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Berachos 044: A thousand fruits, according to the Maharshal
Elie Samet asks:
Hi. If the thousand fruits don't fit according to the maharshal how does he
learn the pashtus of the gemara?
Elie Samet, Israel
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The Kollel replies:
According to the Maharshal, they simply required more baskets to carry the
fruit. I will explain.
1) The Gemara tells us that 100 (not 1000) fruits could fit into a basket
the size of 3 Se'ah (according to our text). Now we will do our
calculations and see how big this basket must have been. We know that there
are 6 Kav in 1 Se'ah, 4 Lug in 1 Kav, and 6 Beitzim in 1 Lug (these
measurements all refer to volume). This means that a Se'ah is the volume of
144 Beitzim, so a basket of the size of 3 Se'ah can hold 432 Beitzim.
Therefore, according to our text, 100 Ginosar fruits fit into a basket
which held the volume of 432 Beitzim.
2) We must not forget the concept that the Halachic authorities mention,
that "Nitkatnu ha'Beitzim" -- the eggs in our times are smaller than they
were in the times of the Gemara. (This has a practical consequence for such
Halachic issues as how much wine one must drink on Seder night, etc.) Some
Poskim maintain that the eggs in the times of the Gemara were twice as
large as they are nowadays. If we make this very approximate assumption,
this would mean that the basket mentioned in the Gemara contained the
volume of about 850 eggs. If 100 fruits fit into this basket, this means
that each fruit was the size of 8 eggs or more, so those are pretty big
fruits.
3) The above is all according to our text. However, according to the
Maharshal's text a basket the size of 3 Se'ah could *not* hold 100 Ginosar
fruits. According to the Maharshal, the Ginosar fruits were even larger
than they were according to our text. According to the very approximate
estimation we made above, 100 fruits could not fit into a basket which
could hold a volume of 850 eggs. The Chidush of the Maharshal is that the
fruits were even larger than we thought. Therefore, it must be that
according to the Maharshal they required more of these gigantic baskets to
carry the gigantic fruits.
Kol Tuv,
Dovid Bloom
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