Last week’s Halakhah in Brief generated a lot more discussion than I would have expected— most of it surrounding an issue I meant to include but forgot, modern ways to identify people who have passed away. As people noted, nowadays science has developed many new ways to identify a person, chief among them being DNA evidence and dental records. Either of those, if it were necessary would, I am pretty sure, qualify for idenitification. This means that in cases where a body is found, the problems of igun rarely arise anymore, although for hundreds of years it was a huge worry.

For this week’s sheet, I wanted to broach several topic areas rather than lay down any simple rules. It seems to me that if we ask people the extent to which halakhah, strict law, prescribes the details of a Jew's life, we will often receive one of two answers, each erroneous in my view. Some make the error of thinking of Judaism as a legal system that codifies some rules, but leaves much of how to live one's life open to personal decision. In this view, as long as halakhah doesn't specifically address an issue, there must not be any Jewish input on that issue. The stress on specific law as the purview of halakhah can also be expressed in the opposite way, in the claim that all of life is specifically codified within absolute legal statements. People who hold this view believe that (ideally) there is no significant element of personal choice or ideology in the living of a Jewish life.

This week, I thought I would put before the community three halakhic concepts that demonstrate broad concerns of the system that are nevertheless not specifically ruled by that system. The concepts I have chosen (for no cogent reason) are nidui, ta`aromet, and yored `imo le-hayyav. In each case, the detailed rules for the full application of the concept are too extensive and complicated to summarize in one sheet, so that the presentation here is not meant to provide authoritative guidelines, but just to introduce the notion.

Nidui is one of the methods of imposing communal discipline on a Jew who is not acting appropriately. A person who has been placed in nidui is required to act as if in mourning, to show contrition over having had this ban placed on him. The surrounding community is required to refrain from interaction with that person, as an expression of their communal displeasure with his actions. An exception to that requirement seems to be where the people would suffer economic loss by virtue of joining in that nidui. If, for example, someone's client was placed in nidui, that person would not be required to observe those restrictions. Rambam lists 24 actions that incur the punishment of nidui, among them denigrating a Torah scholar and not being careful about Rabbinic commandments. The right to place a person in nidui for denigrating a Torah scholar actually belongs to that scholar, although all those with greater Torah knowledge are not required to adhere to it. That means, for example, that if a Torah scholar of middle rank was verbally abused by someone (even in private) and placed the abuser in nidui, it would be the responsibility of all those of lesser Torah knowledge to shun that person.

These laws become very complicated-- sometimes the Torah scholar does not have the right to put the other person in nidui, sometimes it is inadvisable even if he does have that right, and so on. In the cases of public disregard for Rabbinic pronouncements, there are also complications, perhaps chief among them (in our time) being that communities rarely any longer take such bans seriously. Despite these halakhot still being fully "on the books," it is hardly conceivable that a community in America today would support a rabbi who pronounced a nidui on a longstanding member of the community. Nevertheless, we should still note the amorphous nature of the halakhah, and the role it assumes for extralegal communal pressure in the workings of the halakhic system.

Tar`omet is a right to be upset with another person for not fulfilling a commitment. The prime example (although there are others) is if one person contracted to hire another, and either side reneged on the agreement at a point where no monetary loss had been incurred, and where the commitment could be replaced without a loss. An example would be where a school agreed to hire a teacher for the next school year. During the summer, however, that teacher took a different job, at a point when the school could still replace him or her without any significant trouble or loss. The school nonetheless has the right to tar`omet, the right to hold it against that original teacher. The right of tar`omet has no monetary ramifications, but it is a halakhically ordained right to bear ill will towards someone else.

A worse case comes when someone calls someone else a name. In each case, different kinds of retaliation are provided, the most serious being that if one person call another one a rasha, an evildoer, the person so insulted has the right to be yored `imo le-hayyav. That right is generally defined as the right to hate that person, to attempt to interfere with his livelihood (for example, by opening up a competing business right next door), and to make his life miserable. There may be exceptions to this, particularly depending on the context in which the word rasha came out of the person's mouth. If, for example, one person called another "idiot," and the response was "rasha," we would treat that differently than if a person simply got angry with someone else and burst out with the cry of rasha.

Daf Yomi