Q&A: Half Slave and Half Free Person
Half Slave and Half Free Person
Question
To the honored Rabbi,
I saw in the Talmud, in tractate Rosh Hashanah 29, regarding someone who is half slave and half free, a dispute whether he can fulfill his own obligation through blowing the shofar or not. And in the Shulchan Arukh, in section 589, and likewise in Maimonides, they wrote that according to the Jewish law he is obligated in shofar, and therefore he needs to hear it from a free person.
But regarding sukkah, in section 640, it says that he is obligated and fulfills it himself.
I assume this is a familiar question, but I’m interested in what the Rabbi thinks.
Answer
I don’t have time right now to get into it, but I didn’t understand the difficulty. With sitting in a sukkah, no one else can fulfill the obligation for him anyway. It is a commandment that must be performed with one’s own body. So what could he do in order to fulfill the obligation for his free half?