Woodchopper Revisited 15

might have used the figure of the poor person purely as a rhetorical device, the Talmud and the subsequent codifiers accept the comparison as halakhically determinative:“If one is seeking to purchase or rent an object, whether land or chattel, a second person who preempts him and acquires that object is branded as‘wicked. Given that the rule is based on an analogy, the commentators accordingly debate the extent of the comparison. Some say that the rule applies only when the property in question is ownerless(iefker) or a gift, for such would likely be the case when a“poor person” is attempting to acquire a “cake.” Others contend that the law covers only those cases where the second person buys the property, since that condition matches the case of Rav Gidal and Rabbi Abba. It is only because Rabbi Abba buys the property that he deserves to be called“wicked,” since he could have left Rav Gidal alone and bought some other property. Such would obviously not be the case if the property was ownerless, since no such bargain probably exists elsewhere.’ Meanwhile, early halakhists extended the analogy to matters of marital law: an agent appointed to betroth a wife for his client is called“wicked” if he betroths that woman to himself” And"in 1956, R. Moshe Feinstein , the preeminent posek(halakhic decisor) of North American Orthodox Jewry, was asked whether the rule of“the poor man examining a cake” extended to the case of shidukhin, a couple who were informally engaged to be married. While Feinstein answered in the negative, he did so by first examining whether the analogy to the target case (shidukhin) was an apt one. In any event, none of the development of this area of the law could be imagined without recourse to argument from analogy. Yet even though analogy is central to the process of talmudic and halakhic thought, both the sages and their rabbinical successors express considerable ambivalence over the use of analogy in the learning of the law. In B. Yevamot 109b, R. Yitzchak interprets Proverbs 11:15 to say that“evil upon evil will befall...the one who nails himself(tokea atzmo) to the matter of the law.” The Talmud offers two explanations for this expression. According to the first, the one who“nails himself” in this manner is he who studies Torah but