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Boker Tov Friends.
Greetings from a tense Israel. Torah study is always good, and in hard times especially so. So on to perek 11.
The first Mishna is straightforward in terms of the halachik principle it is teaching, though it is somewhat jarring in terms of the some of the language it uses to expresses itself. The background for this Mishna is the Biblical law that a man who seduces or rapes a unmarried woman is required to make a compensatory payment to her or to her father, and is required to offer marriage to her (see Shemot perek 22 and Devarim perek 22). Our Mishna presumes a situation in which the woman (the victim) has already refused the marriage offer, and the principle that the Mishna is establishing is that there is no residual legal impact of the marriage that could have happened, but didn't. This man and this woman are seen as halachikly unconnected.
(The jarring language is the way that the Mishna dispassionately refers to the woman as “his raped one”. There is a much larger conversation to be had about the way that Biblical law addresses the issues of seduction and rape. Please be in touch if you’d be interested in a short shiur about Rav Aharon Lichtenstein's teaching on this topic.)
Mishna two makes an important halachik point about the legal relationship – or lack thereof – between siblings who converted to Judaism together with their mother.
Mishnayot 3-5 are in the “brain teaser” category that we’ve encountered many times before in Yevamot. These Mishnayot feature a “kibbutz” of children, some of whose mothers are positively known, and some of whom could be the child of any one of the various mothers (and fathers) in the story. This strange situation, in which some of the children know with certainty that they are bothers while others are just not sure, gets mapped onto the laws of yibbum, and also onto the laws of kahuna (kohen-hood).
The animating principle in Mishna 5 is that someone who may - or may not - be a kohen must observe the personal laws of kahuna (just in case), but at the same time he is not required to give the various “priestly tithes and gifts”. This is true even though there is a 50% chance that he is NOT a kohen, in which case he would be obligated to give these tithes and gifts. Why is he exempt then? It is because of the general halachik principle that a person who is making a financial claim upon someone else (in our case this would the the kohen who would potentially be the recipient of the tithes and gifts), is required to prove that he is in fact entitled to what he is claiming. And since there is no way of definitively proving that the man in our Mishna is a non-kohen (and therefore obligated to give tithes and priestly gifts), a kohen's claim of tithes and priestly gifts from him has insufficient legal weight.
Mishnayot 6 and 7 work off the rabbinic injunction that a woman who is divorced or widowed should wait for three months before remarrying, so that there is no uncertainty around the paternity of a child she might bear soon after remarrying. These Mishnayot play out the legal precautions that need to be taken if she did NOT wait these three months. (And as you’ll see, Mishna 7 is essentially a replay of Mishna 5.)
With prayer for good tidings, I wish everyone a Shabbat Shalom.
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