Daf Yomi Yevamos 35
Rabbi Moshe White learns in the local Kollel. He tells the
story of how, after many years of learning in Edmonton he began to think of
himself as a talmid chacham (Torah
scholar). One day, he took a trip back
to Israel and spent a summer in Jerusalem.
“Suddenly,
I was a nobody,” he recalls, “The grocery store owner was more learned than
me. The local doctor had been through Shas (the Talmud) five times and was
well-versed in the Jewish legal codes. I
had gotten so used to being known as learned in Edmonton, that I’d forgotten
what it meant to be a true talmid chacham!”
The Mishnah states: If two men married two women and after the
chuppah they were (inadvertently) switched, they are guilty of adultery. We must separate them for three months in case
she is pregnant, unless they were minors in which case one is not yet able to
give birth and so she may return to her husband immediately.
Shmuel taught: All women who had relations and
subsequently wished to get married must wait first three months. The
Rabbis decreed that even a minor must wait on account of the fact that adults must
wait.
The Gemara asks: Do we indeed decree that
minors must wait on account of adults?
We learned in our Mishnah “unless they were minors in which case one is
not yet able to give birth and so she may return to her husband immediately”!
In response, Rabbi Gidel quoted Rav: The case
of the Mishnah was merely a once-off ruling.
The Gemara asks: Are you then suggesting that
the matter actually took place? (Most of
these cases in the Mishnah are purely hypothetical).
The Gemara concludes: Rather, let us say that
it was like a once-off ruling since wife-switching is not a normal
occurrence.
Sadly, we
live in an age of decadence, when anything goes and everything is okay. We
read all about depraved behaviour in magazines and newspapers, we are bombarded
with it on TV and in movies and it becomes the new reality. But despite what we see in the heathen
culture around us, the Talmud reminds us that ‘swinging’ is not normal!
The problem
with our current state of affairs is that our society’s moral depravity is
compounded by technology. Let’s say you
want to engage in abnormal behaviour, but your conscience tells you that it is
unacceptable. But then you go online and
sure enough you find that ‘everyone’s doing it!’ But of course, not everyone’s doing it; you’ve
just found a group of people with likeminded fetishes.
And in the
information age, where you can connect with people on the other side of the
world in an instant, it’s not difficult to find enough similar individuals to
justify and rationalize your inappropriate desires. That’s what happened to popular Canadian
broadcaster, Jian Ghomeshi. He believed
that his private life was normal when in fact it was terrible. All this time, he had been living in a bubble
where everybody was acting abnormally and believing it to be the norm.
That’s why
you need a good peer group. When Rabbi
White got to Israel, he realized that the standard he was holding himself to
was not the true standard of what it takes to be a talmid chacham. He was
living in a bubble in Edmonton where it didn’t take very much to be ‘top of the
class.’ The real standard of Torah
scholarship can only be measured in a Torah community.
That’s not
to say that one must live in Lakewood.
Thank G-d, Rabbi Weiss continues to live in Edmonton and teach Torah to our
community. But he realizes that Edmonton
is a bubble and the goal is much higher than his current environment suggests.
