Q&A: Agency and More
Agency and More
Question
I’ve been dealing recently with the topic of agency, and it’s just so not 2020.
An agent of the owner of the money?? Who cares?
"Not included in the legal framework of"? Why the hell can’t a gentile separate terumah for me? What’s so complicated here?
A woman appoints an agent to receive a bill of divorce because of a scriptural decree, since otherwise her agent is not the agent of the owner of the money (that’s how it is in the Jerusalem Talmud: there the Torah granted it to her)??
I understand that it could be that in the rabbinic era people simply understood things this way. Either because, ontologically, agency is the handing over of burning power-balls from the holy sender to the agent (who in this case doesn’t have them and isn’t the owner of the money), or because people simply didn’t understand that agency could exist in these cases (if you aren’t the owner of the money there’s no certainty to your agency [?] well…)
But what does that have to do with me?
My intuition says something completely different about agency.
I read the medieval authorities (Rishonim) on this issue and it just doesn’t connect for me. I have to come up with all kinds of hypotheses about strange definitions (and various later authorities certainly outdid themselves… with scriptural decrees and intricate conceptual definitions), and it’s just beside the point.
Is there anything to do with this? (It sucks for me—is this just what they thought two thousand years ago, and it’s stuck forever??)
Maybe I’m just being a nuisance. It sucks for me.
Answer
If you think differently from the medieval authorities (Rishonim), I don’t see any problem at all. The Talmud is binding, but you can interpret it according to your understanding.
And even the Talmud itself, of course, you can interpret differently from the way it presents things; it is only binding in practice, in terms of Jewish law and behavior.
Discussion on Answer
(I mean—a kind of awful feeling of dealing with the history of law instead of law itself 🙁 )
What about a little respect for the Sages? Of course one can ask questions about what they said, and perhaps even understand things differently in certain matters, but why speak in such a dismissive way, as the questioner did? I understand that it was meant to emphasize how hard it is to understand what they are saying, but still, I think one should speak respectfully.
=It sucks for me..