A Thought on Parshas Mishpatim

"...V'aila ha'mishpatim asher tasim lif'nai'hem..." (21:1) "...and these are the ordinances which you shall place before them..." Over forty years ago I studied in the yeshiva of the Gaon haDor Rav Moshe Feinstein z'l. During my second year there, we studied the difficult tractate of Yevamos. This covers the laws pertaining to the responsibilities incumbent upon a man who had a married brother who died childless. During the winter zman. I recall coming across a fascinating passage in one of the commentaries known as the Meiri (Rabbeinu Menachem from the House of Meir, who lived in Spain until the early 1300s). In that passage, he explained a midrash which comments on the famed story of Shlomo HaMelech who was asked to judge and determine who was telling the truth about a small child. In the "Book of Kings" (Melachim I 3:16) we learn of the two women, both of whom had given birth to sons, only one of whom survived. Each woman now claimed that the surviving son was hers. Solomon sat in judgement, and was able to bring out the truth. The episode is well known. The deeper issues involving such a dispute have been the topic of many interpretations. This week, ibn Shu'aib, also of Spain during the same general era, cites the same midrash as the Meiri, and interprets it in similar striking fashion. The midrash says that these two women were actually "yevamos" - women whose husbands had died. Then the midrash says that they were "a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law." First, ibn Shu'aib deduces a compelling reason for the midrash to reveal these hidden details. Then, he works with them: If these women had both lost their husbands yet each one had given birth to a child, regardless of that child's subsequent death, the Torah frees them to remarry as they wish, and there is no longer any mitzvah for them to "have yibum" with their respective brothers-in-law. If so, why did they now have to bring the surviving son before the king to resolve their dispute? What was the issue, other than a matter of who would raise the child? ibn Shu'aib reasons that it must be that the mother-in-law gave birth first. Then, the husband of the daughter-in-law died. This would mean that the new born child of the mother-in-law was the brother of the deceased husband, and thus the brother-in-law of the daughter-in-law. Since the daughter-in-law's late husband had still been alive when his little brother was born and then this man died, his widowed wife now had a brother-in-law to make yibum. The practical problem was that since he was still an infant, the widow would need to wait for him to mature and to grow up, at which time he could perform the mitzvah of yibum and marry her. She would be much older by that time, as well as much older than the man, the brother-in-law, who would marry her through yibum. However, she was meanwhile pregnant. Once she would give birth to a son, even after the death of her husband, she would no longer need yibum, since he late husband would then have had a living descendant. Tragically, however, that woman's child died within 30 days of the birth. That creates a problem in halacha, for which the only solution is for her to get chalitza instead of yibum. Her little brother-in-law would grow up, but not be able to marry her. He would only be able to perform the chalitza ritual to free her to marry someone else. When the widow realized this, she was not keen on waiting single for so many years, only to have to go through a chalitza when the little brother-in-law matured. So, she in essence "kidnapped" him, took her dead child and put him next to her sleeping mother-in-law, then claimed that it was her son who was alive, which would then mean that her late husband had left a viable descendant and she did not require yibum or chalitza. Moreover, the prospective (false) brother-in-law, she reported, was dead. A double dispensation. Solomon suggested that the only way to resolve the overt dispute between the two women was to slice the child in half and share the remains. The real mother, the mother-in-law of the worried daughter-in-law, could not face such a tragic solution and insisted that her daughter-in-law just take the child and allow him to live. However, the daughter-in-law refuses to take him and opts to have him dissected per the king's recommendation. Why was this? Beyond the fact that her reaction revealed to Solomon that she could not be the real mother - for what mother would agree to have her child killed? - ibn Shu'aib suggests that the daughter-in-law could not deal with the thought of living with a child who was in fact the man she was supposed to marry. Her distress at this point led her to the most irrational decision to let him be killed. ibn Shu'aib asks, why didn't she just kill him herself when she first realized that she was going to be stuck, the night that her own child died? That would have freed her of all complications. ibn Shu'aib proposes that she was afraid of being caught, and moreover, murder feels worse to most people than setting someone up to be killed by someone else. And with this interpretation, we see deeper into the Talmudic mind of ibn Shu'aib, talmid of the Rashba. Good Shabbos. D Fox