I've noticed a number of themes that keep reappearing in the past few days of study. One such theme is the protection against the shoddy memory of a householder who hires a worker.
We know that the rabbis are in the business of creating laws to protect individuals from flaws in the system. Because a householder is often busy and often has many workers, the rabbis made laws that aimed to avoid problems that might arise from a certain householder's flaw; perhaps he hire a worker and forget the wage that he promised him.
Therefore, the rabbis changed a number of laws to avoid this problem. When there is a dispute between a householder and a worker over wages, for example, Jewish law would usually permit the householder to swear that he is correct. However, because the householder may be remembering wrong--he may have been thinking of a conversation with someone else--it reversed the oath and gave it to the worker. There are other examples as well and you can find them in and around today's Talmud page.
In post-Talmudic legal literature there is one word that appears over and over again, ha'idana, meaning today or currently. When you see this word it usually means that the rabbis are looking at a ruling in the Talmud and explaining why it doesn't work in this day and age.
With this in mind, I have a question about this ruling for today, ha'idana. The rabbis I'm sure never dreamed that many people would have e-mail. And furthermore that most e-mail (like g-mail) would be able to store thousands of documents in a searchable database. Today, it doesn't matter whether the householder has a good memory or a bad memory. Since most agreements are done over e-mail, any dispute can be settled with a click of a mouse.
I wonder then, if many of these rulings are based on a system of hiring that is outdated. If one lives though this halachic (Jewish legal) system of oaths, when do we accept that maybe the rulings aimed at protecting against the householder's shoddy memory may not be needed?
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Well, if anything, it is even more complex. Have you ever heard of electronic discovery, where parties to a lawsuit demand to receive all correspondence related to the matter? eDiscovery today has become so prohibitively expensive that parties would rather settle than go to court.
ReplyDeleteHackers, on the other hand, can alter electronic evidence. Then again, forensics experts can find the alterations. And then again, hackers can cover their tracks even better. So one click of a mouse becomes a production request, collection, processing, review :)