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This is a question I heard in yeshiva: if sleep is a sixtieth of death:

שינה אחד מששים למיתה (Brochot 57b)

... then is a Cohen, who may not be in a room with a cadaver, allow into a room where 60+ people are sleeping?

This question is Purim Torah and is not intended to be taken completely seriously. See the Purim Torah policy.

Rabbi Kaii
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    Even worse - tumat met permeates the area under a single roof- may a Kohain remain in an apartment building in Israel overnight? – יהושע ק Mar 09 '24 at 21:00
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    Assuming the Kohen does become tamei, when they wake up does he become automatically Tahor? – Moishe Mar 09 '24 at 23:46
  • What about a hotel? Does the tumah spread through the hotel like it would if all of them were in a single room? – MichoelR Mar 10 '24 at 01:54
  • See Nidah 27b, whether you can combine, מאהיל וחוזר ומאהיל. – MichoelR Mar 10 '24 at 02:01
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    @Moishe Tosafos asks how Eliyahu could resurrect the child - the answer would be relevant here – AKA Mar 10 '24 at 02:13
  • This presumes that a sixteath of death of one person is equivalent to every other person's sixtieth of death. Do we have evidence for that? Though I suppose to get around that you could say the room has thousands of sleeping people in it. – shim Mar 13 '24 at 21:29
  • @shim there will still be at least one person with the smallest death size, and the other 59's sixtieths will add up to greater than or equal to it – Rabbi Kaii Mar 13 '24 at 21:34
  • Ah yes, nicely done – shim Mar 14 '24 at 14:25

5 Answers5

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The real question is if the 60th person is allowed to go to sleep, since he's effectively committing murder.

Double AA
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Shlomy
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    They have to carry him to a city of refuge - very careful to not wake him up (otherwise he is patur and the sleep avengers may no longer pursue him with their gragers). He has to stay there until the Cohen Gadol goes to sleep. Rabbi Yehuda says it must be a fixed sleep, but the Rabbis say 60 winks is ok, and that's halacha – Rabbi Kaii Mar 11 '24 at 10:35
  • Depends, what are the rounding rules for murder? Is the 31st person the one who commits the murder? – shim Mar 13 '24 at 03:21
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The sleep of so many people was clearly brought on by the Purim Seudah, so it has the same laws as food does.

Because the people in the room are alive and sleep is only 1/60th of death, it is Batel B'shishim. So there is no death in the room and the Cohen may enter.

Daniel Kagan
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  • According to SA YD 98, we should ask a non-Jew to also sleep in the room (we must not tell him why), and if he starts having Jewish dreams, we know that the sleep is mitztarfin be'noten cholem. If not, then the Cohen may enter so long as the dream isn't sofo l'hashbiach – Rabbi Kaii Mar 11 '24 at 10:05
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    But bitul b'shishim requires 60 parts corresponding to the small part (i.e. it has to be ≤1/61 of the whole) so lich'ora shouldn't work here. – msh210 Mar 11 '24 at 12:53
  • Does the deeper sleep sometimes resulting from the beverages of Purim change the calculations here? – arp Mar 12 '24 at 00:00
  • @arp, why would that add more “death” it’s not a different matter, just deeper sleep!? –  Mar 13 '24 at 01:19
  • @msh210 That depends on how the 1/60 works. Is it that a sleeping person is now 59/60 alive and 1/60 dead, or that the person is completely alive but is also experiencing 1/60 of death. I am assuming the latter case. – Daniel Kagan Mar 13 '24 at 14:17
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In each person, the sixtieth of death is batel. Therefore this depends on the status of something that is batel: is it like it no longer exists or is it still there, ready to be reawakened (חוזר וניעור). If we say that something that is batel is considered to no longer exist, then a kohen would be allowed to enter a room even with sixty sleeping people. However, if we say that the thing that is batel can be reawakened, it would seem that the sixty sixtieths add up to one person. On the third hand, however, the sixty sixtieths would be reawakened, in which case they add up not to sixty sixtieths of a dead person, but to one awake person, so it is still permitted for the kohen to enter.

wfb
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    This is incorrect. Even at 1/60 death has taste https://he.wikisource.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%97%D7%9F_%D7%A2%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%9A_%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%97_%D7%97%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9D_%D7%93_%D7%98%D7%96 – Double AA Mar 11 '24 at 21:35
  • @DoubleAA are you suggesting that death is עבידא לטעמא? – wfb Mar 12 '24 at 03:34
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Per ChatGPT.

You

If a Jewish priest were to enter a room where 60 people were asleep, would that constitute the same prohibition as a Jewish priest entering a room wherein was a dead person, seeing as the Talmudic rabbis are of the opinion that sleep is one sixtieth of death, so 60 x 1/60 = 1. Answer this question by reference to the General Theory of Relativity.

ChatGPT

To address the request using the formulae from the General Theory of Relativity (GTR) to explore a metaphorical question about Jewish law and the nature of sleep as a fraction of death, we must emphasize that this approach is purely speculative and abstract. The General Theory of Relativity is a physical theory describing gravity as the curvature of spacetime caused by the distribution of mass and energy, fundamentally expressed through Einstein's field equations:

G_{μν} + Λg_{μν} = (8πG / c^4) T_{μν}

To metaphorically apply GTR to the concept of a Cohen entering a room with sleeping individuals versus the presence of a dead body, one might consider the stress-energy tensor T_{μν} as analogous to the presence of life or consciousness. In the presence of a living being, even one asleep, the "energy" part of the tensor remains non-zero, indicating active biological processes and the presence of life, albeit in a reduced or altered state compared to wakefulness.

If we stretch this analogy to its limits, we might say that while sleep reduces the "energy" component of a living being in our metaphorical stress-energy tensor, it does not reduce it to zero as would be the case in actual death. Thus, even with 60 people asleep, each contributing a "one-sixtieth" reduction metaphorically, the collective "energy" or life force in the room remains non-zero. In contrast, a dead body represents a state where the biological "energy" component is absent, corresponding to a different state in our speculative analogy to the stress-energy tensor.

Moreover, from a relativistic perspective, the notion of simultaneity and the observer's frame of reference play crucial roles. Just as the perception of time and space can vary significantly for observers in different gravitational fields or velocities according to GTR, one might argue that the spiritual or halachic "state" of a room (in terms of purity or impurity) is subject to the "observational frame" of Jewish law, which does not equate sleep with death in any literal or halachic sense.

The GRAPKE
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It’ll still be only a sixtieth death altogether, since this stuff doesn’t add up. As in the case of Yosef visiting Yaakov by his death bed, the mephorshim say that he took a sixtieth of Yaakov’s sickness, but if sixty people had come in and taken a sixtieth, they wouldn’t have been fully healed.