Zeh Nehenneh ... This One is Pleasured

We folk who have made it to the Last Quarter, to play, therein, with a sufficiency of health and wish to pleasure self and others have, perhaps, gone through many -- may I call them -- incarnations. I am not specifically speaking of the typical developmental and maturational growths that go along with early childhood. We learn to re-situate our own bodies when in discomfort and to respond to others. We crawl and then toddle and then run and then walk. We ask for things with single words and suddenly are found speaking -- not in tongues -- but in sentences. We scratch itches, publicly clean our nostrils and eventually learn the secrets of using indoor plumbing in ways that fail to elicit disgust in those who have been placed on this Good Earth to care for our needs. We even begin to have some sense that others have needs and develop the sense that we may disturb others and even feel sadness when that occurs.

So much happens in those early years. And then -- with these skills under our wings -- we take brief flights from the nest and Mama ... and seek out a sequence of our own provisional nests and caretakers. For me, I flew about studying religious texts and then Mathematical ones. I took partial leave from those and tried teaching and running schools for a bit before settling into being a counselor of sorts and health care provider. I was never good at relinquishing the old ... Old interests die hard for me and continue on (epigenetically) informing these future incarnations.

So, the religious readings from my youth remain, even if the balance I learned in toddlerhood has occasionally been compromised ... Hell! I'm not complaining ... I haven't fallen off a bike in 50 years.

So, yesterday, I was pissing and moaning about how things don't always turn out the way one might have hoped for in the beginning and ended by suggesting that I would return to my chief bugbear, today.

To begin ... There was, I think, about 1100 years between the time Jeremiah preached "incoming" and doom to the completed writings of the Babylonian Talmud written when at least part of the Kingdom of Judah was exiled as a result of early skirmishes and wars in the Middle East. When we were kids, we learned about Golden Ages and Crescents ... ah, but what a mess. In any case, during the latter parts of those many centuries, scholars in the towns of Sura and Pump'disa put forth civil and ritual codes of practice. There were lots of details ... indeed, enormous numbers of details but generalities, as well.

Among those general principles that I recall, central are the rules for -- if I may -- the moral endpoints of the toddlers learning that there are his or her own pleasures and then the nuanced responses that they may elicit in others. An example: You're walking outside the fence of an apple orchard, whose owner has gone to Aruba for two weeks of R&R. There's an apple on the ground. You pick it up and eat it. The Masters would ask: Are there damages in this situation, after all (and in their language): Zeh nehenneh v'zeh lo chasser (this one has pleasure and the other one has no loss). They conclude: No, A having pleasure does not define the loss in B. The worms would've eaten the apple and the fruitman had no loss.

The Masters suggested (as my aging memory at least partially recalls) different situations that required a careful approach to determine civil responsibilities in these matters (Tort Laws): here are those that I remember (in volumes Kiddushin and Baba Kama .... interestingly, the first being a tract on marriage) ...

Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Mitztaer .... This one is pleasured and the other suffers.
Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Nehenneh ... This one is pleasured and so is the other one (pleasured).
Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Mischayev ... This one is pleasured and the other incurs a debt.
Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Chasser ... This one is pleasured and this has a loss.
Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Lo Chasser ... This one is pleasured and this one has no loss.

My bugbear is the one that, as far as I can recall, they missed and that yet seems part of the web of possibilities of human relatedness.

Zeh lo Nehenneh v'zeh Yichasser ... This one has no pleasure but carries out whatever act in spite of the expectation that it will cause someone else a loss. I suppose, to carry the earlier analogy ... I'm walking in or near the orchard on picking-day and I reach up and grab the sweetest apple that anyone has seen, throw it on the ground and crush it underfoot. Doing harm to others when there is no gain to oneself ... those same Masters referred to a certain human capacity to cavalierly cause others harm without any gain except the knowledge that the other has lost ... Sin'as Chinam .... gratuitous enmity.

In 40 years of working as a healthcare provider, it remains the hardest personality characteristic for members of Clan Anthropos to overcome ... revenge? In the Fourth Quarter or in earlier ones, we look upon those so much better equipped to Dance in the Vineyards ... when we look upon them with love and gratitude, we hum along and remember when we danced just as vigorously. When we spy the vineyard dancers reveling in their youth with envy, either because we never so-danced or because we no longer can, we generate a disruptive din ... we turn the radio up as high as it can go, rev our unmuffled engines and remain unhappy ourselves.

Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Nehenneh ... to paraphrase Rodney King: Why can't we all get pleasure?