At first glance, Bava Batra, described by Sefaria as “relationships between neighbours, land ownership, sales, and inheritance,” seems as dry as dust and almost as much fun as filling in a tax form in your third language. The opening Mishnah does little to dispel my assumption: Bava Batra 2a: Mishnah: Partners who wished to make a partition [mekhitza] in a jointly owned courtyard build the wall for the partition in the middle of the courtyard. What is this wall fashioned from? In a place where it is customary to build such a wall from non-chiselled stone, or chiselled stone, or small bricks, or large bricks, they must build the wall with that material. Everything is done in accordance with the regional custom.”
It continues in that vein, dividing up courtyards, gardens, fields, and vineyards, in a similar manner until 2b:7 when the Gemara asks “And is damage caused by sight in fact not called damage?” So if I look upon you in your half of our jointly-owned courtyard, my ‘gaze’ is intrusive and can be called damage….Which begs the question, why is this wall being built? What is its’ function? Does it keep things out or keep things in? Is the wall there to keep me from temptation, or will the wall allow me to conduct an illicit tryst?
Inside the wall
Building walls in order to keep what’s on the inside safe from what’s on the outside, whether it be people or ideas, is, ultimately, a fool’s errand and doomed to failure. Even if there is a wall, love and desire will find a way; Rav William knew that:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Act V:I
Wall: In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall;
And such a wall, as I would have you think,
That had in it a crannied hole or chink,
Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisby,
Did whisper often very secretly.
This loam, this rough-cast and this stone doth show
That I am that same wall; the truth is so:
And this the cranny is, right and sinister,
Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper.
The wall is unable to keep the lovers apart; they rendezvous on either side of the wall (of non-chiselled stone or chiselled stone?) in secret and whisper their undying love – “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” – through the cranny.
Will’s wall, built to separate property, which in the case of Pyramus and Thisby is Thisby’s virginity, fails to fulfil its’ function. Perhaps the ‘upstart crow’ should have consulted Kiddushin 81a 7: If there is an open entrance to the public there is no concern due to being secluded. If there had been no wall between Pyramus and Thisby would their love (and lust) have blossom’d? Sonnet 129 has the answer: “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
⌜Mad⌝ in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and ⌜proved a⌝ very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Kiddushin seems to indicate that building a guardhouse or a wall is an advantage to those who desire to engage in illicit trysts. Building a wall merely serves to pique the interest, ‘what, I wonder, lies behind that wall? Who is that bathing on the rooftop?
Bava Batra 6b:3 Abaye says: If there were two houses on two sides of a public domain, this one, the owner of one of the houses, must build a fence for half his roof, and that one, the owner of the other house, must build a fence for half his roof. They must position the fences so that one fence is not opposite the other fence, and each one must add to his fence a little beyond the midway point, so that each one should not be able to see the activity on the other’s roof. If only Uriah the Hittite has built a fence.
II Samuel, 11:2-4: Late one afternoon, David rose from his couch
and strolled on the roof of the royal palace: and from the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and the king sent someone to make inquiries about the woman. He reported, “She is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam [and] wife of Uriah the Hittite.” David sent messengers to fetch her: she came to him and he lay with her. David paid for his lust but we did get some fabulous poetry out of it.
Even if a wall is built to last, they never do, or they stop fulfilling their original function. The Great Wall of China, built to keep out the Mongol Horde, is naught but a tourist destination nowadays. And the great wall of the last century, built to separate the Communist East from the decadent West, is, despite Honecker’s boast that the wall would last another 100 years, no more. The Berlin Wall was pulled down and sold off in little chunks to people who did not weep its’ demise. People will always want to know what’s on the other side and all walls eventually crumble.
