Q&A: Rabbinic Prohibitions in a Case of a Commandment / Distress / Loss
Rabbinic Prohibitions in a Case of a Commandment / Distress / Loss
Question
Hello Rabbi,
In one of the columns you wrote the following:
For telling a non-Jew to do something, and a rabbinic prohibition, are permitted in a case of a commandment, distress, or loss.
I wanted to ask: is this true for all rabbinic prohibitions? Or only rabbinic prohibitions on the Sabbath?
And how does this fit with the prohibition against saving one’s property that is burning on the Sabbath because of a rabbinic prohibition? Isn’t there distress or loss here that should permit the rescue?
Best regards,
Answer
Telling a non-Jew, yes (and even about that there is some dispute), but rabbinic prohibitions are not permitted across the board. For if that were so, why would there be any need for the leniency of telling a non-Jew in the case of a rabbinic prohibition—a double rabbinic prohibition in a case of need or a commandment?
As for your question about the prohibition of extinguishing a fire or saving property, it seems to me that I commented on this here in the past. In that case, the Sages created a prohibition that from the outset stands even against those leniencies; that is, it is not permitted in a case of need or major loss. It is like a limiting clause on the leniency for rabbinic prohibitions in a case of major loss.
The harder question is not halakhic but practical: it is obvious that people will not be able to abide by this prohibition, and will not lose all their property because of concern over a rabbinic prohibition (lest one extinguish the fire, when the extinguishing itself is a constructive act not needed for its own purpose). So what is the point of decreeing this? Especially since the prohibition is based on the fact that a person is agitated over his property and may come to extinguish the fire. A person is even more agitated when he is forbidden to extinguish it, and therefore may come to violate this prohibition itself. And we have already found something like this regarding carrying out the dead body (in the case of King David). Moreover, Tosafot on Shabbat 4a writes that it cannot be that there is a prohibition against removing bread that one stuck to the oven wall, because people will not obey such a rule (a person will not sacrifice himself to stoning because of a rabbinic prohibition). Something similar seems to apply here as well.
I once thought (see columns 293 and 358) that perhaps this is only a declarative prohibition meant to educate us about the importance of the Sabbath, but they did not really intend for us to observe it in practice. And indeed, the halakhic decisors greatly limited it, except that they leaned on hysterical expansions of life-threatening danger, as is the way of halakhic decisors in such cases (and I discussed this in my columns on public life-threatening danger, 529–531).