Daily Talk
Three men die in a town of five hundred over three consecutive days and the court proclaims a fast and sounds the trumpets. The same three men die on a single afternoon and there is no fast at all. The number is identical and the grief is identical, so the Rambam is plainly not counting deaths. What is he counting?
When the Trouble Is Addressed to You
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About This Talk
Chapter 2 lists the ten communal distresses that call for a public fast and the sounding of the trumpets, from enemies and armed columns passing through to plague, rampaging animals, locusts, blight, collapsing buildings, epidemic, the failure of the town's livelihood and rain, and then spends the rest of its length narrowing each heading until it is difficult to satisfy. A plague requires three deaths on three consecutive days measured against a census that excludes women, children and men too old to work, and the same three deaths on one day or across four days is no plague at all; a beast counts only if it exceeded its own hunger, and houses built out in the wilderness are held to a stricter measure still, since the fault lies with those who settled where wild animals live. The chapter closes on commerce and weather, defining the collapse of livelihood as goods that cannot be sold above sixty percent of their worth, permitting the community to cry out over it even on the Sabbath while withholding the trumpets, and ruling that abundant rain is no distress at all in a mountainous land of stone houses, since one does not fast in order to make a benefit pass.