In the last two Mishnayot, we’ll talk about things that a merchant has to do when it comes to weights. It’s a very serious prohibition to have inaccurate weights. You’re cheating people if you have that, and you have no way of paying them back. You don’t really know whom you stole from. People walk into the shop, and you charge them for something you weren’t supposed to charge them for. You gave them less merchandise than they were entitled to, and you don’t really have a way of finding out who they were. So a person has to be very careful that his weights are correct.
The Mishnah says that a wholesaler has to wipe down his measures. Let’s say he has a container that he measures out wine or oil with. Let’s say he has a gallon measurement. He has to wipe down the inside of that container every 30 days. The whole point is to make sure that nothing has dried up within the walls of the container, so that when he fills up a gallon for somebody, he’s giving him an actual gallon, and not less than a gallon because things have built up and dried up on the inside. So you have to clean it up and wipe it down.
A householder is somebody who sells out of his house. It’s not somebody who does a lot of business. He only has to wash or wipe it down every 12 months. There’s less buildup because he does less business. Therefore, even once a year is considered sufficient. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel flips it. He says the opposite is true. A wholesaler who’s constantly doing business is always using the kelim, his utensils, to measure out a gallon of wine for somebody, for example, so it’s never going to dry up. Therefore, cleaning isn’t needed as much. Since you’re always using it, every time the person pours more wine in, it doesn’t allow the wine from the previous use to dry up on the inside of the container. Therefore, there’s less nervousness with the wholesaler. So he only has to do it every 12 months. But the householder, who’s only using it once in a while, and things could dry up in there very easily, has to clean it down and make sure that it’s dry inside once every month.
Chenvani mekane'ach midotav pa'amayim baShabbat. If you have a shopkeeper, he has to wipe down his measures twice a week. A chenvani, like we learned in Mishnah Chet (eight), doesn’t have to tip out the extra three drops that he sells from the bottle because he’s very busy; he’s asuk. Therefore, we say he’s somebody who has to be very careful that the liquid doesn’t dry up inside the bottle. He has to wipe it out and wipe it down more often than a wholesaler or a householder.
U'memacheh mishkalotav pa'am achat baShabbat. He has to also wash down his weights. You know, on one side of the balance there would be fur, and on the other side would be a certain weight, so they would measure it. He has to wipe it down once a week to make sure that things don’t stick to the weight and dry onto it, which would make it heavier. Then the person who puts food on top of that would be getting less than he thinks, because the weight would already be heavier from whatever was there previously.
U'mekane'ach moznaim al kol mishkal u'mishkal. And he has to also wipe down the pans of the scale after every single time that he weighed something, to make sure there’s nothing from the previous sale on the pan. He has to wipe it down to make sure that nothing is left over there, so that he doesn’t cheat the next customer.