Today’s daf relates the following story about avoiding indirect damage:
Rav Yosef had certain palm trees and bloodletters would sit beneath them. Crows would come, eat the blood, fly up to the palm trees, and damage the dates. Rav Yosef said to (the bloodletters): “Remove these crows from here.” Abaye said to him: “But it is indirect damage!” He replied: “Rav Tovi bar Matana said, ‘… indirect damage is prohibited.’”
Rav Yosef, it turns out, is particularly sensitive to crows, so the fact that the bloodletters have already established their right to work underneath his trees does not give them license to stay. The bottom line is that they can be held liable for indirect damage — for the crows their work attracts.
Rabbi Meir Abulafia, a Spanish talmudist living in the 12th and 13th centuries, suggests that there are two biblical verses, both quite famous, that might be the source of the prohibition on causing indirect damage to another: Leviticus 19:14, “do not place a stumbling block before the blind,” or Leviticus 19:18, “love one’s neighbor as oneself.” Neither of these verses are obvious candidates for the prohibition. In fact, several other commentators give different sources. But upon closer examination, each — if it is in fact the source — gives us a deeper understanding of the proscription. The negative injunction against putting a stumbling block before the blind includes a prohibition on giving bad or harmful advice to another. Thus even more so, we might argue, one should not cause actual damage to another. The positive injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself asks us to consider the other person: If we want people to treat our own property in a particular way, certainly we must likewise treat their property with respect.
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Even though the bloodletters near Rav Yosef’s trees might have argued that they were simply doing their job and the crows were not their concern, these verses implore us to think beyond our immediate actions to their consequences. If the blood from the bloodletters is enticing crows to the area, then they are, in fact, responsible for their presence, and they must take into consideration the effect it has on those around them. Because it causes significant though indirect damage to Rav Yosef, the bloodletters’ freedom is curtailed.
Interestingly, if the source for not causing damage is loving one’s neighbor as oneself, rather than putting a stumbling block before the blind, there may be an exception. Rabbi Yitzhak Yehudah Shmelkis, a 19th-century Galician rabbi, mentioned in a responsa that the prohibition to cause indirect harm “is specifically in a case that he causes damage and does not benefit another Jew, and not where it causes damage to one and benefits [another]; even more so when it benefits oneself, one has not transgressed a biblical commandment …” This exception potentially limits the scope of one’s responsibility for the effects of one’s actions to the point where causing indirect harm might be permitted in a case where someone else benefits from the action.
While we see from the many discussions in this tractate and elsewhere that this isn’t a blanket exception, it raises the fundamental question asked about indirect damage: How much are we responsible for the downstream results of our actions, seen or unseen?
Read all of Bava Batra 23 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on July 18, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
