Measuring Mitzvot: Shabbat HaGadol 5776

R. Pinchos Bodner: "Halachos of K'zayis"

We have learned that a k'zayis is equal to half or a third of a k'baytza, an egg. There are two methods given by Chazal for establishing the size of an egg. One method is to measure the amount of water displaced by an average size egg. Using this method a k'zayis based on a third of an egg is 18.3 cubic centimeters (0.62 fl. oz) and a k'zayis based on a half egg is 28.8 cc (0.96 fluid oz). Another method is to calculate the cubic volume of a box whose volume is known to be equal to one and a half eggs. This box measures 2 thumb widths long by 2 thumb widths wide by 2.7 thumb widths high. According to Hagaon Rav Moshe Feinstein z'l a k'zayis based on the thumb width method is 43.5 cubic centimeters (1.47 fl. oz).

Haym Soloveitchik: "Rupture & Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy" Tradition vol 28:4 (1994)

This essay is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred within my lifetime in the community in which I live. The orthodoxy in which I, and other people my age, were raised scarcely exists anymore...

The problem of "minimal requisite quantities" (shiurim) has been known since the mid-eighteenth century, when scholars in both Central and Eastern Europe discovered that the shiurim commonly employed with regard to solid food did not square with the liquid-volume shiurim that we know in other aspects of Jewish law. The ineluctable conclusion was that the standard requisite quantity of solid food consumption should be roughly doubled. Though the men who raised this issue, the GRA and the Noda Beyehuda, were some of the most famous Talmudists of the modern era, whose works are, to this day, staples of rabbinic study, nevertheless, their words fell on deaf ears and were without any impact, even in the most scholarly and religiously meticulous circles. It was perfectly clear to all concerned that Jews had been eating matzot for thousands of years, and that no textual analysis could affect in any way a millennia-old tradition. The problem was theoretically interesting, but practically irrelevant.

And then a dramatic shift occurs. A theoretical position that had been around for close to two centuries suddenly begins in the 1950's to assume practical significance and within a decade becomes authoritative. From then on, traditional conduct, no matter how venerable, how elementary, or how closely remembered, yields to the demands of theoretical knowledge. Established practice can no longer hold its own against the demands of the written word....

Borough Park and Bnei Brak, not to speak of Riverdale and Teaneck, while demographically far larger than any shtetl, are, as we shall see, enclaves rather than cultures. Alternatives now exist, and adherence is voluntary. A traditional society has been transformed into an orthodox one, and religious conduct is less the product of social custom than of conscious, reflective behavior. If the tallit katan is worn not as a matter of course but as a matter of belief, it has then become a ritual object. A ritual can no more be approximated than an incantation can be summarized. Its essence lies in its accuracy. It is that accuracy that religious Jews are now seeking. The flood of works on halakhic prerequisites and correct religious performance accurately reflects the ritualization of what had previously been routine acts and everyday objects. It mirrors the ritualization of what had been once simply components of the given world and parts of the repertoire of daily living. A way of life has become a regula, and behavior, once governed by habit, is now governed by rule...

In 1959, I came to Israel before the High Holidays. Having grown up in Boston and never having had an opportunity to pray in a haredi yeshivah, I spent the entire High Holiday period—from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur—at a famous yeshiva in Bnei Brak. The prayer there was long, intense, and uplifting, certainly far more powerful than anything I had previously experienced. And yet, there was something missing, something that I had experienced before, something, perhaps, I had taken for granted.

Upon reflection, I realized that there was introspection, self-ascent, even moments of self-transcendence, but there was no fear in the thronged student body, most of whom were Israeli born.95 Nor was that experience a solitary one. Over the subsequent thirty-five years, I have passed the High holidays generally in the United States or Israel, and occasionally in England, attending services in haredi and non-haredi communities alike. I have yet to find that fear present, to any significant degree, among the native born in either circle. The ten-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now Holy Days, but they are not Yamim Noraim—Days of Awe or, more accurately Days of Dread –as they have been traditionally called.

I grew up in a Jewishly non-observant community, and prayed in a synagogue where most of the older congregants neither observed the Sabbath nor even ate kosher. They all hailed from Eastern Europe, largely from shtetlach, like Shepetovka and Shnipishok. Most of their religious observance, however, had been washed away in the sea-change, and the little left had further eroded in the "new country." Indeed, the only time the synagogue was ever full was during the High Holidays. Even then the service was hardly edifying. Most didn't know what they were saying, and bored, wandered in and out. Yet, at the closing service of Yom Kippur, the Ne'ilah, the synagogue filled and a hush set in upon the crowd. The tension was palpable and tears were shed.
What had been instilled in these people in their earliest childhood, and which they never quite shook off, was that every person was judged on Yom Kippur, and, as the sun was setting, the final decision was being rendered (in the words of the famous prayer) “who for life, who for death, / who for tranquility, who for unrest.”96 These people did not cry from religiosity but from self- interest, from an instinctive fear for their lives.97 Their tears were courtroom tears, with whatever degree of sincerity such tears have. What was absent among the thronged students in Bnei Brak and in their contemporary services and, lest I be thought to be exempting myself from this assessment, absent in my own religious life too- was that primal fear of Divine judgment, simple and direct.

..., I would go so far as to suggest that individual Divine Providence, though passionately believed as a theological principle—and I do not for a moment question the depth of that conviction—is no longer experienced as a simple reality.103 With the shrinkage of God's palpable hand in human affairs has come a marked loss of His immediate presence, with its primal fear and nurturing comfort. With this distancing, the religious world has been irrevocably separated from the spirituality of its fathers, indeed, from the religious mood of intimate anthropomorphism that had cut across all the religious divides of the Old World.

It is this rupture in the traditional religious sensibilities that underlies much of the transformation of contemporary Orthodoxy. Zealous to continue traditional Judaism unimpaired, religious Jews seek to ground their new emerging spirituality less on a now unattainable intimacy with Him, than on an intimacy with His Will, avidly eliciting Its intricate demands and saturating their daily lives with Its exactions. Having lost the touch of His presence, they seek now solace in the pressure of His yoke.

Rav Mordechai Friedman: Editorial Note to "The Mitzva to Eat Matza and the Measurement of a Kezayit" By Rav Yossi Tzvi Rimon available at the "Virtual Beit Midrash"

Here is a fascinating solution to the 600 year old riddle of 2x2x2.7 etzba vs. 1.5 beitza: If you place your thumb on a ruler, it will indeed measure 2.3~2.5cm in width. Which corresponds with the measurement Tashbetz, and all those achronim (Noda B'Yehuda, Chatam Sofer and Chazon Ish to name a few) who doubled the shiur of an egg on this basis - a revi'it thus being v.150cc.

However, it was once pointed out to me that artisans of old, when wishing to measure quickly, and without a ruler, would use their thumbs, by placing one next to another and then alternatively lifting the far thumb and place it next to the near one. Thus "inching" their thumbs along the surface while counting (much like is still done with feet when lacking a tape measure).

Try this at home along a centimeter ruler and you will find that because of the flexibility of the fleshy sides of your thumbs, they become compressed slightly and thus 10 thumbs = 20cm or 1 thumb = 2.0cm. 4x4 x 5.4 = 86.4cc or Rav Chaim Na'eh and the Rambam's calculation based on 1.5 modern eggs!