Festivids!

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I received an amazing Nailed It vid that captures the glorious failure aesthetic of the show with the perfect song. Go watch it and bask in its beauty:

Tubthumping (6 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Nailed It! (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Nicole Byer, Jacques Torres
Summary:

They (or their cakes) get knocked down, but they get up again.

I made three vids. If you can guess one of them, and weren't already spoiled for that vid, I'll make you a vidlet for a fandom of your choice.

Masechet Chullin Daf 54/55/56

Daf 54

The Gemara continues to discuss treifas that are not tears. There's a callback to the original question at the start of the perek about whether there are 18 treifas or not.

A hunter is described, Yosef the Hunter, who would shoot deer in the gid hanasheh, and likewise Rav Pappa bar Abbah would shoot deer in the kidneys. When doing so, the animal would die.

IF the idea of treifa is that an animal has an internal wound that would result in its death on its own if it were not shechted, then these would be treifas. But they, and nothing like them, is described in the Mishna's list of 18 treifas, or even in the extended lists from the first Gemara after the Mishna. So the question is do we have a full enumeration of the treifas in the Mishna, or is the Mishna expounding on a categorization that further items could be added to if they meet the requirements? Or even deeper of a question, is treifa purely halakha l'Moshe MiSinai or is it something where we use empirical evidence to decide?

The general approach of the Gemara seems to be to lean as much as possible on the idea of treifa as halakha l'Moshe MiSinai. Their answer to the case of the gid hanashe and the kidney is to say that these are not treifas because if one applied some sort of medicine to the wound they could heal. Rabbi Linzer argues that this could be a limiting principle on the part of the Gemara to avoid opening the door to an ever widening array of possible treifas.

Daf 55

Very often in this perek the Gemara uses the 'issar' as a limit. The issar was an ancient coin, it's described as the issar italki meaning presumably it's a Roman mintage. It seems to be a comparatively small coin in size. In various cases, if a hole in an organ is smaller than an issar, it does not invalidate the organ, but if it's bigger than an issar it does invalidate the organ as a treifa. But what if it's exactly an issar?

The Gemara brings a ruling from Rav Nachman that it tries to generalize as meaning that in all cases where the word 'ad' - until- is used, the 'ad' does not include the exact amount. In other words, if a poster says "Anyone up to 5' tall cannot ride', Rav Nachman would understand it to mean that a person who is exactly 5' tall would be able to ride.

The Gemara tries to suggest that 'ad' is ambiguous depending on the rest of the phrase, but is not able to prove purely through linguistics that we couldn't just accept this putative Rav Nachman principle as a rule of interpretation. But then it finds some counterexamples where Rav Nachman holds one way in one case and another way in a different case.

The conclusion is that there is no universal linguistic principle of 'ad', so the interpretive principle guiding halakha is that in all cases, if the sizing is exact, we take the machmir approach, whether that be to include the exact size in the lower category or the higher category, except for d'rabbanan cases, where we can be mekil.


Daf 56

A new Mishna lists the treifos for birds. This is a much less extensive list than the list for animals, but the Gemara brings a Baraisa in the name of Levi that all the applicable treifos for animals apply to birds and this Mishna is only describing the treifos for birds that are different than the treifos for animals, or where one might think the treifa is different for birds so an explanation is needed.

So the Mishna discusses nikvos of the gizzard (treifa) and crop (kosher), for example, two organs that birds have but animals don't. And there's an extended and somewhat confusing discussion of a membrane around the brain of birds that is, I guess, more delicate on birds than on animals, so it can be a treifa. But the Gemara's not sure if all animals have this membrane or not, and if they do, if it's equally delicate on all birds. I think bird brains are so small that checking for this membrane seems very difficult to do, and difficult to ascertain whether a puncture happened before or after shechita. There are various post-shechita tests employed but they all seem somewhat ambiguous.