A wife asks her husband to remember to bring home bread and milk. “We have none left,” she informs him. “Can you pick it up when you come home from shul? It’s important for the kids.” She knows that he can be forgetful, and so she reiterates: “Please don’t forget.” And he in turn reassures her, “Of course, I will surely get them on my way home.”
Sure enough, as his wife had predicted, he forgot all about it. He feels terrible as he walks through the door, and he’s greeted with a hailstorm. “I can’t rely on you for anything.... Where’s your basic responsibility? I asked you five times, and you promised to remember.... What’s wrong with you?”
Why He Really Forgot
The husband is a bit confused. “What exactly did I do wrong,” he says to himself. “I really forgot. I was learning and davening... why is she so upset at me? Should I not have learned?! Should I walk around repeating “milk, bread — bread, milk” until I get to the store? Of course, I wanted to bring it home. What was so wrong with what I did?”
Indeed, Chazal already taught us, ידענא לא כל היא פשיעותא, being unaware is a form of transgression (Bava Metzia 35a). If we give something to a person for safekeeping and he forgets where he placed it, he is held responsible. He can’t say, “You don’t understand... I hid it so well, because I wanted to ensure its safety... that even I forgot where I put it. I didn’t choose to forget!”
This just about sums up the two sides of the argument between this husband and wife. “I simply forgot... it flew out of my head.”
If There’s No Feeling, We Forget
But what’s really going on here is something a bit different. The real pain that the wife is feeling is that “You don’t care that there’s no bread and milk in the house! The babies are crying that there’s no milk in their bottles, and you don’t even care! It’s not your problem! You’re going to daven Minchah calmly while the house is turning over. You don’t feel the weight of this responsibility.”
