Say it ain't so!

Everyone knows that it's a big merit to marry the daughter of a talmid chacham. After all, what's the first question out of your lips when the shadchan comes a'calling about this great girl from a fine family? You don't ask if she's highly attractive, if her parents invested their life savings with Warren Buffett in 1964, or if her brothers were MVPs of their basketball teams at Camp Haka in 1994. No my friends, you ask if her father is a genuine, A-OK, 100 percent American certified Talmid Chacham. Oh yeah.

Well folks, sorry to burst your bubble, but you were born about five hundred years too late. Why? Because there are no talmidei chachamim nowadays.

For example, a Jew is not allowed to go to sleep on a boat that's tied to the bank of a river on shabbos if he knows that a non-Jew will come along and row, row, row that boat gently down the stream and over to the other bank. Why not? Because he knows the non-Jew is gonna come and move that momma-who is he fooling?

On the other hand, a talmid chacham is allowed to sleep there, or to say he's going to sleep there, even though he knows full well that when he "wakes up" he's going to find himself on a new side of town. Why? Go look it up (מסכת שבת קלט עמוד ב). However, nowadays this isn't permitted, because there ain't no talmidei chachamim who can pull stunts like this.

So now you're gonna say, "Hey boy, wait a minute there, there's only no talmidei chachamim who can pull a stunt like that-but just regular old plain talmidei chachamim with eligible daughters? There's plenty of those! (c.f. New Jersey, Lakewood)" Well sorry to rock your boat wiseguy, but you're wrong.

In the Alter Rebbe's Shulchan Aruch (סימן שיד, הלכה כ) it says that a talmid chacham is allowed to plug a hole in a barrel with a piece of food and say that he's doing it to protect the food, when in reality he's doing it to protect whatever's inside the barrel. Even if this talmid chacham doesn't use the legal fiction it's not really so bad, because covering the barrel for the purposes of covering a barrel is only forbidden by the rabbis (under the prohibition of fixing a vessel). Besides, this guy's a talmid chacham, he wouldn't do something like this without employing a legal fiction anyway.

However, it is forbidden for an עם הארץ to do this, because we don't trust him to employ a legal fiction when he's doing it. Basically, the guy has no clue what he's doing, and the chances of him saying the right things to the right people at the right time are practically nil.

There are some (the Rambam among them) who permit even an עם הארץ to do this trick, and we rely on these words for a talmid chacham, even though for everything else there aren't any talmidei chachamim left.

What does this mean? That's right folks, ain't no stopping us now! I mean, it means that for all practical purposes (besides for closing holes in barrels with chicken bones) there are no talmidei chachamim left. Yup, next time some poor Bobover chosson comes up to you in 770 begging for money for his chasuna, claiming that his father is a big talmid chacham and has seventeen kids besides, tell him he's a liar!

Then give him five bucks, because that's the nice thing to do.