Seeking Ferret

The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson is very good, and very full of plot, and has a ton of amazing characters and it handles integrating the new ones in really skillful ways and it never goes where you expect it to go, and the last hundred pages even take a surprising dip toward more hopefulness than I expected, and it was extremely enjoyable to read, but man does it cliffhang hard. Though the author's notes at the end say that Book 3 is already written, so that's good news.

My biggest ding on it is some first person sections from Xate Yawa that I don't think served the story well.

I was just emailed a weekend coupon to the local kosher pizzeria. I... don't know what to do with that.

A zissen pizzach to all!

I guess I do know what to do with that. :P

Daf 141

The language of the commandment of shiluach haken is of a negative mitzvah followed by a positive. First it says "You shall not take the mother bird." Then it says "You shall surely send away the mother bird."

Mitzvot in this configuration have a few possible interpretations. One is that they're just separate mitzvot entirely. Sometimes even though they're juxtaposed there's no reason to consider them together.

Sometimes, it's a reinforcement, to suggest this is a mitzvah to take particularly seriously, or that when it's in conflict with another mitzvah, you prioritize this one.

Sometimes, there's a concept of a positive mitzvah that nullifies a negative mitzvah. Meaning you violate the negative mitzvah, which would incur a punishment of lashes, but if you perform the positive mitzvah before you receive the punishment, it nullifies the violation and you don't incur lashes. A couple examples mentioned here are theft, where the mitzvah of not stealing is followed by a mitzvah of restitution which nullifies lashes as the punishment, and (relevant to the season, probably going to discuss it when I make my siyum tomorrow), korban pesach, where you cannot leave over any meat, but if you do leave over meat and then burn it in the morning, you do not incur lashes.

The Rabbis suggest that shiluach haken is such a mitzvah. You can't take the mother bird, but if you do, you're okay as long as you send it away afterward. Rabbi Yehuda disagrees.

I think, and some mefarshim support me, that their disagreement is a fundamental one that's actually the #1 FAQ of shiluach haken. Is this a contingent mitzvah, or is it an affirmative obligation? Meaning, say you don't want to eat birds eggs, and you come across a nest. Do you have to send away the mother bird and take the eggs anyway, because it's a mitzvah, or is it only if you need the eggs? Rabbi Yehuda thinks that the mitzvah of sending away the mother is an independent obligation, so if you see a nest, there is a mitzvah to approach, send away the mother, and then take the eggs. The Chachamim think that sending away the mother is just a subordinate positive mitzvah that nullifies the main negative mitzvah of not taking the mother bird. Thus if you don't want the eggs, you don't have to do it.

Rabbi Yehuda's position is perhaps surprising. Intuitively we think of shiluach haken as being a mitzvah to teach us about empathy. If we're concerned about the feelings of the mother bird, it can help us attune to the feelings of others around us in general. But it's also just a chok in general, with inexplicable halakhic parameters and most significantly and strangely, one of the only promises in the Torah that if you observe this mitzvah, this one particular mitzvah, you will live a long life. Rabbi Yehuda's position is more in tune with this mysterious aspect of the mitzvah.

Today I will finish the masechta except for the last bit, which I will hold off to learn tomorrow morning at minyan so that we can eat a festive seudah and the firstborns do not need to fast Erev Pesach.

Thanks to everyone who's been reading along and commenting, and Chag Sameach to all!

Daf 140

How do we know that shiluach haken applies only to kosher birds? Says Rabbi Yitzhak, there are multiple words in Biblical Hebrew for bird, and the word צִפּוֹר is only used to refer to kosher birds. This is not the most obvious way to understand the word צִפּוֹר in the many, many contexts in which Chumash uses the word, so it takes the Gemara a while to be satisfied on a narrower agreement with Rabbi Yitzhak's idea: We can assume צִפּוֹר unqualified means kosher bird without doing any serious damage to our canons of interpretation, but anytime צִפּוֹר is modified by some other word, like כנף, it is understood to be referring to a broader class of birds or flying things. We go through a lot of Bible verses before accepting that, though. A lot of Bible verses.

Interestingly, this translational question is a topic I wrote about several years ago while dealing with wildly different issues. When I wrote about Gerald Schroeder's The Science of God, I mentioned his claim that the word עוֹף is the Torah's word to refer to generic flying things, while צִפּוֹר is the Torah's word for birds, which I dismissed as not inherently true. Sometimes עוֹף must be understood more narrowly. Sometimes צִפּוֹר is is not the generic word for bird, it's a specific word for kosher birds. Schroeder was trying to solve a very different problem- Bereishis's timing of when God created birds does not align exactly with present day evolutionary theorists' best guess of when birds evolved. A particular translation of עוֹף and צִפּוֹר made his life easier, and that translation was congruent with the understanding of some mefarshim, so that was enough for him. But he was trying to come up with a resolution without confronting the full complexity of the translational challenge. I wasn't saying Schroeder was wrong, just that his answer was glib. The Rabbis are not so easily satisfied.

Yesterday was an unbalanced and unbalancing day.

My dad's cousins organized the tombstone unveiling for my great-aunt and great-uncle, who died about a month apart last summer. The unveiling was out in Philadelphia. I drove over to my parents house and we drove down together in the morning. After the graveside ceremony, there was lunch and watching the Masters finale and reflecting on two amazing peoples' lives.

I got home around 3PM feeling exhausted. I'd hoped to get most of my Pesach cleaning done, but I managed less than hoped. This also is hard to plan because of Pesach falling on a Friday this year. Normally, if I convert the kitchen over on Sunday, I only have to make do without a kitchen for a couple chametzdik days before Pesach starts, but this year I was reluctant to fully commit to the conversion and be without a kitchen for a whole week. I cleaned and put away my chametzdik dishes yesterday, and plan to use paper/plastic the rest of the week, but I haven't put away all my cooking utensils yet and I think I'm going to clean/convert more and more of my kitchen each night in gradual stages. If that works out, great. If not, Thursday's gonna be frantic. :P

I took the Jeopardy online test again last night. They never tell you how you did, so who knows, but I felt confident on about 45 of the 50 questions and may have gotten another one or two right. I definitely missed two I should have gotten, a chemistry question and a whiskey question. And in checking afterward, I got a couple of my wild guesses right, which is always a nice feeling.

Tuesday night was Puzzled Pint, which doubled as my birthday party. We had an unwieldy team of 7 people as a result, so I only got to look at one and a half of the puzzles and the meta, and we were done pretty quickly. But that was fine, it meant the rest of the night we got to just relax and hang out. The main puzzle I worked on was a double crossword, which is a puzzle type I really enjoy, but layout was a bit annoying to manipulate.

Daf 134

A goy slaughters a cow, they don't need to give the matanos to a kohen. Duh, that's obvious. The goy converts, then he has to give the matanos to a kohen. Similarly obvious. What if there's a safek whether his cow was shechted before or after his gerus? It's a silly question, ignore that, it's not even the silliest question on the page, the point is to explore the handling of edge cases.

The halakha is that because there's a safek, he doesn't have to give matanos, because in matters of monetary debts, if there's a safek you don't have to pay.

The Gemara raises an objection from a case of droppings for the poor. If you have animal holes in your field that grain might fall into, then if you have grain in the holes, it's possible you dropped it while harvesting, in which case you're required to leave them for the poor, or it's possible that they fell on their own earlier, in which case they belong to you and you don't have to leave them. Since it's a safek, you have to leave them for the poor. What's different between the two cases?

It might be as simple as the distinction I mentioned about the last page. The gifts for the poor are tzedaka, you should go out of your way in a case of doubt to help them live secure well-fed lives. The gifts for the kohanim, even though they're still part of the primary livelihood of the kohanim, are gifts intended to honor the exalted position of the kohanim, so in cases of doubt the principle of tzedaka doesn't tip the balance on the safek.

But the Gemara also attempts a broader structure to the question. What is the difference between situations where we are lenient on a safek, vs. where we are machmir on a safek?

Amar Rav Chisda, and also Rav Chiyya, there are eight cases of safek involving a ger and uncertainty about when some action happened with respect to their gerus, and in four of them we are mekil and in four of them we are machmir. The cases where we are machmir include taking challah, and bringing the firstborn animal to be redeemed. The difference is that supposing the worst case of the safek were true, in these cases one would end up violating a d'oraysa prohibition connected to the Temple worship, eating the bread that was tevel, or gaining benefit from an animal dedicated to the Temple. But the cases where one can be mekil on a safek are cases like the matanos, which are chullin, and the pidyon haben, which is just a debt of money.

How does this relate to the leavings of the field? Well, either you dismiss the ruling that you hold differently in the case of the poor, as Rabbi Yochanan tries to do, or you have to say that in some way tzedaka is a sufficient mitzvah that the obligation to give to the poor is not a mere financial obligation but it's a substantial devotional obligation.


In the last bit of the perek, the Gemara defines the zroa and the halachayim, with some nice callbacks to the first perek of Chullin in the definition of the jaw in relationship to the location of shechita on the neck of the animal. Which I definitely don't remember in much detail at this point four months latter. :P

I'm about a hundred pages into The Monster Baru Cormorant, which finally came off hold at the library. Traitor eventually becomes incredibly bleak and despairing; Monster starts off that way and so far has been pretty unrelenting. Oh, man, the map... You know how the map at the start Traitor was hilarious and full of insights into how Baru looks at the world, and basically it was my favorite fantasy map ever? The map for Monster is just full of emotional daggers- both Taranoke and Duchy Vultjag are marked 'my home', and Duchy Vultjag is also marked 'hers'. Treatymont is marked 'Fuck this place.' Dickinson manages to say so much with so little yet again, and he is aiming to wreck you. The book's epigram is "If something hurts, does that make it true?"

But it's also twisty and complicated and beautiful in most of the ways that Traitor was, so it's been a pretty great read so far. All the new characters have lurking depths, all the returning characters are so vividly themselves, Baru is radiantly terrible... I'm excited to keep reading.

Drawing the Line by Edwin Danson


A really neat, incredibly nerdy book about the construction of the Mason Dixon line. It mentions the Civil War and slavery perhaps twice in the whole book. Because it is not a book about the cultural significance of the Mason Dixon line. Danson is a surveyer, and Drawing the Line is quite literally about drawing the line, the technical and political and physical challenges involved in the creation of the Mason-Dixon line, which after nearly a century of political and legal wrangling settled decisively the boundary between the Pennsylvania colony and the Maryland Colony, a scant few years before the American Revolution.

The important context for Danson is the massive leaps forward in surveying technology in the mid 18th century associated with the development of telescope technology, measurement instrument technology, and Earth exploration. A lot of this was tied up with the so-called 'Longitude problem', how to inexpensively and straightforwardly calculated one's latitude at sea, quick enough and accurately enough to be useful for navigation. Before he was sent to America, Charles Mason was deeply involved at the Greenwich Observatory in one of the most significant efforts to solve the longitude problem, the cheaper but less accurate method known as the Method of Lunar Distances.

And so with the enhanced capabilities for surveying and generally for knowing where the hell on Earth one was at any given moment, the possibility for more accurately resolving boundaries in dispute was greatly expanded. Danson rarely steps back and thinks about the bigger picture of his story in any other than technical terms, but a boundary like the Mason-Dixon line was not really feasible before this moment in history. If you wanted a real boundary that everyone understood, you either needed a body of water in between, or you needed a wall- a boundary negotiated not on paper but by the actual physical markers. What Mason and Dixon accomplished was to resolve a boundary dispute arising from a theoretical boundary written on a piece of paper, by actually fully mapping the theoretically defined parallels and tangent lines of the legal proclamations, so accurately that nobody could argue.

It took them several years of painstakingly 'chaining' their way across the Mid-Atlantic, which means what it sounds like. Crews under Mason and Dixon's command had carefully calibrated chains of precise length and they would stretch the chain out on the ground in the specified direct and then mark the spot and bring over the next chain to continue the line. They did this for hundreds of miles, stopping every ten miles or so to take painstakingly precise astronomical measurements to confirm their physical location and adjust for errors in the chaining process with offset tables. After the chaining was done, Mason and Dixon would double back along the line they'd marked, fixing marked spots based on their offset tables, and permanently mark their lines.

The calibrations of the chains were variable with temperature and wear and tear, and subject to dozens of human errors in measurements, but per Danson (and I trust Danson, because the technical language of surveying he uses is so complicated that I have no choice but to accept his word) Mason and Dixon's line was remarkably straight.

The most exciting part of the story comes toward the end. The Proclamation of 1763, a British response to the economically and militarily costly Pontiac rebellion after the French and Indian war, forbid American colonists past the Alleghenies, to avoid antagonizing the Iroquois Confederacy and some of the other tribes of the area. But the lines on paper in the charters of Pennsylvania and Maryland extended about a hundred miles past that boundary. The colony governors sent representatives to negotiate with the native tribes to allow the surveyors to continue their work to the end of the line. The leaders of the confederacy were not stupid- it seems clear they recognized that the only possible intention of this survey was to pave the ground for later expansion of the colonies past the 1763 line, so they had armed detachments accompany the survey, both to make sure that tribes not affiliated with the Iroquois would not harass Mason and Dixon, and to make sure that the surveyors did not push too far into Iroquois territory. Ultimately, they stopped the survey thirty or forty miles short of its targeted goal. Danson suggests this was the result of confusion or misrepresentation by the colonial negotiators, that the natives did not have a clear comprehension of what '100 miles past the 1763 line' was and the negotiators had as a clarifier suggested that the survey extend to a particular river as the boundary, in congruence with what I mentioned above about how pre-Mason and Dixon boundaries were dependent on physical lines to define their meaning. But I think it's also possible from Danson's account that the Iroquois refusal to let Mason and Dixon complete their survey was about asserting their dominance and refusing to let the British colonists establish the foothold they desired beyond the 1763 line. Danson does a good job of conjuring up the tension of the situation as the surveyors pushed increasingly deep into forbidden territory.


In any case, the other story Danson tells well, because he was blessed with Charles Mason's fabulously detailed journals of his surveying adventures, is the story of Mason falling in love with the Maryland/Pennsylvania countryside and falling in love with America as he surveys the land. Many of my favorite passages in the book are preceded by Danson's mention again of Mason's restlessness, which always leads to him grabbing a horse and riding off on an adventure- to Virginia, to New York, to Philadelphia, always meeting new and interesting people to talk math and astronomy with. Sadly, Danson's documentation on Dixon is far sketchier, leading him to dismiss him as fascinating but mysterious.

But if you want to read 200 pages of blow by blow summaries of an incredibly historically significant surveying expedition, you'll enjoy this book. I recognize that might be a small subset of people.

Daf 130

The subject of the new perek is the matanos, the gifts that are owed to the kohanim from every chullin behema you shecht, which consist of the z'roa, the halchayim, and the keva- the front leg, the jaw, and the stomach. The Mishna says the law in still in effect outside Israel and after the Temple was destroyed, which I guess makes sense by the letter of the law but seems logistically unwieldy. Artscroll footnote says there's a lenient position later in the Gemara that says that you don't need to do this chutz la'aretz, and I guess Ashkenazim hold that way by a selective reading of the Rema? Googling around I found kehuna.org which appears to be an advocacy group arguing for restoring as much of the kohen's special privileges as possible in galus, and which claims that they are being denied the cow stomachs that are rightfully theirs. They also seem to say that challah is rightfully theirs, so I guess if they're right I should mail some dough to Brooklyn every time I make challah.

The rest of the Mishna discusses two types of consecrated animals with blemishes that therefore can't be offered as sacrifices and must be monetarily redeemed. The former class had a blemish before they were consecrated. Thus it was never possible for them to be truly consecrated, and when they are redeemed, they regain most of the properties as if they were always chullin, including being obligated in the matanos. The latter class got the blemish after being consecrated, and they even after redemption retain a lot of the properties of kodshin, including being exempted from the matanos.