For the past week, the Gemara has been parsing a mishnah dealing with cases in which a person is so sick they make what they think is a deathbed bequest, only to recover. The question of whether they can reclaim their property has been occupying us for the entire sugya, which concludes today with this story:
There was a certain woman (who gave away property on her deathbed and then recovered). She came before Rava who acted in accordance with his halakhic ruling (and ruled that she could not retract the gift). She constantly troubled him.
As with other cases, this woman unexpectedly recovers and goes to Rava to help her reclaim her property. But Rava rules that she cannot retract the gift. The woman, perhaps understandably, is angry — so much so that she bedevils Rava, perhaps publicly accusing him of ruling unfairly. What does Rava do?
Rava said to Rav Pappa, his scribe, son of Rav Hanan: Go, write for her a ruling in her favor, and write in the ruling the phrase: He may hire replacements at their expense, or deceive them to get them to return to work.
Rava tries to trick the woman into thinking that he has caved and written a ruling in her favor stating that she can retract the gift. But sneakily, he embeds into the judgment a phrase from a previous mishnah (Bava Metzia 75b) in which a man hired laborers to perform a time-sensitive job and they subsequently quit. Rava intended this phrase to indicate to the court that the ruling was merely a ruse in order to persuade the woman to leave. The woman, perhaps better educated than he realized, understood the subterfuge. Now she was even angrier.
The woman said: “May his ship sink; you are deceiving me.” Rava had his clothes immersed in water so that the curse would be fulfilled in this alternative manner, but even so he was not saved from the sinking of his ship.
The woman responds to Rava’s deception by cursing his ship, which sinks despite his effort to outwit the curse.
There are several questions that arise from this story, but the one that’s the most interesting to me is: Why is the curse effective? One obvious reason might be that the woman was wronged. A hint that this is the case is found in the language on our daf, noting that Rava acted “in accordance with his own halakhic ruling.” Two medieval commentators, the Ritva and Nimukei Yosef, note that Rava’s opinion was a minority one, and he erred in relying on his own judgment rather than the majority.
Then there’s the way in which Rava tries to deceive the woman. The Meiri, another medieval commentator, notes that by instructing his scribe to insert the tricky language into his second ruling, and assuming that she would not understand what he was doing, he effectively shamed her in public. On this point, the Meiri writes, “Mockery is a most detestable trait. How much more so must the judges and the leaders be careful to avoid it, as they are punished even more for it, as we find in this incident.” One is reminded powerfully of the story of the Oven of Akhnai, where the shamed sage Rabbi Eliezer utters a curse that kills his colleague.
Another reason could be that Rava’s lived experience as a wealthy and powerful man did not allow him to be sufficiently empathetic to the woman’s plight; his ruling effectively rendered her penniless. This isn’t the only talmudic example of such a situation; on Gittin 35a an impoverished widow successfully curses Rabbah bar Rav Huna after he denies her both her ketubah payment and further sustenance (in that case, the curse removes him from his leadership role as head of the academy).
Finally, there’s the matter of the Talmud’s belief in curses in the first place. It seems that in a time when curses, demons and magical thinking were accepted as real and consequential, most of the commentators agree that a woman scorned — particularly one with no additional legal recourse due to a sage’s duplicitousness — is justified in cursing him (and his boat). Heaven, it appears, agrees.
Read all of Bava Batra 153 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on November 25, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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