The Debt No Court Collects

About This Talk

Chovel u'Mazik opens the law of bodily injury, and where Gezeilah va'Avedah was built on return, nothing here can be returned. Chapter one establishes five separate assessments for one wound, depreciation, pain, medical treatment, lost work and shame, all collected from the injurer's choicest property, and proves verse by verse that "an eye for an eye" always meant money, since the same verse continues "a blow for a blow," for which the Torah states outright that he pays idleness and medicine; "do not have compassion" is read as an instruction to the assessors not to shave the sum down for a poor or unintending defendant. A man is mu'ad at all times, asleep, intoxicated or careless, except that where one man was already asleep and the other lay down beside him afterward, only the latecomer is mu'ad; shame alone requires intent, so a wood chopper, or a customer struck in the face by a block in a carpenter's shop with permission or without it, owes four payments and not shame; a trespasser may be removed but not injured, and metal is never evaluated for its capacity to wound. Chapter two scales the five and then calibrates them to the person: a tooth, hair burned away permanently, even a barleycorn of flesh carries all five, because gums need treatment and a man fit to dance with his locks has lost that trade; pain is worth what this particular sufferer would pay, measured for a lost limb by what he would give to lose it to a drug rather than a sword; lost work is reckoned as a squash patch watchman, a doorkeeper or a mill worker once damages have paid for the limb; deafening costs his entire worth; frightening a man into illness or shouting him deaf without contact carries no earthly liability but a moral and spiritual obligation; and the medical money has mechanics of its own, since the lump sum enactment exists for the injurer and may be declined, the victim may not take cash and treat himself, and no physician who works for free will satisfy the obligation. Chapter three reaches shame, where the assessment depends on the character of both parties and the shame caused by an ignoble person is greater, where only a shame actually felt is payable, and where words carry no financial penalty at all except against a Torah scholar, who collects a fixed thirty five gold dinarim, alongside the Sages' per blow tariff running from five sela'im for a kick to one hundred for a backhand slap, a tariff that bends down for a man who does not mind. The treatise's own admission sits underneath all of it: the man who shames another with words owes nothing, and has no share in the world to come.