Twelve Bulls for One Sentence

The Hook

Chapter twelve opens with a sacrifice that none of the sinners bring. The High Court rules that a forbidden substance is permitted. The people, having no reason to doubt them, act on it. Later the error surfaces, and the Rambam assigns the offering with a flatness that ought to stop us. The court is obligated to bring a sin offering for its erroneous ruling. The rest of the people are exempt as individuals, even though they performed the transgression, because they relied on the court.

And then he takes away the last handhold. Even if the judges themselves never did the deed, they bring it, because we do not consider the deeds of the judges at all, only their ruling. An entire category of sin has just been lifted out of the hands that committed it and set down in the mouth that permitted it. Twelve bulls, one from every tribe, including the tribes that never touched the thing. What could a sentence be, that it costs more than every action taken on it?

Shegagot 12: The Offering That Belongs to a Ruling

The sacrifice comes in two forms. If the erroneous ruling concerned the worship of false deities, every tribe brings a bull as a burnt offering and a goat as a sin offering, the sacrifice of Parshat Shelach Lecha, whose verse speaks of a transgression erroneously violated because of the seers of the congregation. If the error concerned any other prohibition punishable by karet whose inadvertent violation carries a fixed sin offering, every tribe brings a bull as a sin offering. Twelve bulls either way, burned because their blood is carried into the inner chamber, and each carries a name worth saying slowly. A bull brought because of a lapse of awareness by the congregation. Every tribe is itself a congregation, the Rambam says, proving it from a line in Chronicles about Yehoshefat standing in the congregation of Judah.

The reach is startling. Whether the whole people of Eretz Yisrael acted on the ruling, or the majority of the people though they were only a few of the tribes, or the majority of the tribes though they were a small part of the people, the same twelve bulls go up, and even the tribes who did not transgress bring on account of those who did. The error was in the ruling, and the ruling belonged to everyone. And when the court is merely in doubt whether it erred, it brings nothing at all, because the verse says that the sin becomes known, and only what becomes known creates a liability.

When is any of it in force? The Rambam gives eight conditions, and they read less like a checklist than like a description of what an instruction has to be before anyone can honestly say they were instructed. The ruling must come from the High Court of seventy one, with the head of the academy sitting among them and every member fit to render judgment. All of them, or the majority, must have erred. They must have ruled explicitly, telling the people in words, you are permitted to do this, and the majority must have acted because of it, believing the court ruled according to the law. The ruling must have cancelled part of a commandment while leaving part standing. And the eighth is the one to hold on to: when they become aware of their error, they must know the precise matter concerning which they ruled erroneously. Fail any one of the eight and the court is exempt, while every person who acted brings his own fixed sin offering.

Shegagot 13: The Weight of a Voice in the Room

Chapter thirteen is the sound of those conditions failing, one at a time. A court of a single tribe rules that the fat of the stomach is permitted and the district eats it; that court is exempt and every one of them brings. The High Court rules that the blood collecting in the heart is permitted, but the head of the academy was not with them, or one member was not fit for appointment; same result. Authority which is only nearly authority carries nobody.

Then comes the strangest law in the three chapters, and it turns on nothing except whether a man opened his mouth. If one judge knew the others were erring and protested aloud, you are making an error, and was outvoted, the court is exempt and everyone who acted is liable. If that same judge knew and stayed silent, so that the ruling went out with no dissenting view attached and spread among the whole people, the court is liable and everyone who acted is exempt. His silence is what made the ruling whole. And if the one who kept quiet then acted on the ruling himself, he is liable, because he did not rely on the court. He cannot rely on what he knew was wrong.

The same sensitivity governs what counts as a ruling at all. If the court discussed the matter and said this is permitted, but never issued a ruling and never told the people you are permitted to act in this manner, and someone overheard and acted, the court is exempt. A room thinking out loud is not an instruction. The counting is done with the same care. Members of the Sanhedrin who acted on their own ruling are not counted toward the majority. The Diaspora is not counted either, because the word congregation applies to the inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael, and Efraim and Menashe count here as one tribe rather than two.

The chapter ends where reliance breaks down from below. A sage, or a student who has attained the knowledge that enables him to rule, who knew the court had erred and ate anyway because he thought it a mitzvah to listen to the court even when it errs, brings a fixed sin offering by himself and is not counted among those who transgressed because of the ruling. A common person in the identical position is exempt, because his knowledge is not definitive. And where the court erred honestly before a people who knew better and ate anyway, nobody brings, because they were not relying but choosing. Whenever a person relies on the court, he is exempt. That is the whole principle. Everything else is a study of what reliance actually is.

Shegagot 14: A Ruling and a Mistake Are Not the Same Thing

Chapter fourteen sets the outer boundary. If the court erred and ruled to eliminate one of the Torah's fundamental laws, and the entire people acted on it, the court is exempt and every transgressor brings. The verse says that a matter will lapse, and the Rambam reads it narrowly. A matter, and not an entire fundamental law. The court is liable only where it nullified one aspect of a prohibition while maintaining the rest, and only regarding matters not spelled out and elaborated in the Torah itself.

The contrast he draws is exact. A ruling that it is permitted to bow down to a false deity, or to transfer an article from one domain to another on Shabbat, is not a mistaken ruling at all. It amounts to saying there is no prohibition against foreign worship, or against labor on Shabbat, and the Rambam names that for what it is. Not an error in ruling. Forgetting the matter. But a ruling that carrying is forbidden while throwing from domain to domain is permitted, or that blood emerging at slaughter is forbidden while blood collected in the heart is permitted, is a ruling. It has the shape of law. And for that shape, if the majority acted, the court brings twelve bulls.

Then two cases that test whether we understood any of it. The court declares Shabbat over because the sun was covered by clouds and appeared to have set, and then it shines out again. The court permits a married woman to remarry on testimony that her husband died, and the husband walks in. In both, the Rambam refuses to call it a mistaken ruling. He calls it an error. The individuals bring and the court brings nothing, because nobody misread the law. They misread the sky, and a witness. A court answers for what it teaches, not for what it failed to see.

And then the case that unsettles everything. A court delivers an erroneous ruling and afterwards forgets the nature of the prohibition it ruled on. It knows with certainty that it permitted something carrying karet, and still cannot say whether the permission concerned a forbidden fat or a forbidden blood. The court is exempt, and everyone who ate brings a fixed sin offering. This holds even when the people come and tell them, you ruled concerning this and this, because the verse says that the transgression which they caused to be violated became known to them, and the Rambam hears in that an insistence that they arrive at it themselves. Being told is not knowing. The chapter closes with the person who stopped asking. Once the court has recognized its error and the correction has spread, whoever transgresses on the old ruling brings a provisional guilt offering, because he should have kept inquiring and did not, so he is treated as a man in doubt whether he sinned at all. Unless he had already left the region, in which case he is exempt, because he cannot inquire where he now stands.

The Unifying Principle

Put together, these chapters are not about courts. They are about where a sin is located. Everywhere else in the Mishneh Torah sin sits in the deed and travels no further than the hand. Here it travels upward, into the mouth that gave permission, and the hand goes free. A ruling is not advice. It acts through other people, and whoever issues it owns what it does.

The Alter Rebbe, early in Tanya, describes the leaders of each generation as the head and brain of the people of their time, with the vitality of the generation drawn down through them the way a body is animated through its head. Read the twelve bulls against that image and the arithmetic changes. Nobody is being punished on behalf of anyone else. The head is where the error happened, and a body does not bring an offering for what its head decided. It is also why every tribe brings. A head that erred did not err for one limb.

Which turns the silent judge into the hinge of the whole thing. The Baal Shem Tov taught that when a person is shown a fault in someone else, he has been shown it because it touches something in him, and that the seeing carries an obligation rather than a verdict. The judge in chapter thirteen sees the error clearly. If he speaks, the ruling breaks and the people carry their own deeds. If he says nothing, the ruling stands, whole and wrong, and twelve tribes pay for it. His silence was not neutrality. It was the last piece being fitted into place. The Rebbe returned constantly to the point that nobody is a spectator in a room he is standing in, and chapter thirteen makes that sacrificial law rather than inspiration. The counterweight sits right beside it. The common man who suspected the court was wrong is exempt, because his knowledge is not definitive, while the scholar with the identical suspicion is liable. Knowledge here is not a possession but a debt.

Modern Application

We live almost entirely downstream of rulings. Guidance, policy, an institution saying it is fine, a consensus we have neither the training nor the hours to audit. The Rambam's instinct toward that is remarkably generous. If you were genuinely told, you did not sin as an individual, and the offering belongs to whoever told you. Few systems of responsibility will say that out loud.

Then he spends two chapters on the conditions, and each is a question worth carrying. Was it actually a ruling, or a room thinking out loud that you overheard and treated as permission? Did the people who told you have the standing to tell you? Was anyone objecting, and did they object aloud or swallow it? Was the permission narrow, or the quiet cancellation of a whole principle, which the Rambam calls forgetting rather than ruling? And the sharpest one. Did you actually not know? The man who ate while suspecting, and told himself that deference was itself a virtue, brings his own offering and is not even counted among those who were misled. Your exemption is only as good as your ignorance is real.

The last law of chapter fourteen is for people like us, who have access to every correction and read almost none of them. The ruling was retracted, the retraction was published, and you acted on the old word because you were not paying attention. The Rambam calls that neither innocence nor sin. He calls it doubt, and hands you a provisional guilt offering for the failure of not having continued to ask. The man who had left the region is genuinely exempt. The man who stayed and stopped reading is not.

The Closing

The Sfat Emet often plays on the fact that hora'ah, a ruling, and Torah itself grow from one root, a verb meaning to point or to aim at a mark, and takes from it that Torah is not information but direction, and that direction exists only while somebody is actually pointing. That is why these chapters price a sentence so high. The court did not misstate a fact. It aimed a whole people, and they went where they were aimed. The bulls are not the cost of what was eaten. They are the cost of a direction.

Three chapters on one question, which is who owes the offering when everybody acted in good faith. It belongs to whoever aimed. It stays with them only as long as they can still name what they said. And it moves the moment someone in the room knew better and chose to sit quietly. Speak, and you have changed who pays. Stay silent, and you have finished the ruling for them. And if you are the one being aimed, keep asking. The offering for the man who stopped asking is small, and it is still an offering.