Daily Talk
The Rambam spends three chapters counting sin-offerings, and what he is actually counting is not sins. He is counting the number of times a person woke up. Why should the moment you remember matter more than the moment you sinned?
The Length of a Lapse
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About This Talk
Shegagot 6 measures the inadvertent sin by the lapse of awareness rather than by the act, so that different pots, different days and even five separate animals do not divide a transgression, while a single moment of remembering divides even half a mouthful. Chapter 7 carries the same rule into idolatry and the Sabbath, where forgetting the institution of Shabbat costs one offering and knowing the day while missing the labors can cost thirty nine, and where the ordinary weekdays between two Sabbaths count as awareness. Chapter 8 turns to the man who is merely unsure and rules that doubt has its own offering, but only where a prohibition was genuinely established, so that the man who knows he sinned and cannot name the sin brings nothing at all.