Moshe Zemer
Two Who Laid Hold of a Tallit
Rabbi Hirsch and the ultra-Orthodox Council in Jerusalem offered a miracle solution to the quarrel over the Ramot road. The solution was based on seeing the road as falling into the category of the disputed mishnaic tallit:“If two people laid hold of a tallit and one says...“it’s all mine,” and the other says,“it’s all mine’”(Mishnah Bava Metzia 1:1). In such a case, the Sages ruled, the tallit was to be torn in half and divided fifty-fifty. The Ultra-Orthodox rabbis wanted to apply this halakhic principle as follows: For two weeks the residents of Ramot would be allowed to travel on the new road that passes by the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Kiryat Sanz; for the next two weeks, they would travel by the old road, which passes by the Orthodox neighborhood of Sanhedrin. In this way they would split the experience of Sabbath desecration with a religious neighborhood that had so far remained aloof from the violence. If the road is the tallit, who were the two claimants holding on to it? The ultra Orthodox from Kiryat Sanz, the residents of Ramot, or the religious residents of Sanhedrin? What sort of partition is being proposed? Is it not rather more like the solution proposed by King Solomon to the two harlots who asserted maternity of a single child—namely, that the child be cut in two? The implementation of such a division is so absurd that it was not given any serious consideration.
All of these attempted justifications are in reality only pseudohalakhic arguments without any basis in Jewish law. This same sort of reasoning was used to justify vicious attacks on pathologists for performing autopsies and on archaeologists for desecrating grave sites.
Some would have us ignore the facts and blindly accept the ultra-Orthodox contention that the violence is an anomaly in their struggle, that their demonstrations are usually calm and orderly. Even if this were so, we must ask whether halakhah permits demonstrating and waging furious campaigns, as the ultra Orthodox have repeatedly done on the Sabbath . Many of the| actions associated with the demonstrations are themselves forbidden by halakhah. For example, one of the rabbinic dicta that might impinge on the Sabbath demonstrations is that one may not run or jump on the Sabbath . Maimonides phrased this as“you should not walk on the Sabbath as you do on weekdays.”(Laws of