I eschew cute titles. But if I didn't, I likely would have called this one: Lending a Hand On Shabbos. It turns out that using your hands to move stuff around is more interesting than you would have thought. (I am pretty safe there, even if you never thought about it at all, since anything is more than zero!)
Masechta Shabbos does not begin with a listing of the 39 categories of forbidden labor. Neither does it start out by describing the beauty and radiance of Shabbos. It starts with a poor person begging for food and a well-meaning homeowner trying to help him out. The mishna details situations under which one or the other would be guilty of a capital offense, one or the other would cause the other to commit a capital crime, and situations they would just get whipped for rebelling against Chazal. How's that for an attention grabber?
Let's start with the bare halacha. The home owner is in a רשות היחיד/private domain, and the poor person is in a רשות הרבים/public domain.
Note: The adjectives public and private here refer to access rather than ownership. A private domain has walls and/or doors that limit access, a public domain is wide open. Ownership is not relevant in determining "private" or "public".
The capital offense would be for one person to (1) pick up a significant object in a private domain; (2) set it down in a public domain. Step (1) is known as עקירה/uprooting, and step (2) is know as הנחה/placing. What if two people conspire to get the object from one domain to the other? Chazal forbade that in the case where one or the other could come to violate the Torah prohibition. For example, Chazal forbade the following: the home owner picks up an apple from his counter (עקירה in private domain), reaches through his window so his hand with the apple is how in the public domain (but not set down), and then the poor person would take it off the homeowner's hand, then place it in his shopping cart (הנחה in a public domain). No Torah prohibitions were transgressed. However, it is forbidden by Rabbinic law because if the home owner would place the apple in the poor person's hand (instead of letting him take it), then he would have transgressed the Torah prohibition. The homeowner would also transgress the Torah prohibition by simply dropping the apple outside. Too close for comfort, so Chazal forbade it.
This is so fun. Let's try another one! The poor person sticks his hand into the house. Of course he is not going to take anything -- it's not his house! The homeowner puts an apple in his hand. Now what? It seems that there is no way to come to a Torah prohibition! The poor person didn't pick up the apple, so when he puts it down outside, he has only done half of the action; he set it down in the public domain, but never picked it up in the private domain. Right?
Not quite. Let's break this down. (1) One person picks up an apple in the house, walks outside, sets it down. Boom! Torah prohibition violated! (2) One per picks up an apple in the house, walks outside and then stops. Boom! Torah prohibition violated! The apple is on his body, his body came to rest, so the apple came to rest. (3) Homeowner puts an apple on someone's shoulder, who then walks outside and stops. Boom! Torah prohibition violated! Since he was standing still when the apple was placed on his shoulder, starting to walk -- uprooting his body -- is tantamount to uprooting the apple. (4) Someone leans into the window from the outside and the homeowner puts an apple on his shoulder. Boom! Torah prohibition violated! The shoulder bone is connected to the back bone which is connected to the leg bone which is connected to the foot bone, which is firmly planted on terra firma. So placing the apple on the shoulder is tantamount to placing the apple on the ground outside.
(5) Someone sticks his hand into the window and the homeowner places an apple on the palm of his hand. Fizzle! No Torah prohibition violated... yet, anyway. Why? Because hands are different from other parts of the body. They can move around and act at a (short) distance. However, they are attached to the body. (The arm bone is connected to the shoulder bone, after all.) So... (5a) The person just pulls his hand out through the window. That is one of the cases of our mishna; no Torah prohibition violated. (5b) The person steps back, bringing his hand and the apple outside. Boom! Torah prohibition violated! Once he lifted his feet to walk, the arm lost it's independent status and is now just considered another part of the body.
You might want to read that a couple of times. The point is that very slight changes in actions can make the difference between permissible (according to the Torah) actions and capital offenses. If it weren't for the safeguards that Chazal instituted -- not just for Shabbos, but for all areas of life -- we would often get ourselves into sticky situations. Baruch HaShem for the Chachamim and their safeguards!
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