Bava Kamma 50 ~ Ten Tefachim to Death

משנה, בבא קמא נ, ב

החופר בור ברה"ר ונפל לתוכו שור או חמור חייב אחד החופר בור שיח ומערה חריצין ונעיצין חייב א"כ למה נאמר בור מה בור שיש בו כדי להמית עשרה טפחים אף כל שיש בו כדי להמית עשרה טפחים היו פחותין מעשרה טפחים ונפל לתוכו שור או חמור ומת פטור ואם הוזק בו חייב

If a man digs a pit on public ground and a bull or a donkey falls into it, he is liable for damages. Whether he dug a pit, or a ditch, or a cave, trenches, or wedge-like ditches, he is liable for damages that his digging caused. If so why is pit mentioned in the Torah? It is to teach the following: just as a standard pit can cause death because it is ten tefachim [handbreadths] deep, so too for any other excavation to have sufficient depth to cause death, it must be ten tefachim deep. Where, however, they were less than ten tefachim deep, and a bull or a donkey fell into them and died, the digger would be exempt.  But if then animal was only injured by falling into them, the digger would be liable. (Mishnah, Bava Kamma 50b.)

The Highest Fall Survived (without a parachute)

According to The Guinness Book of Records, Vesna Vulovic  holds the world record for the highest fall survived without parachute. And how high was that? Really, really high:

Vesna Vulovic (Yugoslavia) was 23 working as a Jugoslavenski Aerotransport hostess when she survived a fall from 10,160 m (33,333 ft) over Srbsk, Kamenice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), on 26 January 1972 after the DC-9 she was working aboard, blew up. She fell inside a section of tail unit. She was in hospital for 16 months after emerging from a 27 day coma and having many bones broken...She never suffered any psychological trauma as a result of the incident, and never experienced any fear of flying. She is still alive today, and flies with some regularity. However, Vulovic does not consider herself lucky. Thirty years after the crash, in an interview she said:  ''I'm not lucky. Everybody thinks I am lucky, but they are mistaken. If I were lucky I would never have had this accident and my mother and father would be alive. The accident ruined their lives too."

In my years as an emergency physician I saw countless patients with injuries from falls. Most injuries were relatively minor, but several of my patients died. Is there a minimum height below which a fall would result in a trivial, or at least a non-fatal injury? Based on my experience, the answer is an unequivocal no.  A fall from any height, however low, can result in a serious or fatal injury, and that includes a fall from standing. But that's just my experience. What does the medical literature say? Does it agree with the assertion of the Mishnah that a fall below 10 tefachim (about 76 cm or 30 inches) cannot result in a fatal injury? Let's take a look...

“At autopsy, classic findings in falls from height include aortic lacerations and vertebral compression fractures, as well as ring fractures of the skull base...Severe head injuries most frequently occurred in falls from heights below 10m and above 25m, whereas in the group that fell from 10 to 25m, few head injuries were seen and they rarely were the cause of death. ”

— Turk, EM. Tsokos, M. American Journal of Forensic Medical Pathology 2004;25: 194–199

The Epidemiology of Falls

Falls are very common. In the US they make up about a third of the injuries that lead to an ED visit in the each year - that's close to eight million visits.  In keeping with my experience, national data shows that only about 1% of all fall injuries that come to the ED are profound.  And here's another interesting finding that is in keeping with my own clinical experience: it's close to impossible to predict what kind of injury a person will have based on the height of the from which the victim falls. In a paper that examined over six-hundred fatal falls that occurred in Singapore, the authors noted that  

...there was much variability in the injury severity scores, in relation to the height of fall... Thus, a subject who had fallen through a height of 10 m, with primary feet impact, could have sustained complete traumatic transection of the thoracic aorta, with haemorrhage into the pleural cavities but little else by way of serious injury; while another, similar, subject could have fallen through 20 m and had sustained multiple head, thoracic and abdominal injuries...

In fact theses authors had a very hard time coming up with a model that describes the height of fall and indicators of injury severity other than to give this rather useless nugget: "Our findings suggested that the height of fall was significantly associated with ... the extent of injury." Well thanks. But it's one thing to fall 10m or more (that's over 30 feet for those if you not on the metric system). What about falls from less lofty heights?

Falls Down the Stairs, and Falls from Standing

Let's start with falls down the stairs. German forensic pathologists published a paper in Forensic Science International that addressed this aspect of falls in 116 fatal cases.  The most frequent victim was a man between 50 and 60 years old, and brain and skull injuries were the most common cause of death. About 8% broke their spines as they fell and (shocker) many were intoxicated. So stairs can kill.  

What about falls from standing? Well back to the German forensic pathologists, who this time published a retrospective analysis of 291 fatal falls. Of these, 122 -that's 42% - were falls from standing. About 80% of these ground-level falls were not immediately fatal, and the victim survived anywhere from three hours to almost a year post injury. Almost 60% of the men and 11% of the women who sustained a fatal ground-level fall were (shocker again) intoxicated.  So there we have it. The medical literature demonstrates that falls from standing can certainly be lethal.  Especially after kiddush.

From Thierauf A. et al. Retrospective analysis of fatal falls. Forensic Science International 2010. 198. 92–96. Forgive the English. It wasn't their first language.

The US federal government has also weighed in on the matter. OSHA, the Occupational, Safety and Health Administration has a ruled that a duty to erect fall barriers to protect employees only applies when the fall will be more than 6 feet (1.8m).  

“Each employee who is constructing a leading edge 6 feet (1.8 m) or more above lower levels shall be protected from falling by guardrail systems, safety net systems, or personal fall arrest systems. ”

— 29 CFR 1926.501

Back to the Mishnah

The Mishnah rules that only a pit more than 30 inches (ten tefachim) deep is lethal should someone  - or some animal - fall in. We have seen that this has no medical validity. But that doesn't really matter for a legal system.

Consider the legal limit for alcohol allowed when driving. In my home state of Maryland, it is 0.08%, (though of course your ability to drive safely is impaired at levels considerably lower). So what happens if a driver is stopped and his blood alcohol content is 0.07%? Well, it's simple: he is not legally impaired and so may continue to drive.  Is this an indictment of the Maryland drunk driving laws? Not really. Maryland, like all other states, sets its blood alcohol limit; if a driver is close, but below the limit, no penalty follows.

Jewish law too, has to set limits and measures, below which legal penalties do not apply.  The Mishnah's ruling that a pit is only fatal if it is more than 30 inches deep is a legal one - not a medial one.  It works to set limits and insure public safety. A person who digs a pit only 9.5 tefachim deep is not legally liable, and a pit that is a full 10 tefachim deep is certainly rarely lethal if a person accidentally falls in.  But for the sake of public safety a ruling  - arbitrary though it is - had to be made.  So be careful when you dig your pit in a public thoroughfare.

Talmudology on the Parsha, Vayigash: Confessions and False Confessions

44:18-20 בראשית

וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ אֵלָ֜יו יְהוּדָ֗ה וַיֹּ֘אמֶר֮ בִּ֣י אֲדֹנִי֒ יְדַבֶּר־נָ֨א עַבְדְּךָ֤ דָבָר֙ בְּאזְנֵ֣י אֲדֹנִ֔י וְאַל־יִ֥חַר אַפְּךָ֖ בְּעַבְדֶּ֑ךָ כִּ֥י כָמ֖וֹךָ כְּפַרְעֹֽה׃

אֲדֹנִ֣י שָׁאַ֔ל אֶת־עֲבָדָ֖יו לֵאמֹ֑ר הֲיֵשׁ־לָכֶ֥ם אָ֖ב אוֹ־אָֽח׃

וַנֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֶל־אֲדֹנִ֔י יֶשׁ־לָ֙נוּ֙ אָ֣ב זָקֵ֔ן וְיֶ֥לֶד זְקֻנִ֖ים קָטָ֑ן וְאָחִ֣יו מֵ֔ת וַיִּוָּתֵ֨ר ה֧וּא לְבַדּ֛וֹ לְאִמּ֖וֹ וְאָבִ֥יו אֲהֵבֽוֹ׃

Then Yehuda came near to him, and said, Oh my lord, let thy servant, I pray thee, speak a word in my lord’s ears, and let not thy anger burn against thy servant: for thou art even as Pharoh. My lord asked his servants, saying, Have you a father, or a brother? And we said to my lord, We have a father, an old man, and a child of his old age, a little one; and his brother is dead, and he alone is left of his mother, and his father loves him.

As Yehudah pleads with Joseph (who still appears to be an Egyptian) to spare the life of Benjamin, he confesses that one of his brothers had died. This was not true. It was a false confession, as Rashi notes:

ואחיו מת. מִפְּנֵי הַיִּרְאָה הָיָה מוֹצִיא דְּבַר שֶׁקֶר מִפִּיו, אָמַר אִם אוֹמַר לוֹ שֶׁהוּא קַיָּם, יֹאמַר הֲבִיאוּהוּ אֶצְלִי

AND HIS BROTHER IS DEAD — He uttered this untruth out of fear. He thought: if I tell him that he is alive he may say “Bring him to me”.

When faced with alternatives that are not palatable, people will confess to things that are not true, and often, as Rashi notes, they do so “out of fear.”

Forced Confessions in the Talmud

Abaye and Rava

While Joseph did not physically coerce Yehuda’s false testimony, he certainly played a clever psychological trick on his older brother. In the Talmud, there are several incidents in which torture (or according to some, the threat of torture) was used to obtain a confession of a crime. In two (בבא בתרא קסז, א, Abaye suspected that bills of sale had been forged. "כפתיה ואודי" - Abaye  bound the suspects to a post, and faced with the threat of physical torture, they confessed. In the third case it was Rava who suspected that his own signature and that of the elderly Rav Acha bar Adda had been forged. Rava too, bound the suspect to a post, after which not only did the suspect confess to forging both signatures, but he went on to explain how he had forged that of the elderly Rav Acha, whose hands had a tremor. 

 אנחי ידאי אמצרא ואמרי לה קם אזרנוקא וכתב

I placed my hands on the rope of a bridge while signing. Others say he stood on a skin bottle and signed.

Mar Zutra “The Pious”

In Bava Metzia Mar Zutra The Pious had coerced a student to confess to his crime.

בבא מציעא כד, א

מר זוטרא חסידא אגניב ליה כסא דכספא מאושפיזא חזיא לההוא בר בי רב דמשי ידיה ונגיב בגלימא דחבריה אמר היינו האי דלא איכפת ליה אממונא דחבריה כפתיה ואודי

Mar Zutra the Pious was involved in an incident in which a silver cup was stolen from his host. Later, Mar Zutra saw a certain student wash his hands and dry them on his friend's garment. Mar Zutra said: "this is the one who stole the cup, for he has no consideration for his friend's property. Mar Zutra bound the student to a post and coerced him, and he confessed to the crime (Bava Metzia 24a).

…And One More

For completeness, we should note that there is a fourth passage in the Talmud (Niddah 25b) that also uses the language of כפתיה ואודי.  In that passage, a man was accused on having intercourse with his wife when she was ritually impure. He too was bound and confessed, though it is not clear who was ordering the binding.

He was bound and he confessed

Courtesy of Wikimedia.

The phrase that is used in all four cases is כפתיה ואודי "they bound him and he confessed." The root of the word to bind is כפת, which is used in rabbinic literature to mean to tie or to bind. Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel (Germany ~1250-1327), known as the Rosh, is certain that the suspect was tortured. In his commentary on the passage in Bava Metzia, he wrote וכפתיה בשוטי עד דאודי "he flogged him with rods until he confessed." (As in חושך שבטו שונא בנו ואהבו שחרו מוסר "spare the rod and spoil the child," from Proverbs 13:24.) Rabbi Betzalel ben Avraham Ashkenazi (Israel ~1520-1594) in his commentary to Bava Metzia called Shitah Mekubetzet agrees that coercion was used, although he is unsure if it was physical or psychological:

כפתוהו ואודי. יש מפרשים כפתוהו על העמוד והלקוהו בשוטים. ויש מפרשים כפתיה בדברים שנדוהו אם לא יודה האמת

Some explain that he was tied to post and flogged. Others explain that he was verbally coerced (and threatened with excommunication) until he confessed.

False Confessions

In a 2010 paper published in the Stanford Law Review, Brandon Garett notes that DNA testing has now exonerated over forty people who falsely confessed to rapes and murders. He wonders how an innocent person could convincingly confess to a crime he never committed. For example, in 1990  Jeffrey Deskovic a seventeen-year-old, was convicted of rape and murder. Deskovic was a classmate of the fifteen-year-old victim, had attended her wake, and was eager to help solve the crime. During one of several police interrogations he “supposedly drew an accurate diagram,” which depicted details concerning “three discrete crime scenes” which were not ever made public. "In his last statement, which ended with him in a fetal position and crying uncontrollably," wrote Garrett, "he reportedly told police that he had “hit her in the back of the head with a Gatoraid [sic] bottle that was lying on the path.” Police testified that, after hearing this, the next day they conducted a careful search and found a Gatorade bottle cap at the crime scene."

“Scholars increasingly study the psychological techniques that can cause people to falsely confess and have documented how such techniques were used in instances of known false confessions.”

— Garrett, B.L. The Substance of False Confessions. Stanford Law Review 2010. 62 (4): 1051-1119.

Deskovic was convicted of rape and murder and served more than fifteen years of a sentence of fifteen years to life. Then in 2006, new DNA testing not only excluded him, but also matched the profile of a murder convict who subsequently confessed and pleaded guilty. So how did Deskovic know all the details of the crime to which he confessed? Here is what the District Attorney noted in the post-exoneration inquiry:

...Given Deskovic’s innocence, two scenarios are possible: either the police (deliberately or inadvertently) communicated this information directly to Deskovic or their questioning at the high school and elsewhere caused this supposedly secret information to be widely known throughout the community.

Another paper, this time in the North Carolina Law Review, analyzed 125 cases of "proved interrogation-induced false confessions, which, the authors note with some pride, is "the largest cohort of interrogation-induces false confession cases ever identified and studied in the literature." It makes terrifying reading.  

It is of course really hard to study in the laboratory the psychological effects of torture and coercion and how they produce false confessions.  But scientists try anyway. For example, a very recent paper from a team from the New School for Sociological Research in New York and the University of California studied the effect of sleep deprivation on false confessions.  When compared to those who had rested, participants were over four times more likely to sign a false statement if they were deprived of one night's sleep.  In another recent peer-reviewed paper, (Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime) psychologists used suggestive retrieval techniques on some rather nice Canadian undergraduates. They found that up to 70% of those interviewed 

were classified as having false memories of committing a crime (theft, assault, or assault with a weapon) that led to police contact in early adolescence and volunteered a detailed false account. These reported false memories of crime were similar to false memories of noncriminal events and to true memory accounts, having the same kinds of complex descriptive and multisensory components.

They continue: 

Our finding that young adults generated rich false memories of committing criminal acts during adolescence supports the notion that false confessions and gross confabulations can take place within interview settings. The Innocence Project has shown that about 25% of false convictions are attributable to faulty confession evidence...The kind of research presented here is essential in the quest to help prevent memory-related miscarriages of justice.

False Memories Become Real

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv reported on the remarkable story of how DNA evidence exonerated six convicted killers. Despite this, two of them had detailed memories of the killing that they didn't commit. One was a woman named Ada Taylor who confessed to a woman’s murder in 1989 and for two decades believed that she was guilty.

She served more than nineteen years for the crime before she was pardoned. She was one of six people accused of the murder, five of whom took pleas; two had internalized their guilt so deeply that, even after being freed, they still had vivid memories of committing the crime. In no other case in the United States have false memories of guilt endured so long. The situation is a study in the malleability of memory: an implausible notion, doubted at first, grows into a firmly held belief that reshapes one’s autobiography and sense of identity.

Of course murder is not the same as forging a document, but the lesson for those in criminal justice is the same. People confess to all sorts of things - especially when they are coerced or tortured- and can even forge false memories of the crimes of which they were accused.  

Permitted Coercion in Jewish Law

In the Code of Jewish Law, the שולחן ערוך, the passage in Bava Basra is the basis for the legal right to extract a confession from a person suspected of forging business documents.

שולחן ערוך חושן משפט מב, ג

ואם צריך לכוף בעל השטר ולהכותו כדי שיודה יעשה כדי שיוציא הדין לאמיתו

If it is necessary, the owner of the document (who is suspected of forgery) may be beaten in order for him to confess and the truth to come out...

This certainly made me feel uncomfortable, but let's put this into some context. Torture has been a part of many judicial systems, and was a feature of  Roman law.  Perhaps most notoriously it was used by the Inquisition, after Pope Innocent IV issued a papal bill Ad extirpanda in 1252 which authorized its use by the Church.  Closer to home, the US has recently grappled with, and condemned cases in which the Central Intelligence Agency tortured prisoners, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (partially) revealed in 2014. But among the thousands of legal decisions in the Babylonian Talmud, there are only four rabbis who are named as having tortured or coerced a suspect to confess. And that low number, though it is not zero, should provide us with some solace.

As for Yehudah’s lie - well, it seems to have been a gamble that paid off. Joseph could not continue to hide his true identity, and he revealed himself to his brothers. There never had been a brother who had died. Just one who had been estranged for a very long time.

Bava Kamma Bonus ~ What Is An Ox, and Why You Should Not Daven Close To One

As the Talmud addresses the responsibility for the injuries of one cow caused by another, today we will look at the dangers of praying too close to these usually gentle animals. Back in Masechet Berachot, there is a discussion of the circumstances under which a person may interrupt her prayers because of a threatened physical danger. Getting too close to snakes is not a good idea, but cows are a problem too.

ברכות לג, א

אָמַר רַבִּי יִצְחָק: רָאָה שְׁווֹרִים — פּוֹסֵק. דְּתָנֵי רַב הוֹשַׁעְיָה: מַרְחִיקִין מִשּׁוֹר תָּם — חֲמִשִּׁים אַמָּה, וּמִשּׁוֹר מוּעָד — כִּמְלוֹא עֵינָיו 

Rabbi Yitzchak said: One who saw oxen coming toward him, he interrupts his prayer, as Rav Hoshaya taught: One distances himself fifty cubits from an innocuous ox [shor tam], an ox with no history of causing damage with the intent to injure, and from a forewarned ox [shor muad], an ox whose owner was forewarned because his ox has gored three times already, one distances himself until it is beyond eyeshot.

So today we will discuss injuries from oxen and cows. But first, just what is an ox?

Just what is an ox?

The Hebrew word used in the Talmud is shor - (שור, rhymes with shore). Consider the following verse from Leviticus 22:27:

שור או כשב או עז כי יולד והיה שבעת ימים תחת אמו 

Here are some of the ways it is translated into English:

• When a bull or a goat is born, it shall be seven days under its mother... (Robert Alter. The Five Books of Moses. [Alter seems to have forgotten to translate the word כשב]).

• When an ox or a sheep or a goat is born, it shall be seven days under its mother...(S.R. Hirsch. The Pentateuch, translated into English by Isaac Levy.)

• When any of the herd, or a sheep, or a goat is brought forth, then it shall be seven days under its dam..(The Pentateuch, translated into English by M. Rosenbaum and A.M. Silberman.)

• When an ox or a sheep or a goat is born, it shall stay seven days with its mother...(The JPS Torah Commentary, ed. N. Sarna.)

• When a bullock or a sheep or a goat is brought forth, then it shall be seven days under its dam...(Koren Jerusalem Bible.)

• When a calf, a lamb or a goat is born, it is to remain with its mother for seven days...(New International Version.)

• When a bullock, or a sheep, or a goat, is brought forth, then it shall be seven days under the dam...(King James Bible)

There are more, but you get the point. The word shor (שור) has been translated as a bull, an ox, a calf, a bullock and as a collective, any of the herd.  The Koren Talmud and the Soncino Talmud translate it as ox.  The ArtScroll Schottenstein Talmud as a bull. Confused? Me too.

Here are some of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary definitions of an ox:

1. The domestic bovine quadruped (sexually dist. as bull and cow); in common use, applied to the male castrated and used for draught purposes, or reared to serve as food.

2. Zool. Any beast of the bovine family of ruminants, including the domestic European species, the 'wild oxen' preserved in certain parks in Britain, the buffalo, bison, gaur, yak, musk-ox, etc.

In his late nineteenth century translation of the Jerusalem Talmud into French, Moise Schwab translated the word shor as "le bouef" (rather than "le teureau"). De Sola's English translation of the Mishnah, published in 1843, uses the word ox. So does the 1878 compendium by Joseph Barclay, and the first complete English translation of the Talmud, by Michael Rodkinson, published between 1896 and 1903.  The translation of shor as ox is goes back to these early translations, but the suggestion that the meaning of the word is a 'castrated male bovine quadraped' is certainly wrong. Jews are forbidden to castrate their animals, and a castrated bull would have been ineligible to use as a sacrifice. And so we must conclude that the best translation of the word shor (שור) is a bull (well done, ArtScroll!).  

The delightfully named lecturer Dr. Goodfriend from California State University recently published a lengthy paper (in this book) on the various terms for cattle in the Bible, and the question of whether a castrated bull (a gelding) could have been offered as a sacrifice in the Temple.  The good professor Goodfriend concludes that indeed the prohibition against the castration of animals "would have placed the Israelite farmer at a disadvantage as fewer suitable animals would have been available for his use." One possible way to overcome come this (other than to use cows for ploughing) would have been to import castrated bulls from those who lived outside of Israel.  

And having sorted that out, let’s turn to the fun topic of the day. Injuries from cows.

“Cow-related trauma is a common among farming communities and is a potentially serious mechanism of injury that appears to be under-reported in a hospital context. Bovine-related head-butt and trampling injuries should be considered akin to high-velocity trauma.”

— Murphy, CG. McGuire, CM. O’Malley, N. Harrington P. Cow-related trauma: A 10-year review of injuries admitted to a single institution. Injury 2010. 41: 548–550.

Injuries from Domestic bulls (and Cows too)

Mechanisms of injury from cows. From Murphy, CG. McGuire, CM. O’Malley, N. Harrington P. Cow-related trauma: A 10-year review of injuries admitted to a single institution. Injury 2010. 41: 548–550.

Much of the fourth chapter of the Talmud in Bava Kamma addresses injuries from domestic bulls and cows. In Masechet Berachot Rabbi Yitzchak reminded the devout not to get too lost in their prayers if there are cows (or bull or oxen) in the vicinity. It turns out that they cause all kinds of injuries even today. In 2009, orthopedists from Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Ireland published a fascinating paper entitled Cow-related trauma: A 10-year review of injuries admitted to a single institution. Over a decade, the hospital admitted 47 people with cow related trauma, most of whom sustained their injuries from kicking (unlike matadors, who suffer from horn related injuries). And next time you feel like walking across a field containing some gentle-looking cows, remember this: one of the patients was admitted with a head injury, a hip fracture and hypothermia after being trampled on by his herd of cattle in a field and found a number of hours later. (There are no details as to whether the injury occurred during shacharit or mincha).

“If a bull be a goring bull and it is shown that he is a gorer, and he does not bind his horns, or fasten the bull, and the bull gores a free-born man and kills him, the owner shall pay one-half a mina in money. If he kills a man’s slave, he shall pay one-third of a mina.””

— Code of Hammurabi, Articles 251–252.

In another paper - Blunt Bovine and Equine Trauma - from La Crosse Lutheran Hospital in Wisconsin, researchers provided this illustrative case:

A 57-year-old male was pinned to the ground by a 2,000 pound dairy bull and repeatedly knocked to the ground forcefully at least seven times before he was able to crawl from the pen…Examination revealed the following injuries: bilateral flail chest, 13 rib fractures, bilateral hemopneumothoraces, renal contusion, two forearm fractures, left shoulder dislocation, bilateral scapula fractures, and dental alveolar fractures. The patient was treated by...mechanical ventilation for 15 days…His hospital course was complicated by Klebsiella pneumonia and at 16-month followup he remained severely dyspneic, unable to perform his usual farm work.

Finally, we should note a report published a few months ago in The Times (of London) about Scottish farmer Derek Roan, who was killed by one of his cows. Roan, whose family had farmed in the area for some 125 years, born on the farm had also appeared in a BBC documentary series This Farming Life.

Sheriff Joanna McDonald, who conducted a fatal accident inquiry, wrote that Mr Roan had died

… from extensive thoracic injuries as a result of an accident involving a cow whilst working on the farm. His death is certified in the post-mortem report as having been primarily the result of severe chest trauma.

Mr Roan intended to move a cow and its calf to join the main herd. The cow, a black Galloway beef cow weighing around 550kg, along with her calf, had been separated from the main herd a few days earlier due to suckling issues with the calf, who was approximately a week old at the time of the accident.

The farm vet, Dr Graham Bell, stated that it was good husbandry to deal with this issue in the way that Mr Roan had, to ensure that the calf was managing. The cow, who was aged around ten to 12 years, had never shown any signs of aggression before.

Cattle look gentle, and for the most part, they are.  But they are large beasts with incredible strength. Hikers, (and farmers) beware. Please pray safely.

Talmudology on the Parsha, Miketz: Why Do We Dream?

בראשית 41:1

וַיְהִ֕י מִקֵּ֖ץ שְׁנָתַ֣יִם יָמִ֑ים וּפַרְעֹ֣ה חֹלֵ֔ם וְהִנֵּ֖ה עֹמֵ֥ד עַל־הַיְאֹֽר׃

And it came to pass at the end of two years, that Pharoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the River.

Dreams feature a great deal in the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph shares his dreams with his brothers, which was not a good idea. As a result, he ends up in a prison in Egypt, where he accurately interprets two sets of dreams, Consequently is brought to Pharoh he ends up interpreting Pharoh’s famous seven-fat-cow-seven-ears-of-corn dreams. That’s three sets of dreams all in a few chapters. But why, exactly, do we dream? Let’s start with the the Talmud,

Dreams in the Talmud

גיטין נב, א

אמר, דברי חלומות לא מעלין ולא מורידין

Rabbi Meir used to say: The content of dreams is inconsequential (Gittin 52a)

The Talmud contains many theories about the content of dreams.  In Berachot (10b) Rabbi Hanan taught that even if a dream appears to predict one's imminent death, the one who dreamed should pray for mercy. R. Hanan believed that dreams may contain a glimpse of the future, but that prayer is powerful enough to changes one's fate. Later in Berachot (55b), R. Yohanan suggested a different response to a distressing dream: let the dreamer find three people who will suggest that in fact the dream was a good one (a suggestion that is codified in שולחן ערוך יורה דעה 220:1).

He should say to them "I saw a good dream" and they should say to him "it is good and let it be good, and may God make it good. May heaven decree on you seven times that it will be good, and it will be good.

Shmuel, the Babylonian physician who died around 250 CE, had a unique approach to addressing the content of his own dreams. "When he had a bad dream, he would cite the verse 'And dreams speak falsely' [Zech. 10:2]. When he had a good dream he would say "are dreams false? Isn't it stated in the Torah [Numbers 12:6] 'I speak with him in a dream'?" (Berachot 55b).  In contrast, Rabbi Yonatan suggests that dreams do not predict the future: rather they reflect the subconscious (Freud would have been proud). "R. Yonatan said: a person is only shown in his dreams what he is thinking about in his heart..." (Berachot 55b).  And from today's page of Talmud, we learn that Rabbi Meir believed dreams were of no consequence whatsoever.  

“It is of interest that two millennia separated the first detailed description of the major peripheral characteristics of dreaming from the first contemporary experimental results of brain research in this field, while only about 60 years were necessary to establish relatively solid knowledge of the basic and higher integrated neurobiological processes underlying REM sleep.”

— Gottesmann, C. The development of the science of dreaming. International Review of Neurobiology 2010. 92: 16

What does Science have to Say?

Dreaming takes place during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep, when there is brain activation similar to that found in waking, but muscle tone is inhibited and the eyes move rapidly. This type of sleep was only discovered in the 1950s, and since then it has been demonstrated in mammals and birds (but not yet in robots). Most adults have four or five periods of REM sleep per night, which mostly occur in 90 minute cycles. Individual REM periods may last from a few minutes to over an hour, with REM periods becoming longer the later it is in the night. 

Here are some theories about why we dream, all taken from this paper. (The author, J. Allan Hobson, directed the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center from 1968 to 2003. He also published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and 10 books on sleep and dreaming. So he knows something about the physiology of sleep.) 

1. Sleep and dreaming are needed to regulate energy

Deprive a lab rat of all sleep and it will die. Deprive a lab rat of REM sleep so that it does not dream, and it too will die.  These sleep-and-dream deprived rats lost weight and showed heat seeking behavior. This suggests for animals which regulate their body temperature, sleep is needed to control both body temperature and weight. Importantly, only mammals and birds are homeothermic, and they are also the only animals which are known to have REM sleep.

2. Sleep deprivation and psychological equilibrium

Based on a number of experiments in healthy human volunteers, it has been shown that sleep and dreaming are essential to mental health. "The fact that sleep deprivation invariably causes psychological dysfunction" wrote Prof. Hobson in his review,  "supports the functional theory that the integrity of waking consciousness depends on the integrity of dream consciousness and that of the brain mechanisms of REM sleep." (When we studied Nedarim 15 we noted however, that eleven days of sleep deprivation seemed to have no ill effects in one man.) The relationship between dreaming and psychological health is rather more complicated though: monamine-oxidase inhibitors completely repress REM sleep, and yet are an effective class of anti-depressants.  There appears to be a relationship between dreaming and psychological well being, but its parameters require much more study.   

3. Sleep, Dreams and Learning

In 1966, it was first suggested that REM sleep is related to the brain organizing itself.  This suggestion was later supported by studies which showed that the ability of an animal to learn a new task is diminished their REM sleep is interrupted.  Other studies show that REM sleep in humans is increased following an intensive learning period. 

“...dreaming could represent a set of foreordained scripts or scenarios for the organization of our waking experience. According to this hypothesis, our brains are as much creative artists as they are copy editors.”

— Hobson, JA. REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness. Nature Reviews 2009.807.

Nightmares and Fasting

We've all had dreams that frighten or upset us. The major code of Jewish law take bad dreams seriously. While fasting is absolutely forbidden on Shabbat, it is permitted in two instances: when Yom Kippur falls on Shabbat and when you've had a bad dream and need to undertake a fast "to tear up the heavenly decree." Here is the ruling:

שולחן ערוך אורח חיים הלכות שבת סימן רפח 

סעיף ד
 מותר להתענות בו תענית חלום כדי שיקרע גזר דינו. וצריך להתענות ביום ראשון, כדי שיתכפר לו מה שביטל עונג שבת 

It is permitted to fast on Shabbat because of a bad dream, in order for the bad ruling to be torn up. However he must then also fast on Sunday, in order to atone for the fact that he ruined his Shabbat enjoyment by fasting...  

There are several psychological definitions of a nightmare. One describes nightmares, as "characterized by awakenings primarily from REM sleep with clear recall of disturbing mentation." These bad dreams are common, occurring in 2-6% of the population at least once a week. They seem to be more prevalent in children and less prevalent in the elderly, but in all age groups women report having nightmares more often than men. Nightmares are also more frequent in patients with psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, neuroticism, schizophrenia, sociality and post traumatic stress disorder. And in all populations they are more frequently reported during episodes of stress.  

There are a number of psycho-analytical models of nightmare formation, but little empirical evidence to support any of them.  They are shown in the table below.

Psychoanalytic and neo-psychoanalytic models of nightmare formation
Authors	Core mechanism producing nightmares
Freud 1900	Transformation of libidinal urges into anxiety that punishes the self (masochism); analogous to the neurotic anxiety underlying phobias
Jones 1951	Expression of repressed, exclusively incestuous, impulses
Jung 1909-1945	Residues of unresolved psychological conflicts.Individuation or development of the personality
Fisher et al. 1970	Attempts to assimilate or control repressed anxiety stemming from past or present conflicts
Greenberg 1972	Failure in dream function of mastering traumatic experience
Lansky 1995	Transformation of shame into fear (post-traumatic nightmares only)
Solms 1997	Epileptiform (seizure) activity in the limbic system (recurring nightmares only). Activation of dopaminergic appetitive circuits in mediobasal forebrain and hallucinatory representation by occipito-temporal-parietal mechanisms (nonrecurring nightmares and normal dreaming)
From Nielsen T and Levin, R. Nightmares: A new neurocognitive mode. Sleep Medicine Reviews 2007:11 (4); 295-310.

A review paper from researchers in Montreal and Yeshiva University summarizes the research in this way:

In sum, although clinical and, to some extent, empirical evidence supports different psychoanalytic models of nightmare formation, for the most part such models have not been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny. Rather, their central tenets have been integrated with more recent nightmare models, where empirical evidence is less scarce.

These same researchers suggest that nightmares "result from dysfunction in a network of affective processes that, during normal dreaming, serves the adaptive function of fear memory extinction." Fear memory occurs when an innocuous stimulus (like a door bell ringing) is paired with an unpleasant experience (like an electric shock).  Fear memory may be useful if it saves the individual from repeating a dangerous error. Extinction memories override the original fear memories and allow the individual to hear that ringing door bell without fearing an electric shock. The suggestion is that nightmares occur when the brain does not properly process fear extinction memories, For this reason nightmares are more prevalent in those with stress or psychiatric disorders. It's an interesting theory, but one that has not yet gathered much empirical evidence for its support.  But there is no doubting the relationship between psychiatric disorders, stress, and nightmares, and we noted earlier that  R. Yonatan claimed "a person is only shown in his dreams what he is thinking about in his heart..." (Berachot 55b). Perhaps this is why it is permitted to fast on Shabbat after a nightmare.  

Interestingly the Shulchan Aruch records an opinion that such Shabbat fasting is not permitted for a nightmare that appears only once; rather it is only allowed if it appears three times or more ( י"א שאין להתענות תענית חלום בשבת אלא על חלום שראהו תלת זימני). This is now more readily understood in light of the relationships we have noted between nightmares and psychological wellbeing; a recurrent nightmare may be associated with a more deeply felt stressful situation, and so it is only these recurrent bad dreams that allow for a Shabbat fast. One-off nightmares are not reflective of this stress, and so fasting  on their account is not permitted on Shabbat.    

The Realism and Bizarreness of 365 Dreams
Category	Frequency (%)
Possible in waking life, everyday experiences	29
Possible in waking life, uncommon elements	50
One or two bizarre or impossible elements	27
Several bizarre elements	4
From M. Schredl, et al. Dream content and personality. Dreaming 1999. (9): 257–263

In Summary

At best, we can say that contemporary science has a poor understanding of why we dream.  Hobson concludes his review stating that dreaming is "the subjective experience of a brain state with phenomenological similarities to - and differences from - waking consciousness, which is itself associated with a distinctive brain state." Well thanks for that Professor.  But not very helpful.

Dreams are very important to how we function as humans but we seem to have no idea how dreams serve to keep us from dying or getting very sick. That we must dream in order to function seems to be certain; but why we dream about what we do is far less known. And don't trust every scientific paper you read on the subject. Publication and peer review is no guarantee of veracity. Let's end with a good example of scientific nonsense from this paper published in the journal Sleep and Hypnosis, which seeks to explain why some dreams portend the future. (Well, um, actually they don't. But do go on.)  Just its title alone should make you run for the hills: Dreams, Time Distortion and the Experience of Future Events: A Relativistic, Neuroquantal Perspective. And it only gets better:

“If dreams and related altered states are actually the experiences of biophotons within the brain...then the temporal discrepancies between precognitive experiences and subsequent verified events may reflect the relativistic and quantum properties of minute differential velocities in electromagnetic phenomena. The average discrepancy of about two to three days between the experience and the event in actual cases supported this hypothesis.
The moderately strong correlation between the global geomagnetic activity at the time of precognitive experiences, primarily during dreams, and the geomagnetic activity during the two days before the event in those cases where the discrepancy is more than 6 days suggests a variant of entanglement between photons emitted during the event and those experienced before the event. The marked congruence of gravitational waves, geomagnetic activity, the Schumann resonance and the peak power of brain activity during different states, particularly when the sensitivity of the right hemisphere is considered, indicates a physical substrate by which prescience could occur.”

— Dotta BT. Persinger MA. Dreams, Time Distortion and the Experience of Future Events: A Relativistic, Neuroquantal Perspective. Sleep and Hypnosis 2009;11(2):29-39)

Rabbi Meir, the great sage of the Talmud, believed that the content of dreams was of no consequence whatsoever.  He may well said that same about some of the contemporary scientific explanations of dreaming.  

“אמרו לו בחלום מעשר שני של אביך שאתה מבקש הרי הוא במקום פלוני, אף ע”פ שמצא שם מה שנאמר לו אינו מעשר, דברי חלומות לא מעלין ולא מורידין

If a man was told in a dream that Ma’aser Sheni [a tithe on produce] belonging to his father was to be found in a certain location, even if he found some produce in that same location, it is not to be considered set aside for this tithe. For the content of dreams is of no consequence.”

— רמב"ם הלכות מעשר שני ונטע רבעי פרק ו הלכה ו