Wow! Yevamot was 3 volumes and 122 pages, I am guessing about 850 total pages. The Daf Yomi cycle is both sides of the Hebrew each day; meaning this mesechet took 121 days to complete. Why they all start with 2, I don’t know.
The entire tractate was devoted to the complexities of yibum: when a woman has to marry her brother-in-law when her husband dies before they have a child. The problem starts because this relationship is otherwise forbidden unless the exact conditions are met. What happens is the son and husband are traveling together and the son dies before the husband? What happens to the co-wives? What is the criteria for establishing the death of the husband (or son)? Who can testify? What can they say that will suffice?
The ability to properly separate a husband and wife is paramount because her second union can be nullified by the husband’s return, rendering her an adulteress and any children from the second union illegitimate and unable to marry into the children of Israel.
This was the the hardest tractate to slog through thus far. It was highly technical and I kept thinking this was a great application for a computer program that asks a series of questions and then tells you if you can marry the other person. Sorry Rabbi’s but even doctors are faced with expert systems replacing them for common ailments.
Another very notable issue brought up in Yevamot: The ability of the Rabbi’s to suspend Torah law for the sake of the community. This so called ‘nuclear option’ appears in chapter 10. From what I can tell this option can be applied to relieve a conflict in stringency or to prevent greater sins from being committed. A common example is the ban on blowing the Shofar on Shabbat for fear someone might mistakenly carry the items into the public domain. A modern example my Rabbi provided (thank you) is the Conservative revocation on the ban prohibiting a Kohen from marrying a divorced woman. FYI, Kohenim have even more stringencies due to additional biblical bans and requirements.
Then, and much more to my liking, Yevamot ends with a discussion on how large a wound a person can sustain before a witness can assume he is dead (leg amputation above the knee), how long a person can be in cold water without being bloated and deformed enough to be no longer recognizable (over 3 days) and how long a wound can be in water before it kills a person (under 3 days).
And my favorite: if a person hears a mystical voice telling him the husband is dead, how do you know it was the person’s ghost, a demon, or sheidim? They have to have 2 proper shadows. A note on 122 states that the ability to discern the details of shadows has been lost. Could this be the Jewish equivalent of the aura?
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