Q&A: A Double Doubt When Both Doubts Go Against the Shulchan Arukh
A Double Doubt When Both Doubts Go Against the Shulchan Arukh
Question
Yabia Omer, vol. 9, siman 6:
A Jew lights the fire, and a non-Jewish worker in a Jewish home places the cooked dish on the flame. There is a double doubt based on a dispute among the halakhic decisors: whether it is permitted when a Jew lights the fire, whether it is permitted in a Jewish home, and whether it is permitted when the non-Jew is a hired worker. So there are three doubts regarding a rabbinic prohibition. The Shulchan Arukh prohibits each of these cases (and does not treat them as doubtful), and Rabbi Ovadia follows him; and nevertheless, Rabbi Ovadia (following the Chida and others) creates here a double doubt to permit it. And this is what is called: “we apply a double doubt even when both doubts go against Maran.”
What is the explanation for such an approach, where in each issue taken on its own they rule stringently, but combine them into a double doubt to permit?
[A probabilistic model could assign 0.6 toward prohibition for each side and therefore rule stringently in each individual case; but with a double doubt there is 0.4 toward permission in the first doubt plus 0.24 from multiplying with the second doubt, for a total of 0.64, and therefore it is permitted.]
Answer
The question is whether the Shulchan Arukh ruled from certainty or from doubt. If he ruled out of doubt, then he was only instructing what to do, but it still remains in the category of doubt. In that case, even the Shulchan Arukh himself would rule leniently in a case of double doubt. Otherwise, it באמת is not clear (according to Rabbi Ovadia’s own approach, of course, in which Maran’s rulings are binding as settled Jewish law).
Discussion on Answer
If so, then you need to ask them. Why be stringent in a rabbinic doubt? And wouldn’t the Shulchan Arukh himself rule in a double doubt even “against himself”? And perhaps their position really is based on a probabilistic model.
Just to note: if there is a probabilistic model and each ruling of Maran is given the same force, then the probability range one could attach to it runs from a bit more than 0.5 (because in every single doubt we decide like Maran) up to 0.7, but no more. If each of Maran’s rulings is assigned 0.8, for example, then even with two doubts there is still more than half toward prohibition.
What do you mean, why be stringent in a rabbinic doubt? Could it enter your mind that in every rabbinic prohibition the Shulchan Arukh abandons the words of Maimonides, the Rif, and the Rosh, who prohibit, and rules based on Rabbenu Yerucham and a responsum of the Ran to permit? It seems to me that Rabbi Yosef Karo himself presumably regarded his ruling as certain. If he had written in the Shulchan Arukh (“whose rulings were accepted”) the ruling in the case of double doubt itself, then perhaps the Sephardic later authorities would indeed have backed away from it.
How could he have ruled out of doubt if this is rabbinic? The idea that we apply double doubt with two doubts against Maran is accepted by many Sephardic later authorities that Rabbi Ovadia brings there, and they did not say that in every doubt considered on its own one can go against Maran, at least in rabbinic matters.