Eiruvin 79 - 85
- Straw filling the ditch or creating a wall between two courtyards
- Creating a shituf (partnership) in a movuy by granting a neighbor a share in one’s food
- The need for such an arrangement in every sort of eiruv
- The four rulings of the Elders of Pumpedita
- Status of wife in eiruv arrangements
- What sort of food and how much of it qualify for eiruv and shituf
- What determines the wholeness of a loaf of bread?
- Giving money to the grocer for a share in the eiruv
- When Rabbi Yehuda explains or disagrees in the mishnayot
- For what purpose can one make an eiruv techumim to allow walking on Shabbat beyond the halachic limit?
- When a mother’s eiruv helps for her child
- Amount of food needed for eiruv techumim and what constitutes a meal
- Three different sets of weights
- Upper and lower courtyards
- Where the eiruv of courtyards can be placed
When Money Works
In order to finalize a transaction on objects that are not real estate, it is not sufficient to pay money alone. Some symbolic action of acquisition such as pulling the object into the domain of the purchaser is necessary to finalize the transaction and render retraction impossible.
An analysis of why this is so will help us understand when and why there is an exception to this rule. One of these exceptions deals with meat for the holidays and the other with food for an eiruv.
Four times a year there is a great demand for meat: the days preceding Pesach, Shavuot, Rosh Hashana and Shmini Atzeret. If someone gave some money to an animal merchant as payment for even one dinar’s worth of meat in an animal worth a thousand dinars, the seller cannot back out of the deal for lack of sufficient customers, and is compelled to slaughter that animal in order to fulfill his obligation resulting from the transaction finalized through money alone.
Rabbi Yochanan explains this in the following way. By Torah law money given in a transaction finalizes it and denies the ability to retract. The Sages, however, were concerned that if the buyer made no effort to pull his acquisition out of the seller’s domain, a situation could arise of a fire breaking out in the area of the seller with him making no effort to save the goods which he no longer owns. They therefore decreed that these goods leave his ownership only after the buyer has physically taken them into his custody. Since the Sages were interested in a Jew having greater access to meat before the above-mentioned holidays, they suspended this decree and allowed money to serve as the finalizer of the transaction.
What the Sages Say
“There is always room in the belly for tasty food.”
- Rabbi Yosef quoting a folk saying as to why we eat more on Shabbat than on weekdays
Eiruvin 82b
