Ketubot 20: Handwriting Witnesses; How to Remember

Part of today's daf is challenging in its legal referencing.  Another part of today's daf is less legally complex.  I won't pretend to understand all of the legal ramifications of today's daf.  However, I can give an overview, and I can share the meaning that I derive from the text.

As in almost all legal affairs, two witnesses are required to lend credibility to a claim.  When arguing over the validity of a legal document, two witnesses must agree that a handwritten signature was not forged, coerced, or in any way invalidating the document.  Those signatures were often signatures of witnesses - the rabbis use the example of a contract describing money lent from the lender to the borrower.

The legal complexity arises when those witnesses have died, when either the witness or one of the parties might have been incapacitated, or when different pairs of witnesses contradict each other regarding their memories of the document being signed.  Our daf describes detailed accounts of different rabbis' concerns.  Each possibility seems to open up a new set of possibilities.  Following these arguments proved itself too time consuming for me in this daily daf yomi context.

One of the rabbis' resulting conversations focuses on memory.  Witnesses are required to actually remember the signing (or other circumstances in question).  They are permitted to look at notes, but those notes must jog a real memory of the incident.  Sometimes witnesses can have their memories 'jogged' by others, but not by litigants themselves.  Torah scholars, however, are permitted greater leniencies than ordinary people when it comes to retrieving memories. Our notes explain that this because Torah scholars would never degrade the court by succumbing to a bias or lying about a memory.

We are presented with an example of how people remember things.  The rabbis are concerned about potential ritual impurity in piles of dirt that are outside of a city.  Women might bury miscarried babies there; people might bury limbs that have fallen off due to sickness there.  But wouldn't people remember if something that imparts ritual impurity had been buried there in the recent past?  The rabbis guess that unless something was buried secretly, people would learn about these incidents and would remember them even up to sixty years after the burials.   This could happen even in Eretz Yisrael, which is supposed to retain ritual purity.

While Rabbi Chisda argues that people might remember up to sixty years after an event, the Gemara disagrees.  People might remember an incident forever.  Thus there is no time limit on how long a witness's memories are considered to be valid.

We end today's daf with a new Mishna that turns back to handwriting.  Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi says that if one witness testifies that his own signature and the other's handwriting are valid - and the other witness testifies that his own signature and the other's handwriting are valid, then they are deemed to be credible.  But if each witness only vouches for the validity of his own signature, two other witnesses are required to validate their handwriting.  The rabbis disagree.  They claim that one person vouching for his own signature is enough; two witnesses are not required in this case.

Of particular interest to me was the example of bar Shatya which has come up in the past.  He was said to have been both sane and insane in a cyclical manner throughout his life.  When witnesses were able to verify his sanity, his decisions stood up in court.  When witnesses told that he was not sane during a particular transaction, some of his decisions were reversed (the sale of land; not that of movable property).

It is fascinating to understand how our Sages understood the notion of sanity.  Clearly, people have struggled with mental illness and wellness for thousands of years.  Based on these texts, it seems that unusual behaviour was seen as a part of the continuum of human experience, just like ambiguous sexual identity or going through a period of ritual impurity.  The shame that we attach to these 'differences' is not recorded in Talmudic texts.  However, that does not mean that people in these circumstances were not stigmatized.  But the difference between ancient and modern descriptions of mental health is striking.