Chanan the Wicked delivered a blow to the ear of a particular person. Rav Huna told Chanan, "Give the victim half a zuz." Chanan had a worn-out zuz but couldn't change it. He delivered a second blow to the other ear and gave the person the zuz.
If an ox is warned regarding its own species but not other species, or regarding young animals but not mature animals, the owner pays full damages where warned but half damages where he was not warned. Students asked Rabbi Yehudah about an ox warned for goring on Sabbath. He said, "For goring on Sabbath, he pays full damages, on weekdays, half-damages."
Art: Autoportrait by Van-Gogh
2 comments:
What is this, comic relief? Actually, it seems to me that they are two interlocking arguments against the notion "the punishment should fit the crime."
The point of the bit about Chanan the wicked, I suppose, is that Rav Huna failed to anticipate that too small a penalty is no disincentive. It also reminds me of a common death penalty criticism: If someone is driven to murder by in a moment of thoughtless passion, they are by definition immune to thinking about the threat of a capital penalty. Perhaps the "default" penalty for cuffing someone should be half a zuz, perhaps that is appropriate from both a justice standpoint and a social control (disincentive) standpoint. But Chanan must have earned his title "The Wicked," and should probably be treated like a warned Ox or a three-strikes felon and marched off to jail. In this case the punishment should fit not the crime but the criminal.
The second comment brings up a philosophical point. In Plato's Parmenidies, there's a rare moment when Socrates loses an argument. He is describing his idea of "eidos" - the true essence or ideal form of a thing. He talks about the eidos of water in all it's manifestations (running water, still water, cloud, ocean, etc.) In the same way, he could talk about an eidos of "earth." So Parmenidies asks "What is the eidos of mud?" In other words, how do you keep your notion of categories from devolving into redundant tags for each individual thing?
Similarly, Yehuda is, through a joke, (I think he's joking) warning us that if there is a different penalty for every individual circumstance, then we lose the ability to categorize crimes. If assessing the penalty rests not only on the "warned/not warned" question, but on warned/species, warned/age, or warned/Sabbath, what is to stop it from resting on warned/age/Sabbath? and on and on. Then we're walking down a set of stairs with no natural landing until the bottom, where every crime is completely unique.
The idea that "the punishment should fit the crime" sounds very reasonable, but at the extreme, it makes for a legal system that is completely arbitrary. Bava Kamma here seems to be warning against this tendency, in support of a legal system that, in effect, allows for different clothing sizes but not for custom tailoring.
This is probably the only practical solution. Custom tailoring is ultimately impractical. It may also be theoretically impossible, because only Hashem knows and can assess all the relevant circumstances. But it's important to keep in mind the corollary -- every humanly administered punishment is to some extent unjust.
Matt, yes, you can consider it a comic relief. Chanan means “gracious,” and the name tells us that he had the potential of being so. However, because he insisted on always having his way and did not want to give his possessions away for free, he won an appellation of “Bisha” - wicked. That is a moral lesson which I have read in Ben Ish Chai, who in addition explains other lessons we learn from this story – but they are all technical clarifications of other issues, such as the value of zuz compared to selah and acceptability of inferior coin that nobody wishes to change as a payment for humiliation.
Now you touch on the theory of punishment. In the American legal system it is an open discussion, and different reasons apply at different times. In the Talmud, it is never discussed, but the basic idea of punishment is that any transgression blemishes the soul, and the punishment is intended to purify it back.
Mentioning Plato you again touch on some of the basic discussions, namely, is good beloved of gods because it is good, and therefore it is something higher than gods, or is it good because it is beloved of gods, but Euthyphro can't accept this, because his gods argue between each other. The Talmud will say that good is defined by God.
About differentiation between crimes – Talmud agrees with you but for a different reason. If you give no criteria, then “you have allowed the Torah to be decided based on each specific circumstance,” and there need to be guidelines. However, if the guidelines say that this ox is prone to goring on Shabbat but not on other days, then this is entirely possible. The two explanations are that he does not recognize the familiar people who are now dressed in their finery, or that not working and being lazy makes him want to fight.
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