Rav Avi: Hi, and welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times! I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, and I'm here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. Okay, I will admit, I'm a little nervous to hear the answer to this question. The questioner writes: "How frequently does one really need to check mezuzot?" And I want you all to know that "really" is in capital letters here. "How frequently does one really need to check mezuzot? Is the checking strictly material and technical, or are there non-physical or spiritual reasons to examine mezuzot? In what context may one check the mezuzot oneself?" Great question, and I imagine it has very different implications for people with very different sized homes, unless we just mean the front door. So I'm curious, also, to hear if that's gonna be a difference.
Rav Eitan: Alright. So, let's go to the main Talmudic passage on this, because this is one of those cases where you have, like, a source, it seems like it tells you what you need to know, but then you start peeling away layers, you start thinking about it, and I find with a source like this I know less and less what's going on the more I think about it. So, there's a text that appears in the Talmud Bavli in Yoma, in Tractate Yoma, a tannaitic source that says the mezuzah of an individual is checked twice in the course of a shavuah — now, we're used to "shavuah" meaning "week," but it's clear from the context here it has another meaning, which it does in rabbinic literature, which means a seven-year cycle, a sabbatical period. So, twice over the course of seven years, you're supposed to check a mezuzah. And a mezuzah of rabim, of the larger community or of some communal structure or, is it just a lot of people living together, you do twice in a jubilee cycle. So, basically if you were to divide it up evenly, it would be once every three and a half years and once every 25 years, though we'll come back to maybe what those numbers signify.
Rav Avi: Well, it sounds a lot better than twice in a week, but I'll admit it still sounds like a lot more often than I check my own mezuzah.
Rav Eitan: Alright, so, look — this is the question — yeah, but come on — you've moved, right? You've probably moved twice in seven years.
Rav Avi: That's actually true, that's probably true.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So, look — the first basic question here, with this text, is why? Like, what are we checking for? This is really the questioner's core question, which I want to spend some time on. You can tell someone they have to check something, but what is that action about?
Rav Avi: Yeah, great. And I like the way you pulled — you said both of those questions, one being what am I looking for when I check it, and the other being why am I checking it.
Rav Eitan: Great. Interestingly, the Talmud continues, where Rabbi Yehuda reports a story after that ruling, where he says there was once a certain artivin — there's a debate as to whether "artivin" is the name of a person or "artivin" is a profession, perhaps related to a Greek word related to checking — whoever the artivin is, he was checking mezuzot in the upper market of Tzippori, of the town of Sepphoris up in the Galil — and a certain Roman general found him and took a thousand zuz from him. Okay? In other words, the sense of the text seems to be that there was some financial risk, there was some sort of liability, around checking this mezuzah that a Roman soldier, authority figure, did not like, and the man involved here suffers some kind of penalty. So, that's the sort of bizarre story here. The question is, what is going on here in terms of the checking, and why might people in the outside world not like it, or be concerned about it? So, let's go to the basic thing, first, of what are we doing? So Rashi, right here, on the word "nivdeket," where it says the mezuzah is checked, says because either perhaps it rotted or it was stolen. Now, that's really interesting, because those are two —
Rav Avi: So it's like, check to make sure it's still there.
Rav Eitan: So that is really interesting, because those are two totally different things that would be two totally different checks. Right? Whether it's been stolen is just, is it there? You're just supposed to make sure that, you know, things haven't fallen off or it wasn't stolen, you've gotta check periodically, apparently not very frequently, to make sure it's still there. "Nirkavah," that it's rotted, either means that it just sort of decayed to the point of total disintegration, or might be a concern that somehow actually the letters on the parchment themselves, due to rot, have decayed and disappeared and the text no longer reads, you know, in the way it's supposed to read. But that's much less clear there. For Rashi, it's possible that you could read his entire concern as just, is it there? Is it intact, and is it there? And the check is about nothing more than that.
Rav Avi: And in that context, it certainly seems like checking is something you do yourself.
Rav Eitan: That's for sure. No question about that. We'll see pretty much everyone thinks the checking is what you do yourself, no matter what, but we'll get back to that. The Rambam, Maimonides, has a different read. He says you check it twice every seven years if it's an individual's mezuzah, lest one of the letters got torn off, you know, sort of separated off from the rest of the parchment, or perhaps the letter was erased and rubbed off because, after all, it is located on a wall, on the structure, which is subject to rot and to weather and to all sorts of things. So for the Rambam, it's already something very different. It is about actually the text coming apart and decaying in a very clear way, such that the checking is not now, okay, yeah, it's there, it's there, it's there, it's there, but you're clearly going inside, unfurling the parchment, and checking — does it still say what it says?
Rav Avi: And these, up until now, both feel very technical to me. Like, I might say if it's really about whether or not the parchment has decayed, then if the mezuzah on my door is inside an internal apartment building and it's in a plastic case, it's very well protected, then I'm a lot less worried about it than, you know, something sort of open to the stone on the outside of a Jerusalem sidewalk or something like that.
Rav Eitan: Yes. That's exactly right. There does seem to be a sort of more technical piece here, and indeed Rashi seems to reinforce that, because when he's analyzing the other part of the text we started with, which says you only check the mezuzah shel rabim, the kind of communal or public one, which seems to be sort of the mezuzah that's, like, on the city gate or that's on, you know, a sort of big courtyard complex that has lots and lots of apartments and residences within it, the sort of public things, right, because remember the text of the Torah says, write them "al mezuzot beitecha," on the doorposts of your house, "uvisharecha," on your gates, and the gates are understood, rabbinically, to be public buildings. So it's those public buildings, it seems, that get checked once very 50 years.
Rashi says why do you only check them once every 50 years? Because when you've got something that's a communal responsibility, you can't actually expect that much of people, because if the standards are too high, everyone's gonna pass the buck and say that someone else has to do it. And it'll never get done. You have to actually set communal expectations at a reasonable level — if you say everyone in the shul is expected to come to minyan, you know, 10 times a year on a rotating basis, even though that might be fair, it might end up that they won't come at all, because they will feel that that's not a reasonable amount with their schedule. Whereas something that's more scaled down, you will get people to do. But that, again, sounds like a sort of accommodation of not doing it is related, on some level, to, you know, well, yes, you should technically check these things, but what can we do? We can't expect more of people than to do this, so we go a little more lax on the technical, physical checking requirement. But it does seem like this is very much about making sure the mezuzah is present and it's intact in some way.
And indeed, if you follow that thread through, you find many who assert that that is what this is about. It is about making sure that the letters are in place — most people don't just go with the making sure it hasn't been stolen piece laid out by Rashi — but they say, you know, even the rot discussed by Rashi, they read as being the same concern as the Rambam, of perhaps the letters have rubbed off. And then, yes, you have a requirement, periodically, to open it up and to look. The Chatam Sofer of Moshe Sofer in 19th century Hungary is very explicit, though — he says we're not talking about a check of you're supposed to go through it and make sure, oh, did the sofer write it with all the vavs and the yuds in the right places, and is everything spelled exactly correctly? No, what you're supposed to do is open it up and see, are all the letters there? In other words, just check it against what you know to be the text of the Shema, have things rubbed off, has anything been, you know, been severed from the main text? And he says very clearly, you don't need an expert who is basically a sofer, who knows exactly how every Biblical word is written, either with full or deficient spelling; anyone can check it, it just needs to be that you open it up and look at it to make sure it hasn't been rotted away.
Now, the problem with this is the technical piece here doesn't seem fully to add up to the periods of time that are prescribed. Particularly, I would say, the gap between the private and the public mezuzah — it's very hard to imagine why the public mezuzah is going to rot away or have letters flake off at a different rate than the private mezuzah. And even within the private realm, the twice every seven years either seems like way too much or way too little. If it's just really the standard of, is the mezuzah still there, I feel like on that level I check my mezuzot, yeah — it's like, every day or once a week where I'm walking into a room, and I, yeah, you look up, right? I'm not personally a mezuzah kisser every time I go into a room, it's not the way I was raised, but it's something you're conscious of, and you look at all the time. And if it's about being attentive to the parchment not falling apart, I don't know — then you would expect, it would seem, like rabbinic text would give you all kinds of criteria of oh, if it was a particularly rainy season that year, and if it was outside as opposed to inside — you would have all kinds of different standards. And none of that appears here, which suggests that perhaps something else is going on here just, you know, other than just the technical verification that the piece of writing is on your doorpost.
Rav Avi: Right. Meaning, that opens up the question, for us, of is there a metaphysical reason to be checking a mezuzah? I'll share — I've heard these stories, I'm curious to hear from you where you think this comes from, because I haven't heard anything, any evidence of it in the texts that you've shared thus far. I've never experienced this myself, but I've heard stories of, you know, a family whose house will burn down, and they'll go to the — and the local rabbi will come for a visit and say something like, well, did you check the mezuzot? Because maybe that was part of the problem. I've only heard the stories in very critical of that kind of theology way, but I imagine that must be rooted in something, some sort of concept that, you know, you check your smoke detectors and you check your mezuzot, that it's supposed to be doing some metaphysical protecting. So I'm curious where you think that comes from.
Rav Eitan: Right. So, I think if we want to get to the bottom of this and really understand the fuller dynamic of the discussion, we gotta go a little deeper into, well, what is the mezuzah and what might then checking it actually be about? So here, one really interesting source is from the, again, the Talmud in Tractate Menakhot, where Rava is describing how, where exactly, you should be locating the mezuzah on a doorpost, and imagine here a really wide doorpost. Okay? That might, let's say, even an arm's length deep, such that it's a sort of significant cavity that leads from the entrance into the house, until you hit the actual door. And Rava says, mitzvah l'hanikhah b'tefakh hasamuch b'reshut harabim. When you're locating the mezuzah on the doorpost, it should be at the outermost section — that is to say, the section of the doorpost most close to the street. In other words, you might have thought, well, put it right next to the door, as close to sort of the actual entrance to the house as possible. No, put it as far out as you can towards the street. Okay, it doesn't explain what that's about, but then the Talmud asks, well, what is that about? And you have two views. One is, well, we want you, when you're walking in, to the first thing you encounter as you start heading through that doorway is the mezuzah. We don't want to sort of wait until it's at the end of the cavity; do it right in front. So that's about sort of your experiencing, encountering it.
Rav Avi: That feels in keeping with the fact that, you know, my mezuzah on my door is on the outside, you could see it even if my door was locked and closed, it's not on the inside of the doorframe.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So just to be clear, here it's for sure gonna be outside of the door, and then the question is, right, should I put it all the way, almost flush with the street side of that doorway? And one thing is, I should encounter that mitzvah, if you will, as soon as possible, whenever I come home. But Rav Chanina of Sura gives a different answer: he says, so that it will protect you. Meaning what? The function of the mezuzah is to protect the house, and therefore if you wanted to protect the entire house, you better put the mezuzah as far out on the house as you can, so that the house is maximally protected. And then comes a tradition that says this tells you something about how G-d is so different from earthly monarchs, because the way earthly monarchs live and work is the king sits inside a protected palace, and all of the troops and the guards stand around protecting the king from without, the king or the queen is protected inside by troops that are outside, whereas G-d actually has servants sitting in the house, and G-d protects them without, as it says, Hashem shomrecha, G-d is your guard. It's an amazing imagine of an inverted relationship of essentially G-d's mission being to care for people.
Rav Avi: That is so beautiful, where did you say that text is, where did that come from?
Rav Eitan: That's in Masekhet Menakhot, lamed gimel amud bet, 33b.
Rav Avi: Ah, so that was from the Talmud. That's just a really beautiful image.
Rav Eitan: So, here I actually think you have the basis for a potentially raging debate, which is, is the mezuzah basically an object for fulfilling a mitzvah, so you want to encounter that as soon as you come into the house, or is the mitzvah, is the mitzvah of mezuzah, to go back again, or is the mezuzah actually a kind of talisman, is it something that protects, it works as, like, an amulet on the house and on the doors in the house, and to the extent it is, is that okay? How do we think about that? And this indeed leads to a brawl — basically a rabbinic brawl on this question. I bet you can guess — who do you think is the most vehemently opposed to the idea that the mezuzah would be an amulet that you would put on your house?
Rav Avi: I'm gonna say Rambam, Maimonides.
Rav Eitan: You got it! So, Rambam — I'll just read a little piece of this, because I think our listeners will enjoy it. He says the following: "It's common practice that people write on the outside of the scroll of the mezuzah the word 'Shaddai',' shin-daled-yud, one of G-d's names." And he says that's really fine because it's outside of the parchment, it's not messing with the internal letters of the Shema. "But," he says, "there are some people who write the words of holy people and angels or other verses or designs of various sorts that they feel are kind of redemptive and magical, and they write them inside, interwoven with the text of the mezuzah, and these people," he says, "have no share in the World to Come, because these stupid people, eilu hatipshim, it's not enough that they cancel out the mitzvah," because he basically thinks that by inserting these things in the text you've invalidated the, you know, the actual scribal requirements of the mezuzah, but worse they've committd a kind of philosophical treason, because they take this great mitzvah, which is about unifying G-d's name, loving G-d, worshipping G-d, and they turn it into an amulet for their own benefit. And this is the kind of foolish thing, how folk religion ends up destroying worship of the true G-d.
Rav Avi: I will say, it resonates with me, the idea that the mezuzah has developed a cultural significance, maybe, is one way to put it. When I think about — I don't know maybe any — maybe some… I don't know very many Jews who don't consider themselves halakhically observant or eager to fulfill all of the mitzvot who put on tefillin. But I know many Jews who don't consider themselves halakhically observant who have a mezuzah on their front door. And so I would say for probably many Jews, especially in America, and especially today, there are a lot of people who find the mezuzah meaningful and moving for reasons that are beyond fulfilling the particular letters of a particular mitzvah.
Rav Eitan: That is for sure, without question. I think when we talk about contemporary Jewish life, there's an aspect of it that just also goes to Jewish identity, it's sort of a basic statement of, I'm not afraid, you know, to be marked as a Jew in what's a reasonably public way on your house.
Rav Avi: And not only not afraid — you sometimes want, you know, I think especially in the context of New York City apartment buildings where I live, you know, you kind of want people who walk by to know that hey, there's a Jewish family here, they could knock on your door for something if they needed it.
Rav Eitan: That's right, there's no question. And I think it's interesting to think how that overlaps with the impulse to view it as protecting a space, defining a space, giving it some kind of character beyond this. What's really interesting is, you know, most of the things that Rambam lashes out on of this sort, you can almost always find a great rabbi who did exactly the thing that he's describing the horrible masses doing. And in this case, we find in the Sefer Yeraim of Rabbi Eliezer miMetz, when he is spelling out — he's one of Rabbenu Tam's students, so we're back in 12th century France and Germany — when he is laying out the laws of mezuzah, he says yeah, you know, you can look in the Talmud and find all the things you really have to do, but then he says there's also all kinds of things people add in, and those are fine. And then he gives an entire listing of, here's where you can put the name of this angel, and here's this diagram which you can draw, and literally every single thing that the Rambam just spelled out is simply laid out in Sefer Yeraim's description of the mezuzah.
And so you see in that way, that sort of ongoing tension of, well, what is the function of this thing on our door, what role is it playing? If you do ever check your mezuzah, which you should — hopefully by the end of this podcast you'll have a better sense of why and what it means — and you pull out the parchment, you'll find that even though the inside of the parchment of any standard mezuzah reads clean with the Biblical text in the way that Rambam asserts he wants it to be, on the outside, you will always find not only the Shaddai that he refers to, but you'll also find a bizarre shift-cypher text that says "kuzu ben muchzas kuzu" on the bottom of every mezuzah. And that is just a one-letter shift up of the words YHVH, the four-letter name of G-d, and then the word "elokeinu," is our G-d, and then again YHVH, and that is clearly, right — if you take YHVH and just add a letter to each, you'll get kaf-vav-zayin-vav — that encoded text, which is completely meaningless, is obviously a sort of magical formulation which, again, you will find completely standard, pretty much on every mezuzah in any house.
Rav Avi: Yeah. It's interesting. I feel like the idea that you need to add other magical texts to make the mezuzah into a magical amulet — it's interesting to me because I already feel that way about the text of the Shema in the, you know, in the way that, oh, why am I saying this text before bed every night, feels to me like a similar kind of, I'm looking for some sort of magical protection to come, even without the extra encoded magic words, so to speak.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. And when you go back to that Talmudic text where it says, you know, put the mezuzah on the outermost part so it will protect the house, you start to actually realize that while Rambam's formulation here may be very philosophically compelling to many of us, and for those of who don't have proclivity towards what we view as superstition it may feel like he's shoring up, you know, a kind of truer and purer religion, it's also clear and a number of the commentators on Rambam point out, well, I'm not really clear that Rav Chanina of Sura thought about it that way, because he does seem to say, put the mezuzah in this place so that it will protect the house. And there's some degree of whether you can, you know, square the circle on Rambam in that way. But there clearly is this sort of undertone of the mezuzah having a meaning beyond just it sitting on your doorpost.
And here, I want to suggest — I haven't found someone who says this, but this seems to me the best reading of the evidence, that we may get a hint at this sort of not just technical aspect of the checking, but the sense of the checking being itself a religious act. If we pay a little closer attention to the units of time that are being used here, the yovel, the jubilee, is a very clear marker in the Torah of the time when the community as a whole resets. There's a sense of every 50-year cycle, people go back to their ancestral holdings, there are sort of wrongs that have been accumulated — if not moral wrongs, sort of capitalist imbalances that have, you know, crept into the system for the prior 49 years, that there's then a sense of everyone gets a sort of another chance to start over in a model society that you're trying to build. I think it's impossible to hear about the mezuzot being checked based on the periodicity of the yovel, of the jubilee year, without imagining that that has something to do with essentially doing a communal check-in of, are we living up to the society we are supposed to be?
The Shema, particularly what's written in the mezuzah, the second paragraph of the Shema, is very clear in sort of plural form, if you as a society follow My mitzvot, then there will be rain. And if you don't, then there won't. The entire sort of philosophical and religious message of the mezuzah is societies are accountable to G-d for how they behave, what they build, and what they don't build. And when we turn then to the sabbatical cycle for the individual, well, what happens twice every sabbatical cycle in the way that, certainly, the rabbis, chazal, understand the Torah? Well, really, sabbatical cycles are three, three, and one. There is a period of three years where there is tithe taken, for the first two years of that cycle, that you eat in Jerusalem as part of participating in public ritual life there, and then every third year, there's a special tithe that goes to the pooler.
And it strikes me that pa'amayim b'shavuah, the twice every seven years — there too it's hard not to hear, sort of, at the end of year three and at the end of year six in each sabbatical cycle, where what the Torah actually says you must do is an act of vidui ma'aser, a kind of confession over the tithes, where you have to publicly proclaim — this is in chapter 26 in Devarim, in Deutoronomy — you have to publicly proclaim that you actually took care of all the tithes you were supposed to take care of in the prior three years. Which, on the individual level, is basically the individual's accounting — have I, as a farmer in that context, lived up to the expectations of me to creating the kind of model society that I'm expected to do? And again, I haven't found someone who says this outright, but it strikes me that the nivdeket here, the checking, and the almost ritual periodicity of it, is not just a checking of parchment; it's a checking of the actual words, which of course need to be there, for their sort of reality in the lives that we live in the society we're creating.
Rav Avi: That language actually makes me wonder how we might feel differently if we used the translation of "check-in" — like, twice every sabbatical you should check in with your mezuzah, like, re-check-in with that text and see what it has to say and speak to you, and especially as a community. Now, again, we check in with that text multiple times a day, but to check in in the context of the mezuzah.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, and what is nice, what I think our questioner was trying to look for, is it gives a read on anyone being able to do it as not being a leniency but in a way, a kind of a stringency. That is to say, there's something missed if once every three and a half years what you do is take the mezuzot down without looking at them, send them off to a specialist, and get them back. It feels to me like there's an aspect of this text that is suggesting that actually you're supposed to unfurl it twice every seven years, and read it, and look at it, and confront it. And, sure, there may also be technical things that need to be fixed, and that's clearly an important piece of it, but the function of the mezuzah in the house is not just to sort of check off a box of the Torah told me to put this, you know, on the doorpost, and I want to kind of encounter the visual symbol. But there's a reason that there's a specific set of passages written in there, and I'm supposed to confront them in that way.
Rav Avi: Yeah, right. It's like, even worse than taking it down and sending it off, you could just imagine someone saying oh, I scheduled the mezuzah checker to come while we're away next week, and now that would really defeat the point.
Rav Eitan: I think that might be right. Anyway, I thought it was a really interesting question, and I'm gonna continue to think about it and see who else might have thought and written on this.
Rav Avi: Yeah, it's helpful. I'll end with this anecdote that I, my daughter, who's about to turn two tomorrow, actually, has a book that has a picture of a mezuzah in it, and every time we get to that page of the book, she leads me to the front door and makes me open the door so she can point to the mezuzah and show me where it is. And so I actually, in terms of is it still there, feel that I've been doing a lot of mezuzah checking in the last weeks. So, may everyone's mezuzah checking be, I'll say, as sweet as my checking with my two-year-old daughter each night.
Rav Eitan: For many, many jubilees to come.
Rav Avi: Have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at halakhah@hadar.org. Or you could leave us a voicemail message at (215) 297-4254.