People generally believe that James Naismith invented the game of basketball in the early 1890’s. In today’s Daf we learn that the game of basketball was actually invented by Rabbi Yose the son of Rabbi Yehudah in the late second century of the Common Era. Our Daf says, “Rabbi Yose the son of Rabbi Yehudah says: If one stuck a pole in the ground of the public domain and on top of it was a basket four tefachim wide, and he threw an object from the public domain and it landed on the basket . . . ” And thus was the game of pick-up basketball born (although not on the Sabbath)! Of course, if you have ever attended a Passover Seder, you know that the degenerate gambler, the Earl of Sandwich, did not invent the sandwich, but actually Hillel invented it at the beginning of the Common Era!
To really get into the details behind today’s Daf, we need to remember where we are, because we have followed a twisting argument through several days. On Sunday, at the very beginning of the tractate, we covered eight cases involving our poor man standing in public outside the window of our rich lady homeowner on Shabbat. In our first case, our poor man, in a selfless act of charity, takes his Challah and passes it through the window to the rich lady homeowner and puts it in her hand because he wants the lady to celebrate Shabbat, even though he has little to share. We concluded that the poor man had committed the forbidden labor of carrying on Shabbat because (i) he lifted the Challah in the public domain, (ii) he transferred it into the private domain, and (iii) and placed it in the hands of the lady. Since yesterday, we have been trying to answer who was the sage that made this ruling and on what basis. We are troubled because the general rule is that for the elements of lifting and placing we require that an object be on or come to rest on a surface four Tefachim wide (about 14 inches). The ladies hand does not qualify for this general rule, so we want to know who came up with this ruling and how. We are investigating this problem by considering other known rulings by various sages and seeing if we can harmonize our case with one of those rulings. So far, we have been unsuccesful.
When we left off, we were considering that Rebbi (Rabbi Yehudah Ha’Nassi (the redactor of the Mishnah)) may have been the author. We begin today by considering an opinion of Rebbi from yesterday that if we throw an object from a public domain across a private domain, we are liable for breaking biblical prohibition while the sages would exempt us. The Talmud is confused by Rebbi’s opinion because Rebbi holds us liable for transferring to and then out of the private domain, meaning out object did not have to come to rest in the private domain. However, the Talmud notes that if the private domain was roofed, then we consider the whole thing as full of articles and therefore deem anything in it to be at rest. Therefore, Rebbi could still require that the article come to rest and he cannot be the author of the Mishnah. In a side note, we learn that we are allowed to carry objects in a roofed public domain, but not an un-roofed public domain. The forbidden Sabbath labors are derived from the labors necessary to build the sanctuary in the desert. Since there were no un-roofed public areas in the desert, carrying in an un-roofed public area is ok.
The Talmud dismisses Rebbi as the author of the Mishnah. Rabbi Zeira (4th century of the Common Era) hypothesizes that the “Others”, or an anonymous group of sages, are the author. The “Others” previously held that if I throw an object to you on Sabbath and you catch it without moving, then I am liable for violating the prohibition. Rabbi Zeira thinks this means that you do not need a large area to have placement. The Talmud rejects this reasoning because perhaps you may have spread out a cloak to catch the object. We also learn that if I throw an object and you run to catch it, then I am not liable for violating the prohibition, but you are. We later get a discussion about what happens if I throw an object and then run and catch it myself. The Talmud concedes that we will just have to leave this last scenario unresolved.
We then get a whole discussion of whether baskets in public domains are public or private. This is where Rabbi Yose the son of Rabbi Yehdah invents basketball. We consider, and reject, theories that our rich lady lowered her hand to the ground, that she was standing in a pit, that she was a midget, we consider oil floating on wine . . . you get the picture.
The Rabbis are trying to derive a rule that unifies all of the disparate fragments of rulings they collected from the oral tradition. We have not yet found the unifying principle that will provide the correct answer in all cases. Indeed, we come across lots of cases where the Rabbis do not agree on the correct answer. At the end of today’s Daf, we have still not concluded who came up with hypothetical one and what was the basis of that person’s ruling. Perhaps tomorrow.