Seeking Ferret

Rigoletto by Verdi at the Metropolitan Opera


There was some sort of mixup with tickets and maybe I wasn't supposed to be at last night's show even though I had emails saying it was part of my subscription package? I'm unclear on the details, possibly I didn't get the exact subscription package that was my first choice? Possibly I made an exchange when purchasing the tickets because I've already seen this Rigoletto, and lost my notes about the swap? In any case I showed up at the opera house and they didn't have me on the list, but since I'm a subscriber and they had some extra tickets available, they gave me a couple of comp tickets. Orchestra level, waaaay more expensive than the seats I normally get. :) ghost_lingering and I were pretty pleased about the upgrade, though I should probably up my donation to the Met next year. I've probably seen about a hundred shows at the Met and this is my third time seeing one from the orchestra level. It was nice to be able to get more of a sense of actors' expressions than you can from the family circle.

Director Michael Mayer moves Rigoletto to the 1950s mafia-run Las Vegas. The Duke is a mafia don, his courtiers including Rigoletto are his soldiers, who do stunning cruel things to other people because who will stop them? Sparafucile's sister Maddalena is a stripper. The set is largely neon, starting with the delightfully realistic and visually overhwelming Strip of the first act and becoming increasingly abstract toward the stunning blue and white neon lightning storm of the third act. It's a fun setting for a story about morality going out the window, colorful in all senses of the word. I'm not sure how deep the things the re-setting says are, but at minimum it says that just because we live in a democracy and not a semifeudal duchy, doesn't free us from the questions of power and autonomy and faith that Rigoletto asks, because many of the systems of power and obligation still operate, just at different societal layers.

Verdi's music is at its most amazing here. I love the way he reuses "La Donna e mobile" throughout the third act as a theme that says everything we need to know about the Duke and the social power of his charisma. I love the way a cappella resurfaces again and again as a way to strip these figures down to their inner essences. I love how interconnected the score is. In total, "Rigoletto" remains amazing.

Back from Arizona after a 5 hour flight delay!

Daf 78-83 in one go

Conveniently the whole run of Daf Yomi while I was away consisted of the entirety of Perek Hei of Chullin, which was concerned with Oto v'et b'no, the commandment in Leviticus 22:28 not to slaughter a parent and a child animal on the same day. There are some fascinating oral law d'rashes of the verse that are completely counterintuitive to how you would just read the pasuk. At only 5 pages but covering a range of interesting but fairly self-contained halakhic issues, I think this would be a great perek of Gemara for someone just dipping their toes into learning Talmud.

To start with, oto is in the masculine, but the Gemara reasons that the mitzvah must be a prohibition on slaughtering a mother and her child (of either sex), not a father, because the clear intention of the mitzvah is similar to shiluach haken, the much more well known and much weirder mitzvah of sending away the mother bird before taking her eggs. The mother and her child are a clear family unit, in the case of the domesticated species the mitzvah is talking about, the father is rarely an active participant in raising the child, so the majority opinion is that we don't consider the father's seed as really having any connection to the child.

This then leads the Gemara on an interesting detour into the halakhos relating to mules and other crossbred animals, where in some cases where it matters, some Rabbis say that we similarly don't consider the father's seed as having any connection to the child, so that a mule with a mare parent is considered to be more a horse than a donkey, for example when it comes to whether you can yolk it with a mule who has a jenny for a parent.

And similarly the Gemara discusses the koy, an animal that according to some is the crossbred offspring of a domesticated animal and a wild animal, and some say on the same principle that whether it's considered domesticated or wild depends on the mother (for purposes of offering it as a Temple sacrifice, or for the halakha of covering the blood that will come in Perek Zayin.)

Later on there's some interesting halakhic questions about when and if you can incur multiple penalties for the same act, and when you can incur a lesser penalty instead of a greater penalty when committing an act that violates multiple issurs. This comes up because the act of oto v'et b'no inherently consists of two acts, the first of which is not an issur- killing the first animal, and the second of which is an issur- killing the second, related animal. So the Gemara asks a series of questions about cases where either the first act also transgresses a separate issur, or where the second act transgresses a separate issur, and how the two aveiros interact.

A big one that creates complicated interactions is shechting a consecrated animal outside the Temple courtyard, because there's a major disagreement about whether it incurs lashes or kares or nothing if it's done at a time when the animal is not permitted to be offered. So if you shecht the mother and then the child is consecrated, some hold that since you are not permitted to offer the son as a sacrifice that day because of oto v'et b'no, you do not incur the penalty for offering it outside the Temple courtyard, though you do incur the penalty of oto v'et b'no.


There's a lot more cases, I wish I'd been blogging daily during this perek, it was a lot of fun to learn, but I think I have to accept that I'm unlikely to have the time to give it any more detail here, so I'm just going to move on.

Perek Zayin will be about the mitzvah of covering the blood.

Daf 77

Final Mishna of Perek dalet. What if you shecht an animal and inside you find an amniotic sac but no specific evidence of a fetus? Is it kosher from the shechita? What is its status?

The answer is that it's obviously kosher, if you want to eat it. Most people seem to regard it as disgusting, so it's considered a non-food item, but if you wanted to eat it would be considered a food item. In a similar manner, the bones of a neveila and the hide of a neveila do not have the tumah of a neveila, as they are not edible basar as required by the pasuk, but if you did something to the bones or hide of a (kosher, shechted, I think) animal that rendered them edible like cooking them in a stew for a long time, they would be kosher and treated as foodstuffs.

This also applies for purposes of the tumah of foods. So ordinarily the amniotic sac would not transmit tumah, but if you intended for it to be food, it would transmit tumah. But it would not have the tumah of neveila still because you could not intend to eat a neveila so there's no scenario where by your intent you can make it a neveila.

But the amniotic sac still seems to retain some of the properties of being associated with the fetus, apparently because it's assumed that a miscarried fetus was inside it and was reabsorbed into its walls. So if a cow gives birth to an amniotic sac it's considered to be its firstborn for purposes of bechor, although since you can't tell its gender and there's a slightly less than 50% chance that it's a kosher male bechor (three choices- male, female, or male/female but invalid to be a bechor because of birth defect), the sac itself is not judged to have the consecrated status of bechor.

Also, if the amniotic sac partially comes out of the mother and then goes back in, and then the mother is shechted, it's treated as if there could have been a fetus in it at the time, and thus the mother's shechita does not work for the sac, and the mother is considered to have given birth.

The Mishna ends with some discussion of the superstitious burial practices of the other nations around Israel, such as burying a miscarried fetus at the crossroads, which is therefore forbidden to Israel. The Gemara discusses exceptions to this- you're allowed to do at least some practices of the other nations, provided they have some therapeutic or useful purpose. The nuances of this question, of what is a therapeutic purpose and what is just superstitious nonsense and therefore forbidden, deserves a more thorough discussion than the Gemara gives it here, but I believe there's much more on this in Masechet Avodah Zarah.

Note: Unabashed recommendation for Wlad Marhulets's "Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet", David Krakauer as soloist.


Daf 76

For some reason the Mishna here is about treifos, which really ought to have been in the previous perek, but, um... it's all connected? Some of the halakha here is related to some of the halakha about the ben pekuah on previous pages, as the Rabbis found a connection between Rabbi Meir's position on ben pekuah and his position on hanging limbs.

The halakha is that if an animal breaks a bone on its hind leg below a certain point, it's not a treifa, but if it's above that point, it's a treifa. The point in question is called the 'arkuva', and there is a debate in the Gemara about what exactly it is. Rav Yehuda says it's the knee, Ula says it's a joint above the knee.

The Mishna also covers the previously mentioned hanging limb. If the animal were to become a neveilah, the partially severed limb would not only be neveilah, it would also convert in the process of death into ever min hachai. Meaning that not only was it forbidden to Jews, but Jews also couldn't sell it to non-Jews. But if shechita is done, it renders the limb kosher, provided the majority of the skin/meat around the break is intact. Rav teaches this is only if the break is above the arkuva, but if it's below the arkuva shechita renders it kosher even if it's less than the majority. Shmuel teaches that the same law is true both above and below the arkuva.

Daf 73

We established that
a)if you do shechita on the mother, the fetus inside is considered included in that shechita, and it's permitted to eat. And
b) if a limb from the fetus came out of the womb, it is not permitted to be eaten even if it returns to the womb And
c) if you reached inside and severed a limb from the fetus, and then shechted the mother, the mother's shechita includes both parts and they're both kosher to be eaten.

New case: Difficult birth, a limb comes out and is stuck, so you sever it to help make the birth easier and save the mother. But the mother is still in trouble, so you shecht the mother so at least you get to eat her. What is the status of the pre-severed limb?

Obviously it's not permitted to be eaten. But does the shechita still sort of count for it, so that it's kind of like a treifa, or does the shechita not count for it, so that it's a neveila? The difference is that a neveila is tamei and a treifa is not, or if it is, it's only a very minor tumah d'rabbanan in some cases.

Machlokess between Rabbi Meir and the Rabbis. Rabbi Meir says that as soon as you sever the limb, the connection to the mother is ended so the shechita doesn't count for it. The Rabbis point to the case c) I mentioned above, and say that maybe something similar happened and it's a treifa, not a neveila.


They then look at a similar case where Rabbi Meir and the Rabbis disagree, the hanging limb. This is a case where a limb has been partially severed (but not in a way that would make the animal a treifa). There's a d'rabbanan gezeira that if the animal dies naturally the limb is ever min hachai, it's somehow presumed to have separated halakhically during the dying process. But if you do shechita, there's a machlokess between Rabbi Meir and the Rabbis about its status that follows the same pattern as the case of the fetus's severed limb.

An uptick in my mood is correlated with the recent good weather. I've taken my bike out twice this week, my first rides in almost two months. Just a few miles, but I'm looking forward to the return of spring and opportunity for more regular riding.

Definitely more rides on the D&R Canal trail, which is a local treasure, but I'm also thinking about where else I can ride to for more variety. I see the new Goethals Bridge has a bike lane, so maybe I can ride to Staten Island! I also want to see if I can manage a bike commute to work, first a Sunday dry run and then afterward for real. There are also bike trails in other parts of the state that I could drive to.

My longest rides this past summer were ~30 miles, so maybe I should make 40 miles in one ride the goal for this summer. And my total on Strava for last year was about 200 miles, so I'll try to make it at least 300 miles this year.

Also unless I want to keep shutting down for half the year I should get more comfortable riding in colder weather.

Daf 68

New perek! Perek dalet is about whether a fetus inside a behema when the mother was shechted is kosher or not. The halakha is that yes, it is, even without separate shechita, because it's considered part of the mother. But that just leads us to some interesting edge cases. Which is... kind of interesting, but not particularly practically relevant.

The Mishna says that if the mother is undergoing a difficult pregnancy and the fetal calf extends a leg out of the mother, and then retracts it, *it* is still kosher. However, if the fetal calf extends its head out of the mother, then that is considered a birth even if it retracts the head. (And therefore since it's been born, it would need its own separate shechita if that's possible if you wanted to eat it.)

The second half of the Mishna says that if you cut into the womb and removed a limb from the fetus (Probably because it's a difficult childbirth and you want to make the delivery easier), it does not count as ever min hachai and is permitted to be eaten once you've shechted the mother, but if you cut into a behema and removed a kidney, it would be ever min hachai and thus the kidney would be prohibited even though it would not render the behema a treifa and the behema would be permitted to be eaten once shechted.

The second part of the mishna effectively crystallizes the unusual status of the fetus- it's a part of the mother in some ways (the mother's shechita counts for it) but not in others.

From the first part of the Mishna, the rest of the daf explores opinions deriving from different ways of reading the *it*. that is still kosher. Is *it* referring to the fetus in toto, or is it referring to the limb that was extended, or is referring to the fetus in toto except for the limb?

Rabbi Yehuda teaches in the name of Rav (and later in the name of both Rav and Shmuel) that the halakha is that the limb itself once extended is not kosher, but if it unextends before shechita, then the rest of the fetus is kosher. It derives this from a surprising reading of the verse about the treifos. Shemos 22:30. ובשר בשדה טרפה לא תאכלו. What does בשדה add to the verse? Apparently this encodes a broader concept of the natural space in which a particular kind of meat is supposed to be in order to hold a certain status. For example, if a sacrificial animal is in the Temple courtyard and then is removed from the courtyard, it permanently takes on the status of being prohibited.

According to Rav in this case, the natural שדה of the fetus is inside the womb for it to maintain the status of being connected to the mother, so when it exits the womb it permanently loses this status. Thus a limb that leaves the womb and then returns maintains its status of having exited the womb and is thus forbidden to eat.

This is not the most natural reading of the Mishna, and the Gemara tries a variety of ways to refute it, but it does not. Ulla in the name of Rabbi Yochanan argues that Shemos 22:30 should be limited to just the case of chatas offerings, since there is an explicit pasuk in Vayikra where the idea of permanent ban on chatas removed from the Temple courtyard comes from, but the Gemara refutes this since there is also a pasuk in Devarim from which the Gemara derives midrashically that bikurim are not subject to this ban, and therefore the pasuk in Shemos is needed to demonstrate that fetuses leaving their womb are subject to this prohibition.

When Rabbi Yochanan enters the dispute, this becomes a disagreement between him as the leader in early Amoraic Eretz Yisrael, against Rav and Shmuel as the leaders in early Amoraic Babylon. Even after Rabbi Yochanan's imputed position is conclusively refuted, the Gemara still seems to think there was a disagreement between the two areas about something, so it suggests instead that Rav held that the limb exiting the womb counted in some manner as 'birth' and therefore the whole limb was invalidated if a majority left the womb, whereas Rabbi Yochanan held that the limb exiting was not birth, and only the part of the limb that left the womb is invalidated.

Daf 69

I think it is pretty logical that the fetus would be kosher to eat and not require an additional shechita if found inside a properly shechted mother, but... what if the fetus was fairly well developed and viable, and after you remove it from the mother you raise it... Does it need shechita if you want to eat it? No, its mother's shechita counts for it even years down the line.

That's at least consistent as far as it goes, but it leads to strange scenarios. The Gemara seems to want to say that if such an animal, called a ben Pekuah, has children, those children inherit this status of not needing shechita. I can't figure out how many generations this lasts. And what if the ben Pekuah has a child with a non-ben Pekuah? Even though a)the ben Pekuah is kosher to eat without shechita and b)the non-ben Pekuah is kosher to eat, provided you do shechita, c)the child of the ben Pekuah and non-ben Pekuah is assur.

Why? Artscroll has a conceptually puzzling footnote about the various Rishonic conceptualizations of this Gemara... The child of the Ben Pekuah has to be thought of as having partially severed simanim inherited from its parent, and therefore a kosher shechita can't be done. One Rishonic commentator says it inherited one uncut tube from its non-ben Pekuah parent and one cut tube from its ben Pekuah parent. Another says that both simanim are considered half-cut. Either way, you can't do shechita if the simanim are already partially severed, but... if you inspected the animal, its simanim would be fine! It's all a metaphor taken literally or something. The ben Pekuah is a walking dead animal for some halakhic purposes, so therefore we treat it like it's literally dead.

Daf 65

The Gemara spent about a page on the simanim of kosher beasts. It spends a page and a half analyzing the simanim of grasshoppers. Go figure.

I'm not totally sure I followed the whole debate. It's a very technical and very tiny disagreement between two baraitot, one stam and the other in the name of Rabbi Yishmael. Rabbi Yishmael is known for his thirteen principles of midrashic derivation, and the nature of the debate is seemingly between the stam Tanna trying to read the Torah in a straightforward way and Rabbi Yishmael trying to apply one of his principles, a generalization after a specialization.

The verses go:

Leviticus 11:20: All winged swarming things that go upon all fours are a detestable thing unto you
Leviticus 11:21: Yet these may ye eat of all winged swarming things that go upon all fours, which have jointed legs above their feet, wherewith to leap upon the earth;
Leviticus 11:22: even these of them ye may eat: the arbeh after its kinds, and the sal'am after its kinds, and the chargol after its kinds, and the chagav after its kinds.

The stam Tanna interprets the verse as follows: There are eight species of grasshopper that are permitted, the four named ones and four other species which are similar to one of the named species. The characteristics of these grasshoppers is that they have four walking legs, two jumping legs, four wings, and the wings cover most of the body.


Rabbi Yishmael understands 'after its kind' as a generalization following a specialization (following a generalization?) and therefore it's not limited to these eight species, but to any other species that has the same characteristics as specified by these combinations of specification and generalizations. What does that mean? It means I'm confused.

He looks at the first insect mentioned, the arbeh, and points out that it has a bald head (without some sort of fuzz... Rabbi Linzer said this might also mean something about forehead shape). So you might say that since it says 'after its kind' that means that kosher insects are the ones that have bald heads. But then the chargol is mentioned and it does not have a bald head, and "after its kind" is also mentioned after it. So from this we learn that the the bald head is not a factor either way, it's not one of the simanim, because both bald and non-bald grasshoppers are listed in the verse.

Through similar logic Rabbi Yishmael establishes that having a tail or not having a tail does not matter as a siman. And having a rounded head or having an elongated head does not matter as a siman. So what does matter as a siman for Rabbi Yishmael? The same things as the stam Tanna: four walking legs, two jumping legs, four wings, and the wings cover most of the body. But one other thing as well, which he learns from the fourth grasshopper mentioned, the chagav. From the chagav he learns that for an insect to be kosher, it has to be known as a chagav, which apparently is also true of the chargol sad sal'am and arbeh, I guess chagav was a generic term for those sorts of creatures. So in practical terms this is Rabbi Yishmael's real limiting factor- once we verify the physical simanim, we have to have a tradition that an insect was known as a 'chagav' in order to consider it kosher. But it needn't necessarily be one of the eight species named by the stam Tanna.


Of course Askenazim today have no tradition about any insect being kosher so we don't eat any insects.

Daf 66

We know that the Torah requires that a kosher fish have fins and scales. A baraisa says that every fish with fins does not necessarily have scales, but every fish with scales has fins. As a practical matter, this means if you find a dissected fish that's had the fins removed, you can still assume it's kosher if you can see that it has scales. But it raises deeper questions about the nature of the simanim.

If every fish that has scales has fins, why does the Torah require kosher fish to have both fins and scales?

At first the Gemara attempts a linguistic argument- the words s'napir and kaskeset are not everyday words, so maybe if the Torah had only said s'napir, we would have known from context that it was either talking about scales or fins, but we wouldn't have been sure which. But the Gemara refutes this argument by pointing to other psukim in the Nach where kaskeset is used to refer to scales on someone's armored breastplate, so even if the Torah hadn't mentioned s'napir we'd have understood the verse.

So instead the Gemara gives this really interesting, vague answer quoting Isaiah. The full verse is "Hashem chafetz l'maan tzidko yagdil Torah v'yadir"- Hashem was pleased, for His righteousness’ sake, to make Torah great and glorious. The Gemara only quotes the end of the verse "To make Torah great and glorious." This, it says, is the reason the Torah mentions both fins and scales.

There's a lot of really beautiful ways to understand this idea. A basic one is that God could have just given us the requirement of scales, but by giving us the requirement of fins and scales, God gave us additional Torah, merely to give us an extra opportunity to study Torah.

Or perhaps you say that the meaning of this is that the Torah mentioned fins in order that we might learn that every fish with scales has fins, because every opportunity to learn more about the beauty and complexity of the order of the natural world is an exaltation of the Creator.

I first watched Broad City while making Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing, and I instantly loved the show's humor and the girls' BDE and also just how visibly, proudly Jewish the show was. I watched most of the first and second seasons, plus the pre-HBO stuff, and... the end result was all of two seconds in the vid. Like many things in that vid, I made a note that I wanted to revisit the show fannishly in more detail later. metatxt's Festivid request gave me the opportunity.

It was first of all an opportunity to just enjoy the rest of the show that I hadn't seen before, and there is some amazing stuff I hadn't seen. Like St. Mark's Place, the Season 2 finale, is a gorgeous piece of meandering storytelling, made all the more special because it takes place entirely on a single block where I lived for a year and a half and one of my favorite places in the world. I could watch that episode a million times. The chase scene through that shitty St. Mark's Market!!! The wig store!!!! Or the episode with Ilana's mom dickering with Canal Street purse merchants to grieve her mother's death had me literally rolling on the floor. The stuff the show does with Hilary Clinton and Trump and its engagement with our ambivalent and frustrated politics is so powerful and centering. And the stuff Season 4 does across multiple episodes with looking back at the beginning of Abbi and Ilana's friendship is thoughtful about the nature of friendship while still retaining the show's humor.

I wanted to make a vid that engaged with the over-the-topness of the show (the fact that, as elipie said to me, "Everything Ilana does is a meme"), and I wanted a shippy Abbi/Ilana vid, which conveniently is also what metatxt wanted. My first go-to for songs was the episode of LL Cool J's Lip Synch Battle where Abbi and Ilana (the real people, not the characters) competed. "And I Am Telling You" was one of Abbi's performances on that show, and it's an incredible performance the way she splits the middle between taking the song seriously and being just a little too into it. It is a dance with LKBVishness. It's a song from the musical Dreamgirls and it is... an epic emotional journey. I hope I have done it justice in this vid.

Thanks to elipie for beta!

Third on the Playlist (9 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Broad City (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Abbi Abrams/Ilana Wexler
Additional Tags: Fanvid, so extra
Summary:

Abbi/Ilana 5ever. No, 6ever.

Posted to Critical Commons here

Daf 63

I've been using the word 'bird' as my translation of the Hebrew Of, but let's be clear, that's not necessarily an accurate translation. Of means flying bird-shaped thing. It does not necessarily mean bird in the modern sense of avian. It makes no claim about evolutionary relationships.

There's another category of creatures the Torah discusses in its kashrut discussions: the sheretz. which literally means things that crawl- it seemingly covers a variety of verminous creatures, including insects, lizards, and small mammals.


I bring this up because here the Gemara confronts the problem of the tinshemet, which is listed in Vayikra both among the non-kosher birds and among the non-kosher crawling things. It would be seemingly compatible with the Torah's classification of creatures to say that this was the same creature, which has the characteristics of both an Of, and a sheretz. But the Gemara instead uses the hermeneutical principle that a thing is understood in its context to conclude that the tinshemet bird and tinshemet vermin are different creatures.

Some Rabbis understand this to mean that these are two different creatures that have some similarity that leads to similar names. Like how a bearcat is neither a bear not a cat, but is called that because it has some similarities to both. I'm sure you can think of other examples. One example categorization is that the bird tinshemet is a bat, and the vermin tinshemet is a mole, which look similar other than the wings.

Others conclude that these are just completely different animals, which I'm sure you can also think of examples of- two animals with similar or identical names because both names are taken from a place name, for example.



The whole daf today is seemingly designed around not really intended to be understood completely. The Torah had a variety of names for birds, which were not necessarily the names that the Rabbis of the Talmudic era, a thousand years later, used for birds. And the names the Rabbis of the Talmud used were not necessarily the names the Rishonim used 500 years later and several thousand miles away. And the names the Rishonim used are not the names we use today. So as an intermediate link in the chain, the Amoraim are aware that any guidance they offer is going to be limited. They provide identifications of then-current names for birds, but don't really detail characteristics of those birds in much detail, and mostly they emphasize that this whole house of cards is dependent on the transmission of personal traditions about which birds are kosher.