other ideas?
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. You quoted the relevant Talmudic passage: one who follows the leniencies of Beit Hillel and the leniencies of Beit Shammai is wicked. That is exactly the “prohibition” against choosing a lenient rabbi in every context. But in my opinion it is not really a prohibition, rather a reprehensible way of acting, and one could analyze this further.
The connection to retroactive application of the Penal Law seems doubtful to me. Why is that related?
Discussion on Answer
I still do not see a connection to the leniencies of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. In the case you sent, it is a contradiction in the sense that within the same ruling they follow, for each component, a different law (the old one or the new one). In terms of the leniencies of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, the issue is not ruling simultaneously like Beit Hillel and like Beit Shammai, but rather a person’s policy of adopting, in each case, the ruling that is lenient for him. If, in the same case, we were issuing a ruling based on two principles, where on one we follow Beit Hillel and on the other Beit Shammai, then there would be some similarity between the two.
This reminds me a bit of the doctrinal paradox that we once discussed (I think following that you sent me Ron Shapira’s article on legal decisions when there are disagreements among the judges). There it turns out that if you examine the judges’ views regarding each component of the ruling, you get a different result than when you examine their views regarding the final ruling.
Following up on what I sent, see the link, pp. 54–56, regarding the transitional provision and the example there. There is an interesting dispute about the possibility of going leniently with respect to each and every component, and arriving at a lighter sentence that would not have been possible had the offense been committed before the law’s effective date—and also not if it had been committed afterward!
Click to access Dochkremnitzer.pdf