Tuesday 14 February 2017

Bava Batra 22: Salespeople in Towns; Space Between Neighbours

The briefest of brief blogs today:

Our daf has two sections.  The first is concerned with people who enter and then leave a town - this refers to salespeople.  Are they permitted to enter the town at all?  For how long?  How might they cause havoc when they enter towns?  There seems to be an underlying fear of the danger these men might pose to Jewish women in each town.
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The second part of our daf is mostly made up of Gemara in response to a new Mishna.  The new Mishna teaches that one may not build a new wall too close to the old wall of their neighbour's home.  One must leave four cubits between the old wall and the new wall. Similarly, one must be careful about the placement of windows. Windows must be four cubits away from walls, whether above or below.  The rabbis take this to mean that the wall must be built either four cubits higher or lower than the window to ensure that one cannot stare into the windows from the wall.  The Gemara is concerned with different building patterns, with ladders and with gutters.  

We end with another new Mishna.  It teaches that we must place a ladder at least four cubits away from a neighbour's dovecoat, and at least four cubits from their gutters.  The former is to discourage the mongoose from climbing into the dovecoat.  The latter is to ensure that people can lean ladders between to walls to clean or repair their gutters

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