Lice on the Sabbath and related issues

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN from Adam Kirsch at Tablet: Of Lice and Men: Study of the Talmud’s second tractate reveals how the rabbis stuck to logic and made it sacred.

Reading the first pages of the tractate on Shabbat over the last weeks, I was struck by the way this emphasis on Torah study allows the rabbis to sacralize what is, on its face, often a strictly intellectual, logical, even mathematical kind of thinking. When we communicate with God in prayer, we tend to focus on emotions. We feel elevated by thinking about our love for God and his for us, or we declare our devotion or repentance. All of this is encouraged by the emotive language of the prayer service.

The opening pages of Shabbat, however, could not be more rigorously logical. In Shabbat 2a, the Mishnah presents us with a situation in which a householder is standing inside the boundary of his house, while a poor man is facing him while standing in the street, in the public domain. Say that the men transfer an object from one domain to the other, from the private zone to the public or vice versa—something that is legally prohibited on Shabbat. Which one is culpable for breaking for the law?

And, yes, lice do figure in the discussion. Ick.

Earlier columns are noted here and links.