In lecture 28 regarding whether a witness and a judge can combine:

A. You explained that according to the Rabbis in Rabbi’s view, “it is not correct to say that the witness who validates his own signature is testifying to the amount in the document. Rather, by virtue of the fact that he is as though testifying to the amount in the document (and we saw there in the lectures that there is a dispute among the medieval authorities about what he has to know about the loan in order to be considered as such), his testimony is considered valid validating testimony regarding his signature (even though he is only one witness). In the end, bottom line, he is a validating witness and not a witness to the amount in the document.”


I didn’t understand this principle. What does “as though testifying” mean? If he testifies to the amount, according to the Rabbis he is believed, and therefore one could say that since he testifies to the amount in the document, by that very fact he validates the document. Why “as though testifying to the amount”? He is definitely testifying!

B. You wrote, “Therefore it is more reasonable that according to Rav Yehudah said in the name of Shmuel, the judge who testifies to his signature is not considered as testifying to the amount in the document, but only to the validation. He is considered a validating witness in his own right.”

And this is difficult, because here you reverse the rules of the witness in the case of the judge according to the Rabbis. For according to them (the way you explained it above), by virtue of the fact that the witness testifies to the substance of the testimony (= the amount in the document), he is considered one who thereby validates the document itself.
But regarding the judge, you write that by virtue of the fact that he testifies to his signature on the court certification (= validates it), he is considered a validating witness of the document (= the substance of the testimony of the court certification).
Regarding the witness you explain that A leads to B, and regarding the judge that B leads to A.

C. According to Rava, who says that a witness and a judge do not combine, this also goes according to the Rabbis in Rabbi’s view, where the witness testifies to the amount and through that is a validating witness for the document. And the difficulty in Rava is that if so, why shouldn’t the judge also be considered a validating witness for the document by testifying to the court certification? (The step made for the witness—from testimony about the amount to validation of the document—should also have been made for the judge, from testimony about the court certification to validation of the document.) And you answered this: “Because the judge is one witness to an event of the document’s validation in a prior religious court, in which he served as a judge, and one witness is not enough to establish for us that such an event indeed took place. Consequently, the judge is not considered even a single validating witness.”

And I didn’t understand: the witness too, who testifies to his signature, is by himself only one witness to the event of the loan, so why is he enough to establish that such an event took place (the loan)?

I don’t remember that lecture, and I’m not currently immersed in this passage.