Q&A: It Is Better for a Person to Have Relations with a Doubtful Married Woman
It Is Better for a Person to Have Relations with a Doubtful Married Woman
Question
Hello Rabbi!
It says in Bava Metzia: “It is better for a person to have relations with a married woman than to publicly embarrass his fellow.”
It seems to me that most people publicly embarrass others more often than they have relations with a doubtful married woman.
Likewise, it seems to me that most of them would feel more comfortable publicly embarrassing someone than having relations with a doubtful married woman.
Does the Rabbi have an explanation for this saying?
Answer
1. One does not bring proof from the facts. The fact that most people do something or think something is no proof that it is correct. The Talmud is dealing with what is right, not with what happens in practice. It is claiming that it is preferable for a person to do this rather than that, and this is not a factual claim but a normative one.
2. Beyond that, relations with a married woman is an offense between a person and God, and so perhaps it is preferable to violate that rather than public humiliation.
3. According to Tosafot in Sotah, public humiliation is in the category of “be killed rather than transgress” (although this is very puzzling), so it is at least on a par with it.
4. Preferability is not necessarily an overall bottom line. There may be one aspect in which this is preferable to that, but there may be other aspects in which the relation is the reverse. For example, one who recites Havdalah over a cup of wine will have male children. Here this is already a factual claim, and it is clearly not borne out. Ra’avu explains that Havdalah over a cup is a cause of sons, but there may be additional considerations that offset this (for example, because of the sin of vows, a person’s children die).
5. It may be that this is a statement by way of literary exaggeration, meant to emphasize the severity of public humiliation.
Discussion on Answer
4. But if we’re talking about aspects, then what are the Sages teaching us? And why not say, for example, that it is better for a person to worship every form of idolatry in the world than to publicly embarrass his fellow, because there are aspects in both directions? Or that it is better to eat a cucumber than a tomato. There are always aspects, and all that matters is the hierarchical ruling, what you call a position.
And speaking of aspects and positions—a question.
I can’t remember right now the concrete example that caught my attention at the time, so I’ll try without a specific one. Even though I can’t come up with an example, I think it’s pretty common.
There are cases where two interpretations are possible for the first clause and the latter clause of a Mishnah.
Someone who interprets the first clause in way R1 so that it fits his reasoning in law D1a is then forced, interpretively, to explain the latter clause in way S1, and then he gets law D1b. Someone who interprets the first clause in way R2 so that it fits his reasoning in law D2a is then forced, interpretively, to explain the latter clause in way S2, and then he gets law D2b.
So there is a connection here: D1a goes together with D1b, and correspondingly D2a goes together with D2b.
The connection is mediated through the interpretive understanding of the Mishnah, and perhaps it is not an essential connection between the parts.
Now what does an amora do if, in his own reasoning, he holds D1a and also D2b?
He has to bargain with his own views and think, “Which seems more correct to me?” and based on that choose the interpretive track.
That is different from the usual situation in which an amora accepts the Mishnah.
Usually an amora can think, I think A, but the Mishnah says B, so the Mishnah is probably right or authoritative. But here the amora can choose between two tracks, and in order to decide he has to weigh two laws that both seem correct to him and determine which one seems even more correct.
You should ask that to someone who studies aggadah, or someone who thinks it’s worth studying it.
Sometimes they say that the Mishnah is broken up, and that fits this kind of case too. In general, without breaking it up, if no one disagrees with either the first clause or the latter clause, then an amora cannot adopt both interpretations together.
Even without studying aggadah, it’s understandable that if someone says “better A than B,” he could not equally well say “better B than A,” because there are aspects in both directions. So let’s set aside the whole business of aspects (answer 4), and choose the option of literary intensification (answer 5) and the other options.
I don’t think I conveyed exactly what I mean. I looked for an example and didn’t find one. I remember the tractate and the geographical spot on the page, but I can’t find it. Or maybe my memory is off. The point is bargaining with one’s views, weighing them, and choosing to go with opinion A at the expense of opinion B when they are on two completely different issues and the link between them is not substantive. And the question is whether an amora really sets up hierarchies that way and throws out one correct view for the sake of its even more correct counterpart. In weird extreme cases they split the Mishnah, but that’s only in a few places. I’ll be back in a flash when I find the example.
I didn’t understand why you reject the matter of aspects. Indeed, it’s true: you can’t prefer A over B and B over A from the same standpoint at the same time. Precisely for that reason, when the Sages say that it is better for a person to do A rather than B, after they have determined that B is more severe, the meaning is that they want to say there is another dimension from which A is more severe.
And of course I don’t understand how you got to the point of rejecting all the claims except literary exaggeration.
There are situations in which amoraim or tannaim disagree on some issue. For example, Amora A holds X and Amora B does not. Amora A brings a source from a verse or an exposition, and then the Talmud asks what Amora B does with that source. From there they derive another law, Y, unrelated to X, and that yields a double dispute between the sages even though there is no connection between the two disputes. This happens a lot in the Talmud, and almost the entire literature of pilpul is built on this. Isn’t that the logic you’re talking about?
The statement of the Sages has to be non-trivial. Obviously public humiliation is bad (parameter a), and relations with a married woman is bad (parameter b). I understood the “aspects” option—that is, answer 4—as saying that the Sages came to say that public humiliation is bad, and since in relations with a married woman there is no public humiliation, then on the axis of the badness of humiliation, public humiliation is more severe. That’s certainly a startling and original insight, but from the Sages I would expect more. [I phrased that badly. I didn’t mean to reject the other claims except exaggeration, but to reveal in passing what seems to me more plausible.]
It’s parallel. Not long ago you brought in one of the columns a Talmudic passage like this in Sanhedrin about his sister and his father’s wife, etc. But it seems to me there is a difference between laws that emerge from reasoning, where there is a position, and laws that emerge solely from exposition, where the position is less firm. Fine, when I find it, with God’s help, soon, I’ll bring it and then open a new question. I’ve already flipped through half of Bava Kamma and can’t find it, and I feel a weird need to note that this is annoying, and it looks like I’ll keep flipping through it this evening.
That’s just a caricature. Obviously the advantage of public humiliation over relations with a married woman is not the “humiliatingness” of it. The claim could be, for example, that even if the offense is less severe halakhically, it has graver dimensions in other respects, for instance from the very fact that it involves harming another person. And there is novelty in that, because in a common religious outlook there is no significance to things beyond Jewish law and halakhic severity. Something like this is brought by the Chafetz Chaim regarding the extra stringency of the prohibition of evil speech, which has no halakhic expression, for example in terms of punishment, or “be killed rather than transgress,” and the like.
Many other non-trivial interpretations can be suggested.
Got it.
And in the style of people who give little sermonettes at Sheva Berakhot on the fifth day, when everyone is indifferent, one could say that they mentioned a married woman because that is exactly the opposite of public humiliation: with a married woman, by its nature, “the eye of the adulterer waits for twilight,” and they do their deeds in the dark; whereas in public humiliation the whole problem is created by the public exposure. So relations with a married woman has intrinsic severity but no publicity, and public humiliation has no intrinsic severity but only publicity, and on this they said that the transgression of publicity is more severe than the transgression in itself. And they chose the case of a married woman, whose nature lacks publicity, in order to sharpen the contrast between the offenses. Mazal tov, mazal tov.
6. We are talking about a doubtful married woman, and it is possible that a definite lighter offense is more severe than a doubtful severe offense.