The Damage of Being Seen

About This Talk

Hilchot Shcheinim opens on jointly held property and the conditions under which a partner can force it apart: division is compelled only where the smallest resulting share can still be called by the name of the whole, which fixes a courtyard at four cubits by four for each partner, a field at nine kabbim sown, a garden at half a kav, an orchard at three kabbim, and in Babylonia converts the measure into labor, a day of plowing or thirty-six trees, which is one man's day of tending. Where a thing cannot be divided, either partner may name a price and compel the other to buy at it or sell at it, though a partner who will not or cannot buy is never forced to; nobody can be made to accept the larger portion as a favor, since he may answer that he does not want to receive a gift; and an indivisible place is rented with the rent split, or occupied a year at a time, never in thirty-day turns. Chapter two allots four cubits of courtyard to every entrance, for the sole purpose of letting a man unload his burden, which is why a hall enterable with the load, a chicken coop, a half-roofed house and any house under four cubits by four are granted none; it treats hezek re'iyah, the damage of being seen, as actionable damage, so either partner may compel a shared partition wall and no number of open years establishes a chazakah against it; it sets the wall at four cubits, a garden divider at ten handbreadths, the land each partner contributes at three handbreadths for unhewn stone down to a handbreadth and a half for brick, and requires a cubit of mortar on the outer face where a man builds inside his own land; and it holds that parties who took their land from one hand keep no window, ladder, passage or channel over each other, while two who bought from two sellers may change nothing the sellers established. Chapter three divides the cost: a fallen partition is rebuilt jointly to four cubits and no higher, and extra height is charged only against a neighbor who reveals he wanted it by building opposite or seating a beam in it; the compulsory portion is defended by a sh'vuat hesset while the extra height is not, so the claimant swears holding a sacred article and collects; an enclosed ruin costs its owner nothing for three sides and half of all four once the fourth closes it, subject to whose land the wall stands on; roofs that are lived on need guard rails past the midpoint while roof to roof needs only ten handbreadths as a marker of trespass; shared drain and spring repairs run downhill, each sharing in the stretch below him; and the treatise closes on a river where whoever overcomes the other prevails, and a cistern beside the ditch that is filled first for the ways of peace.