Nazir 5: Thirty Days

Amud (a) walks us through the rabbis' understandings of the word yamim.  Does it refer to years? Weeks?  Perhaps two days?  Or 'a specified amount of time'?  Absalom, one of King David's sons, was a permanent nazirite.  We learn that he asked to fulfill that vow when he was 40 years old.  Permanent nazirites are permitted to cut their hair intermittently.  Absalom would cut his hair annually - or was it weekly, or at some other interval - as his hair would become heavy on his head.  

A Mishna teaches us that nazirut without a specified amount of time will be a thirty-day commitment.   A temporary nazirite is to grow his/her hair for the amount of time specified followed by a complete removal of his/her hair.   The thirty-day period of time might have been chosen because of the gimatriya, the numerical value, of the word 'yehiye', will be, as in Numbers 6:5 "He (a nazirite) shall be holy". Yehiye equals thirty.  Or perhaps when we count the number of times certain words are quoted, we find the number thirty (or thirty-one, or twenty-nine).  If a person states that s/he will be a nazirite when s/he has already taken that same vow, an additional thirty-day vow of nazirut is added to her/his original vow.

Our daf ends with a deeper discussion of the number of days required of a nazirite if s/eh does not specify the number of days s/he intends to devote to her/his vow.  When does the actual vow end, on the thirtieth day?  Or the thirty-first day?  At the start or at the end of the days? Is there a consequence fore ending one's nazirut slightly early, or is that acceptable?  And if one is serving two thirty-day terms of nazirut, does s/he shave his/her hair on both the thirty-first day and the sixty-first day?

This debate reminds me of my realization that numbers are imprecise.  When I was six years old, my friends were counting the number of days until their birthdays while looking at a calendar.  I could point out my birthday, but was it 10 days away or 11 days away?  When do we start our count of "one" and where does each "one" end?  And can we truly shave down something like time so that it has a precise moment to measure?  

Our rabbis use texts to help them understand the measurement of time.  Perhaps their considerations would have been helpful to me as a young child, too.