Chulin – Daf 30
Our Gemara on amud aleph uses an interesting phrase to describe the emergence of a Torah idea or ruling: “Nizreka mi-pi chabura,” which translates as “It came out from the group of Sages.”
The Hebrew word “nizreka” has a connotation of being thrown or ejected. Meleches Shlomo (Mishna Tamid 3:8) explains it as a phenomenon where everyone in the group spontaneously and independently arrived at the same conclusion, thereby giving it increased veracity, since many thoughts and personalities aligned at once.
This phrase occurs several times in Shas, but I believe all the occurrences exclusively relate to one Sage, Chiyyah bar Gamda (See Shabbos 3a, and Pesachim 64a, 73b). Is there some connection to Rav Chiyyah bar Gamda’s mode of thought that evokes this unanimity and connection amongst his colleagues? Perhaps.
One such Torah thought that “came out from the group” is found in Shabbos 3a, where the ruling is that if two people perform a forbidden act of work on Shabbos, it’s not a violation (“Shnayim she’asa’uhu peturim”). Two people working together apparently creates a different energy than a single person doing a single act.
Is the idea of the distinct dynamic of a group part of a broader personal philosophy that allowed Rav Chiyyah bar Gamda to energize his colleagues? Another teaching of his is from Bereishis Rabbah (17:2): “Whoever is without a wife is not considered a full human.” Possibly this teaching is also connected to a broader philosophy of respecting the quality of partnership. The most significant partnership one can have is with their spouse. The ability to collaborate, connect, and negotiate between the built-in masculine and feminine traits and perspectives is what allows creation to occur, literally and figuratively. Creation is evoked in the presence of opposites. Successfully hearing and integrating the disparate views of the group can lead to an eruption of spontaneous, unanimous truth.
I’ll conclude with my own home-grown chassidish vort: Shnayim she’asa’uhu peturim – when two people act in unison together, it exempts them from harsh judgment and misfortune.
Don’t Reassure Me: When Kindness Feeds the Compulsion
Daf 31
Our Gemara on amud aleph discusses the halacha of an accidental immersion of a woman in the mikvah without intent. One opinion holds that she is permitted to have relations but is still forbidden to eat Terumah and other holy foods.
However, Rava raised a logical objection to this view. If we rely on this immersion to render her no longer niddah, which carries a severe penalty of kares, surely it should permit Terumah, which carries a less severe punishment.
This is taken as a strong argument; however, the Rishonim raise a question because, in point of fact, there are other instances where the niddah status is treated as less severe than the Terumah purity status. For example, the first Mishna in Niddah rules that if a woman sees a blood stain of color and quantity that would render her a niddah, the assumption is that it happened now, and not earlier (despite the possibility that the stain might have come from a discharge a day earlier). Yet when it comes to purity for Terumah, there is a retroactive look-back period. So here we are more lenient regarding niddah and stricter regarding Terumah.
Ramban answers that technically we should have been strict by niddah too. But if we make the impurity retroactive, it would lead to excessive fear about her becoming niddah, and the anxiety could interfere with normal marital relations.
While the Gemara had no clinical name for this, nor did they assign it as a pathology, they were identifying a pattern of human behavior: When the stakes are high (such as heaven or hell), there is a tendency to obsess, fear, check, and double-check. The rabbis were sensitive to the impact that such overscrupulousness could have on a relationship, and tried to mitigate triggers.
Religious overscrupulousness can manifest as a subset of obsessive-compulsive behaviors. If such a condition constitutes OCD, it should be treated as such, and there are evidence-based practices and clinicians that specialize in that area.
There is a specific aspect that I would like to address because well-meaning family members and rabbanim can fall into this trap. “Symptom accommodation” is the clinical term for efforts to comfort or reassure the concern or the obsession: “Don’t worry, it’s not a problem. I’m telling you it’s fine,” etc.
Ordinarily, this is a kind and human thing to do. However, in this situation, it feeds the central challenge of obsessional thinking. Often, there is an unrealistic need for certainty. The obsessive person worries about something that could happen, and is not able to take perspective and manage the downside and risks associated with it. Part of the treatment involves learning how to accept uncertainty and to bear the anxiety and the pain that goes with it. It may sound strange, but this is reality. We all worry that we might commit a sin and burn in hell. There’s no reassurance. There is caution, there are conservative and careful approaches, but there is no way to remove the uncertainty.
Research consistently demonstrates that symptom accommodation is associated with increased symptom severity. Instead of decreasing distress, doing what comes naturally to comfort someone inadvertently strengthens their disorder.
Symptom accommodation also tends to escalate over time. What at first seems like a small and easy adjustment to make (e.g., providing a guarantee) evolves into more elaborate and difficult accommodations, such as longer and more involved reassurances, psakim according to rigid rules, frustrating and seemingly unending conversations.
Here is what can be helpful to say:
Your anxiety says: “If I check one more time, I will finally feel calm.” But experience teaches that the calm never lasts – the mind simply finds a new detail. Chazal, in their wisdom, built boundaries of time, repetition, and sufficiency into the halachos themselves precisely to protect us from this spiral. The requirements are not to create a guarantee; rather, they are to show respect and due diligence. Beyond that, “the Torah was not given to ministering angels.” This is a bona fide halachic principle. Thus, there are indeed limits to how much checking is required.
Fear and Learning: The Right Amount of Awe in the Study Hall
Daf 32
Our Gemara on amud aleph relates an interesting response that Rav gave to explain why he did not ask a particular halachic question of his sagely uncle, Rav Chiyya: “I did not feel sufficiently intimate with my beloved uncle, Rabbi Chiyya, such that I could ask him that question.”
This is puzzling because the actual subject matter, involving a detail about ritual slaughter, does not seem particularly esoteric. Furthermore, both Rav and Rav Chiyya would seem to be not behaving in accordance with the directive in Pirkei Avos (2:5): “Someone who is too ashamed (to ask) will not learn, nor will an overly demanding person be able to teach.”
There is an exception to this principle, first directly articulated by Rambam but codified by Shulchan Aruch (Y.D. 246:11) as follows:
“A student should not be embarrassed before his fellow students who learned the material the first or second time when he did not learn it even after many times, for if he is embarrassed because of this, he will be found entering and exiting the study hall without having learned anything. Therefore, the Sages said, ‘The bashful one cannot learn, nor can the impatient one teach.’
“What are these things referring to? When the students did not understand the matter because of its depth or because their understanding is limited. But if it is apparent to the rabbi that they are negligent in the words of Torah and are lax about them, and therefore they do not understand, he is obligated to be angry with them and to shame them with words in order to sharpen them. Regarding this, the Sages said, ‘Throw gall (cast fear or dread) at the students.’”
This is based on a different teaching, from Gemara Kesuvos (103b): “Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said to Rabban Gamliel: ‘My son, conduct your term as Nasi with assertiveness and throw gall (cast fear or dread) at the students.’”
The challenge with our Gemara is that we have little evidence that Rav was intellectually lazy nor that Rav Chiyya thought that. We must answer that this was a high personal standard that Rav held himself to, and he may also have believed that his uncle did as well. Though he did not know the answer, and we can be sure that he tried, he felt that he had not tried hard enough and that his uncle would think the same.
This is an important “fifth Shulchan Aruch” aspect of the student teacher relationship. The goal is always the same: to teach and learn Torah with excellence. The means to achieve this goal will vary among teachers, students, cultures, and perhaps even different ages.
Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik was known to be harsh and demanding on his students, having little tolerance for foolishness and those whose mouths emitted it. Yet some biographers assert that in the mid-1960s, after his personal battle with cancer, he became softer and more patient.
In the end, different personalities make the world go round, and even though kindness and patience would seem to be universal, it’s not as simple as it seems. Fear of authority, fear of heaven, and appropriate gravity are necessary parts of the wisdom acquisition process, for both the student and the teacher. It’s all a matter of degree. The Hebrew word for character traits is middos, which actually means “measures.” This is significant because it’s never about never. Instead, it’s about how much or how little.