Bais HaVaad on the Parsha, Parshas Beha’alos’cha

Who’s Asking?

June 12, 2025

Excerpted and adapted from a shiur by Dayan Yosef Greenwald

Those men said to him, “We are impure through a human corpse; why should we be left out by not offering Hashem’s offering in its appointed time among Bnei Yisrael?”

Bemidbar 9:7

According to the Sifri, the phrase “those men” teaches that the men themselves asked Moshe the question. The Panim Yafos explains that many of the people may not have been tamei, because only a person who carries the majority of the weight of a corpse becomes tamei, but one who carries it along with others (mesayeia) does not. Because they all asked together, Moshe ruled that they were all tamei to account for those who were certainly tamei.

The same conclusion would seem to emerge from the Gemara (Psachim 10a): If two people walk on different paths—one of which is tamei, but it is unknown which one—both men are tahor, because each has a chezkas taharah. But if they ask together, they are declared tamei, because two simultaneous rulings cannot contradict each other, and one of them did walk on the tamei path.

Tosfos there notes that this halacha is only mideRabanan; mideOreisa, both are tahor. If so, it is difficult to understand how the Panim Yafos uses a similar idea to explain a pasuk. Perhaps the answer is that in the case in Psachim, each man asked his own sheilah about his own experience, albeit at the same time as his friend. In the Pesach Sheini case, they all participated in the same activity of carrying a body, so perhaps they would all be tamei even mideOreisa.