Question

Hello Rabbi, I had an idea for an interpretation to resolve the difficulties in Ben Azzai’s view that “walking is like standing,” which came up בעקבות your series of lessons on chapter 1 of tractate Shabbat (lessons 33–35).
The difficulties in his view:

1. How does Ben Azzai deal with carrying four cubits in the public domain? According to his view, that would be carrying less than four cubits at a time.
2. At least according to Birkat Avraham, standing in order to adjust the load on one’s shoulder is not considered standing, while standing in order to rest is considered standing. But that is difficult, because if walking is like standing, then all the more so standing in order to adjust the load should count.
3. If one clears objects from one corner to another, then changes his mind about them and takes them out, he is exempt; yet we do not find that according to Ben Azzai he exempts in that case.
4. In Ketubot it clearly seems that Ben Azzai holds that at every single moment of walking both an act of lifting and an act of placing are taking place, because otherwise how could the rule of “he incurs the greater liability instead” apply?

 
Difficulty (4) is the hardest of them, but I think that it too can be resolved in a way that makes sense.
A reformulation of Ben Azzai’s reasoning: “walking is like standing” means walking is like standing only with respect to lifting, not with respect to placing. In other words, a step taken after another step, where on the second step an object is taken, has the status of a step taken after standing; both have the power to constitute lifting. Put differently: even according to the Sages, lifting does not begin until the person starts walking, except that they hold that he must first stand still so that the first step he takes will be called a lifting. Ben Azzai does not require that, because he sees no essential difference between a step in which one takes an object into hand (even an object that was not at rest) when one stood beforehand and when one did not stand beforehand. Both are called lifting. However, as you explained, the lifting follows the first step, meaning the moment of lifting. One can say that according to Ben Azzai, once you have begun the lifting, everything you do afterward is just a continuation of that lifting, and you do not reinitiate the lifting anew at every single step. Now, the reason he exempts when passing through a statio is that you can no longer say that you are continuing to lift the object out of the private domain; lifting applies only in the place where the object is still located in the domain from which it began to be lifted. Once you passed into the statio, the lifting from the private domain ended, because it is no longer there, and now a lifting from the statio to the public domain has begun. But according to his view, no placing occurred in the middle. Even so, according to his view he would exempt, because the lifting was done from the statio and not from the private domain. As for resolving difficulty (1): in the case of carrying four cubits in the public domain, he would impose liability only if you stopped, because walking is like standing only with respect to lifting and not with respect to placing. Even Ben Azzai would agree that no placing occurs here until one stops, because walking has the power only to lift, not to place. Likewise, with difficulty (2), regarding standing in order to adjust the load, we would say the same thing, even though I agree with you that it is not at all necessary to assume that he distinguishes between them like Birkat Avraham. If, on the one hand, we understand that Ben Azzai distinguishes between standing in order to adjust the load and standing in order to rest like the Sages, since we do not find anywhere that he disagrees with them, and on the other hand his view is that walking is like standing, then how could he fail to distinguish between standing in order to adjust the load and standing in order to rest? Standing in order to adjust the load is, at worst, an inferior kind of standing, no better than walking. For example, if one carries from the private domain to the public domain, then even if he pauses in the public domain in order to adjust the load, according to Ben Azzai he would be exempt, just as he is exempt according to the Sages; only if he stops in order to rest would he be liable. The explanation is that even with standing in order to adjust the load, he holds that it is like standing, as with walking, in the sense that someone who begins his standing by pausing to adjust the load, the steps that follow will count as lifting; but with respect to placing, Ben Azzai will agree with the Sages that standing in order to adjust the load is not standing, meaning not a placing.
Difficulty (3) is resolved in the same way, together with your reasoning: the act of lifting follows the moment of lifting, and if at that moment it was for the sake of moving the object from one corner to another, then one is exempt from the labor of transferring out, as in the rule of two forces within one person. Or you could say that the labor was never completed at all here, because there was no lifting, only moving and placing.
Difficulty (4) in Ketubot is, in my humble opinion, resolved as follows:
When you drag an object along the floor, only then is each step considered a lifting, because at every moment the object is considered to be resting. The distinction, according to Ben Azzai, between that and carrying it in one’s hand is that unlike there, in this case the object continually remains on the floor, and therefore the act of dragging is understood as an act needed for lifting it anew at each and every step. But when walking with the object in hand after the initial lifting, the picture is not like that, because even though you must expend energy to carry the object out, the object is with you, and its status follows your status—that is, the body, which while walking is not considered at rest. Therefore, since you are not at rest, it too is not at rest. Likewise, in the case of throwing, he imposes liability because walking can be called lifting, but the flight of an object cannot. And similarly in passing an object hand to hand, which is harder, because there is reason to exempt according to his view, but one can say that he does not regard the continued extension through the statio as a significant lifting, and what we learn—that one is liable for passing from one private domain to another private domain through the public domain—is a special rule. Here, ordinarily, according to his view he should have exempted, because extending one’s hand is not lifting. But that is not difficult, because even the Sages, who impose liability for passing through a statio, should have exempted when it goes through the public domain; therefore indeed they learn it as a special law from the Tabernacle.
 
To sum up, the basic reasoning here is built on two assumptions:

1. Walking performs the lifting.
2. Rest is not required, only presence is required, and one need not distinguish between the public domain and the private domain in order to resolve this.

 
Additional notes:
It sounds like the Raavad’s answer there—that in a private domain one does not need actual rest—is because the private domain is treated like a point-body, meaning something with a single coordinate, whereas the public domain, since there is nothing that uniquely defines its area, is viewed as each coordinate standing on its own. And therefore presence there does not mean resting there, because your coordinate there matters. Correct me if I’m wrong.
 
Also, in light of Tosafot’s unclear difficulty, I think the Talmud’s line of thought in rejecting exemption due to interposition went like this:
Let us bring a case in which passing through an intervening domain does not exempt.
First, let us find a case in which we transfer an object from domain to domain to domain and still incur liability. Now let us try to prove it from passing through the public domain, say when I passed nine cubits in the public domain. Then we find four cubits that you carried, and then another four cubits in the middle that are like a kind of domain, and then one more cubit that is like part of a third domain. So since we find here that an intermediate domain does not exempt us, then the statio too should not exempt. But the cases are not comparable, because placing within the middle four cubits would incur liability, whereas in the statio it would be exempt; therefore one cannot reject exemption due to interposition. So they continue and move on, really infer, to the next case of carrying four cubits, where if he stopped in the middle he is indeed exempt. Now the rejection of that case is explained by your explanation, that there is no act of transfer out because we did not carry a significant measure. From this it follows that what Tosafot meant in their question was to ask why the Talmud bothered to present the first answer, which was rejected, as a case of passing from domain to domain to domain all within the public domain, when it would have been simpler to present the parallel from the private domain through the public domain to a farther point in the public domain. In any event, they answer that the Talmud rejects the comparison there because the reason there is no liability in the middle is that we kept walking and the place itself would in principle be liable for placing, so it is not comparable to an interposition that exempts.
And in fact, in light of their question, it became clear to me that from a didactic standpoint it makes more sense to begin with the first case in the Talmud, because I assume it was clear to them too, right from the start, that it was not comparable to a statio that exempts. Still, this case is more basically similar to the statio with respect to interposition, because as in the statio, there is a domain and then a domain and then a domain. Only after you reject this case because of the second characteristic of the statio do you try to compare it to a case where placing in the middle would exempt, namely carrying within four cubits. And that too is rejected, precisely on the first side of the disanalogy to the statio: there is no actual domain there that intervenes in the middle, and the reason there is no liability within four cubits is because the person is not liable, not because the place is not liable. In itself, the place is not special and is not an intervening domain.