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Masechet Chullin Daf 84/85/86/87/88/89
Feb. 24th, 2019 11:33 pmToday was my grandfather's yahrzeit. My father sponsored breakfast at his minyan. My uncle also came. He had recently found an old sefer my grandmother's father had been given to mark the yahrzeit of his mother, which apparently fell on the same Hebrew date as my grandfather's yahrzeit. A little spooky.
Even though I'm catching up on a lot of posting here, I actually have been learning the daf daily. I just haven't had time to sit down and write up what I learned. It was kind of an off-balance week, but I think this week will be more on balance.
Daf 84
The new perek, perek hei, is about kisui hadam, the mitzvah of covering blood of a slaughtered beast or bird with dirt. It's also about a bunch of fascinating semi-related digressions, and these posts might be more about the digressions than the actual mitzvah of kisui hadam. But anyway, kisui hadam is a separate positive commandment, so if you don't do it, the meat is still kosher. But it's still a mitzvah. It applies in the following circumstances:
You must do proper kosher shechitah
The animal must be either a nondomesticated kosher beast (a chayah) or a kosher bird, but not a domesticated kosher beast (a behemah)
The shechitah is not being done for a sacrifice
If this is the case, then you must do kisui hadam, which involves first shechting the animal so the blood spills onto loose dirt, and then you cover the blood with more loose dirt.
The mishna notes that kisui hadam is not required for sacrifices. The Gemara's first concern is how this is established. Obviously for chayas this is obvious because chayas are not offered as sacrifices, but for birds it's a question because two birds, the tor and the ben yonah, are offered as sacrifices.
One answer we could say is that we learn from the chaya the rule for birds. Since the same rule applies to both bird and chaya, and since the rule for chaya only applies for chullin, perhaps we learn that the rule for birds applies for chullin. But this is unsatisfactory as an answer.
Eventually, the straightforward answer is because sacrifices involve placing blood on the altar, it is impossible to do kisui hadam with a bird sacrificed on the altar. In order to establish this, the Gemara first teaches in the name of R' Zeira a new rule which does not appear in the Torah commandment, that there must be dirt both above and below the blood to fulfill the mitzvah of kisui hadam.
Having established this, it proves that a bird sacrificed cannot have kisui hadam done since it's forbidden to add dirt (or anything that adds to the structure) to the altar. The Gemara then explores the somewhat silly possibility that one could scrape the blood off the altar and then do kisui hadam, but the Gemara is able to save itself from this with a baraisa ruling out this as forbidden.
The Gemara moves on from here to an interesting aggada about eating meat. There's a running conversation in R' Linzer's shiur between R' Linzer and a woman who would like to understand Masechet Chullin as containing lessons about the ethical treatment of animals. Unfortunately there's kind of slim pickings in the literal reading of the Gemara here, but this is one of the places the conversation picked up on.
R' Elazar ben Azaria teaches that a person with little money should eat vegetables, a person with a little more money should eat fish, and a person with a lot of money should buy a small amount of meat, and a person with a huge amount of money should eat meat every day. At its most straightforward this is an aggadic teaching about parsimony and living within your means, but it also seems to have an interpretation where it's against over-consuming meat as an ecological principle, because R' Yochanan argues against R' Elazar on the grounds that for health reasons perhaps people should eat beyond their means.
Daf 85
The mishna teaches that you are not permitted to shecht a koy, an animal who as previously mentioned is a safek of whether it's a chaya or a behema, on yom tov because it's a safek whether you're required to cover its blood and covering its blood would be forbidden melacha if it is not a mitzvah. But if you do shecht it anyway on yom tov you are not required to cover the blood.
The Gemara uses this point to discuss certain general questions about how to approach safek about a d'rabbanan on yom tov, and it makes an analogy to a fascinating case- whether one can blow shofar for a "safek ish o safek isha" on Rosh Hashanah. You may have seen some of the posts going around the internet about how the Talmud has Six Genders. I'm not an expert on this subject, but it has struck me as a somewhat misleading way of framing it. Many halachos have different applications for men and women. The Gemara recognizes that there are some people that it does not know how to apply the categorization of man or woman, and it is interested in these cases, as it is interested in any case of uncertainty in categorization. But I'm not sure that "The Talmud has a gender system that consists of Male, Female, and a messy spectrum of uncertainty in-between that it parses out depending on the exact wording of Torah mitzvos that are explicitly written to be about Males and Females" communicates the same thing as "The Talmud conceives of at least six genders."
The next Mishna records a machlokess between Rabbi Meir and the Rabbis about whether one is obligated to do kisui hadam on a treifa, an animal which proper shechita was performed on but it is not permitted to be consumed. R' Meir says you are obligated, the Rabbis say you are not.
The Gemara teaches that actually this is connected to a similar dispute in the previous perek about oto v'et b'no and whether the mother being a treifa meant that shechting the child was not an aveira. In that case the Gemara recorded the opinion of the Rabbis that shechting the child was an aveira, and the opinion of R' Shimon that it was not.
The Gemara says that actually the consistent position of R' Meir in both cases is that the shechita of a treifa still is a valid shechita for purposes of both Oto v'et b'no and kisui hadam, and the consistent position of R' Shimon is that shechita of a treifa is not a valid shechita in both cases, and the difference between these mishnayos is that in the former case, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi sided with R' Meir that the evidence for his position was stronger, and in the latter case Rebbi sided with R' Shimon. And therefore he recorded R'Meir's position as the opinion of the Rabbis (that is, the majority opinion) on Oto v'et b'no and he recorded R' Shimon's position as the opinion of the Rabbis on kisui hadam.
The difference is that in the verse commanding kisui hadam, the language used includes specifically 'to eat', and this is convincing evidence for Rebbi that R' Shimon is right in this case.
Daf 86
In the first mishna of the whole masechta, the shechita of a cheresh, shoteh, or katan was forbidden unless they were supervised the whole time. If they were supervised, then there's a chiyuv in kisui hadam, but if they just shechted on their own, there's no chiyuv in kisui hadam.
This is mostly straightforward, except that the reason the shechita of a cheresh, shoteh or katan is forbidden is because we don't trust them to reliably maintain focus and know whether they've committed one of the five psulas. So there is the possibility that they did successfully do shechita, shouldn't you do kisui hadam as a just in case?
The answer seems to be that you don't do kisui hadam because you don't want to create the impression to others that you believe they did a valid shechita, because people might try to eat the meat.
Daf 87
One of the interesting things about kisui hadam is that legally speaking, it's almost completely separated from the associated shechita. You fail to do kisui hadam, you can still eat the meat. It's a separate mitzvah. And in a similar fashion, kisui hadam is not just incumbent on you as the shochet. If you fail to do kisui hadam and someone else sees your pile of blood, they are obligated to cover it. But you as the shochet do get first crack at it, as it were, which leads the Gemara to a digression about stealing the opportunity to do a mitzvah from someone else.
Rabban Gamliel teaches that if you steal the opportunity to do a mitzvah from someone, in other words, if there was some mitzvah that they for some reason had a right to get first crack at, and you jumped in without letting them get first crack and fulfilled the mitzvah, you owe them a ten gold piece fine!
There's a wacky story in which Rabbi Yehuda haNasi is approached by a heretic, possibly a proto-Christian, who brings a verse from Amos that he says proves there is more than one God or more than one incarnation of God. Rebbi immediately has a counterproof, then the heretic asks for three days to think of a reply. So he goes away and Rebbi spends the next three days fasting because these stories of interfaith squabbling often carry the risk of violent outcomes regardless of who wins the debate, and at the end of three days a different heretic shows up and tells Rebbi that actually, the other heretic killed himself. Rebbi is so happy that he offers the heretic a choice- either he'll let him say Birkas Hamazon over the meal Rebbi just finished to break his fast, or he'll give him forty gold pieces (ten for each of the four brachos of Birkas Hamazon). This ties back to Rabban Gamliel's teaching.
R' Linzer suggested that there were various things about this story that suggested it involved debate over Christian dogmas- the three days seems like the three days before Jesus returned, the specific verse in Amos could, if you squinted really hard at it, contain an allusion to the Trinity, etc... It's hard to be certain.
Daf 88
The last mishna in the perek concerns what kinds of 'dirt' can be used for kisui hadam. It lists a bunch of specific things that can or can't be used, but the basic principle seems to be that 'dirt' must be dirtlike in the following ways: it must be small particles, but not too fine, and it must be the sort of thing that plants could grow in.
The Gemara introduces a third category: Things that don't necessarily meet our expectation of what 'dirt' is, but which are described as 'dust' in the Tanakh. So gold dust is described as dust in Tanakh, so the Gemara teaches that if you have no other source of dust, you can grind up gold coins and use them for kisui hadam. This is weird, but kisui hadam is a weird mitzvah in general whose rationale is elusive.
As this was a short daf, R' Linzer's shiur spent some time discussing the kabbalistic/metaphysical meaning of kisui hadam. Some suggested that this idea of returning the organic matter of the blood to dirt that can grow plants is about participating in the cycle of life. R' Linzer also tried to draw a contrast to the blood of a murder victim, where there are psukim about the earth crying out to redeem the spilled blood. In the case of a murder victim, you're not supposed to cover the blood, so that it can speak for justice, but in the case of a properly shechted animal, covering the blood may be part of acknowledging the propriety of the act and its place in the natural order.
Daf 89
The perek closes out with some more midrash aggadah.
There's a really interesting midrashic connection between the story of Avraham and the war of the five kings and the mitzvot of tefillin and tzitzit. Genesis 14:23, at the end of the battle where Avraham's participation is decisive, he is offered a share of the spoils of war but says "I'll take not so much as a shoestring or leather shoestrap." The Gemara connects this to the parallel mitzvot of tzitzis and tefillin and says that Israel was given these mitzvot because of the merit of Avraham's action here.
Obviously all the mitzvot are for the benefit of the Jewish people, in that the performance of mitzvot are how we repair the world and perfect our presence in it, but what does it mean that we were given these two specific mitzvot because of the merit of Avraham?
The Gemara teaches that these two mitzvot provide specific personal benefit to the person who performs them. The tefillin, because R' Eliezer haGadol teaches that the tefillin are a siman to the other nations that God protects the Jewish people, and tzitzis because the techeilis are the same color as the Kisei haKavod that God sits upon, and thus the tzitzis when we wear them remind God of the Jewish connection to God's glory.
Even though I'm catching up on a lot of posting here, I actually have been learning the daf daily. I just haven't had time to sit down and write up what I learned. It was kind of an off-balance week, but I think this week will be more on balance.
Daf 84
The new perek, perek hei, is about kisui hadam, the mitzvah of covering blood of a slaughtered beast or bird with dirt. It's also about a bunch of fascinating semi-related digressions, and these posts might be more about the digressions than the actual mitzvah of kisui hadam. But anyway, kisui hadam is a separate positive commandment, so if you don't do it, the meat is still kosher. But it's still a mitzvah. It applies in the following circumstances:
You must do proper kosher shechitah
The animal must be either a nondomesticated kosher beast (a chayah) or a kosher bird, but not a domesticated kosher beast (a behemah)
The shechitah is not being done for a sacrifice
If this is the case, then you must do kisui hadam, which involves first shechting the animal so the blood spills onto loose dirt, and then you cover the blood with more loose dirt.
The mishna notes that kisui hadam is not required for sacrifices. The Gemara's first concern is how this is established. Obviously for chayas this is obvious because chayas are not offered as sacrifices, but for birds it's a question because two birds, the tor and the ben yonah, are offered as sacrifices.
One answer we could say is that we learn from the chaya the rule for birds. Since the same rule applies to both bird and chaya, and since the rule for chaya only applies for chullin, perhaps we learn that the rule for birds applies for chullin. But this is unsatisfactory as an answer.
Eventually, the straightforward answer is because sacrifices involve placing blood on the altar, it is impossible to do kisui hadam with a bird sacrificed on the altar. In order to establish this, the Gemara first teaches in the name of R' Zeira a new rule which does not appear in the Torah commandment, that there must be dirt both above and below the blood to fulfill the mitzvah of kisui hadam.
Having established this, it proves that a bird sacrificed cannot have kisui hadam done since it's forbidden to add dirt (or anything that adds to the structure) to the altar. The Gemara then explores the somewhat silly possibility that one could scrape the blood off the altar and then do kisui hadam, but the Gemara is able to save itself from this with a baraisa ruling out this as forbidden.
The Gemara moves on from here to an interesting aggada about eating meat. There's a running conversation in R' Linzer's shiur between R' Linzer and a woman who would like to understand Masechet Chullin as containing lessons about the ethical treatment of animals. Unfortunately there's kind of slim pickings in the literal reading of the Gemara here, but this is one of the places the conversation picked up on.
R' Elazar ben Azaria teaches that a person with little money should eat vegetables, a person with a little more money should eat fish, and a person with a lot of money should buy a small amount of meat, and a person with a huge amount of money should eat meat every day. At its most straightforward this is an aggadic teaching about parsimony and living within your means, but it also seems to have an interpretation where it's against over-consuming meat as an ecological principle, because R' Yochanan argues against R' Elazar on the grounds that for health reasons perhaps people should eat beyond their means.
Daf 85
The mishna teaches that you are not permitted to shecht a koy, an animal who as previously mentioned is a safek of whether it's a chaya or a behema, on yom tov because it's a safek whether you're required to cover its blood and covering its blood would be forbidden melacha if it is not a mitzvah. But if you do shecht it anyway on yom tov you are not required to cover the blood.
The Gemara uses this point to discuss certain general questions about how to approach safek about a d'rabbanan on yom tov, and it makes an analogy to a fascinating case- whether one can blow shofar for a "safek ish o safek isha" on Rosh Hashanah. You may have seen some of the posts going around the internet about how the Talmud has Six Genders. I'm not an expert on this subject, but it has struck me as a somewhat misleading way of framing it. Many halachos have different applications for men and women. The Gemara recognizes that there are some people that it does not know how to apply the categorization of man or woman, and it is interested in these cases, as it is interested in any case of uncertainty in categorization. But I'm not sure that "The Talmud has a gender system that consists of Male, Female, and a messy spectrum of uncertainty in-between that it parses out depending on the exact wording of Torah mitzvos that are explicitly written to be about Males and Females" communicates the same thing as "The Talmud conceives of at least six genders."
The next Mishna records a machlokess between Rabbi Meir and the Rabbis about whether one is obligated to do kisui hadam on a treifa, an animal which proper shechita was performed on but it is not permitted to be consumed. R' Meir says you are obligated, the Rabbis say you are not.
The Gemara teaches that actually this is connected to a similar dispute in the previous perek about oto v'et b'no and whether the mother being a treifa meant that shechting the child was not an aveira. In that case the Gemara recorded the opinion of the Rabbis that shechting the child was an aveira, and the opinion of R' Shimon that it was not.
The Gemara says that actually the consistent position of R' Meir in both cases is that the shechita of a treifa still is a valid shechita for purposes of both Oto v'et b'no and kisui hadam, and the consistent position of R' Shimon is that shechita of a treifa is not a valid shechita in both cases, and the difference between these mishnayos is that in the former case, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi sided with R' Meir that the evidence for his position was stronger, and in the latter case Rebbi sided with R' Shimon. And therefore he recorded R'Meir's position as the opinion of the Rabbis (that is, the majority opinion) on Oto v'et b'no and he recorded R' Shimon's position as the opinion of the Rabbis on kisui hadam.
The difference is that in the verse commanding kisui hadam, the language used includes specifically 'to eat', and this is convincing evidence for Rebbi that R' Shimon is right in this case.
Daf 86
In the first mishna of the whole masechta, the shechita of a cheresh, shoteh, or katan was forbidden unless they were supervised the whole time. If they were supervised, then there's a chiyuv in kisui hadam, but if they just shechted on their own, there's no chiyuv in kisui hadam.
This is mostly straightforward, except that the reason the shechita of a cheresh, shoteh or katan is forbidden is because we don't trust them to reliably maintain focus and know whether they've committed one of the five psulas. So there is the possibility that they did successfully do shechita, shouldn't you do kisui hadam as a just in case?
The answer seems to be that you don't do kisui hadam because you don't want to create the impression to others that you believe they did a valid shechita, because people might try to eat the meat.
Daf 87
One of the interesting things about kisui hadam is that legally speaking, it's almost completely separated from the associated shechita. You fail to do kisui hadam, you can still eat the meat. It's a separate mitzvah. And in a similar fashion, kisui hadam is not just incumbent on you as the shochet. If you fail to do kisui hadam and someone else sees your pile of blood, they are obligated to cover it. But you as the shochet do get first crack at it, as it were, which leads the Gemara to a digression about stealing the opportunity to do a mitzvah from someone else.
Rabban Gamliel teaches that if you steal the opportunity to do a mitzvah from someone, in other words, if there was some mitzvah that they for some reason had a right to get first crack at, and you jumped in without letting them get first crack and fulfilled the mitzvah, you owe them a ten gold piece fine!
There's a wacky story in which Rabbi Yehuda haNasi is approached by a heretic, possibly a proto-Christian, who brings a verse from Amos that he says proves there is more than one God or more than one incarnation of God. Rebbi immediately has a counterproof, then the heretic asks for three days to think of a reply. So he goes away and Rebbi spends the next three days fasting because these stories of interfaith squabbling often carry the risk of violent outcomes regardless of who wins the debate, and at the end of three days a different heretic shows up and tells Rebbi that actually, the other heretic killed himself. Rebbi is so happy that he offers the heretic a choice- either he'll let him say Birkas Hamazon over the meal Rebbi just finished to break his fast, or he'll give him forty gold pieces (ten for each of the four brachos of Birkas Hamazon). This ties back to Rabban Gamliel's teaching.
R' Linzer suggested that there were various things about this story that suggested it involved debate over Christian dogmas- the three days seems like the three days before Jesus returned, the specific verse in Amos could, if you squinted really hard at it, contain an allusion to the Trinity, etc... It's hard to be certain.
Daf 88
The last mishna in the perek concerns what kinds of 'dirt' can be used for kisui hadam. It lists a bunch of specific things that can or can't be used, but the basic principle seems to be that 'dirt' must be dirtlike in the following ways: it must be small particles, but not too fine, and it must be the sort of thing that plants could grow in.
The Gemara introduces a third category: Things that don't necessarily meet our expectation of what 'dirt' is, but which are described as 'dust' in the Tanakh. So gold dust is described as dust in Tanakh, so the Gemara teaches that if you have no other source of dust, you can grind up gold coins and use them for kisui hadam. This is weird, but kisui hadam is a weird mitzvah in general whose rationale is elusive.
As this was a short daf, R' Linzer's shiur spent some time discussing the kabbalistic/metaphysical meaning of kisui hadam. Some suggested that this idea of returning the organic matter of the blood to dirt that can grow plants is about participating in the cycle of life. R' Linzer also tried to draw a contrast to the blood of a murder victim, where there are psukim about the earth crying out to redeem the spilled blood. In the case of a murder victim, you're not supposed to cover the blood, so that it can speak for justice, but in the case of a properly shechted animal, covering the blood may be part of acknowledging the propriety of the act and its place in the natural order.
Daf 89
The perek closes out with some more midrash aggadah.
There's a really interesting midrashic connection between the story of Avraham and the war of the five kings and the mitzvot of tefillin and tzitzit. Genesis 14:23, at the end of the battle where Avraham's participation is decisive, he is offered a share of the spoils of war but says "I'll take not so much as a shoestring or leather shoestrap." The Gemara connects this to the parallel mitzvot of tzitzis and tefillin and says that Israel was given these mitzvot because of the merit of Avraham's action here.
Obviously all the mitzvot are for the benefit of the Jewish people, in that the performance of mitzvot are how we repair the world and perfect our presence in it, but what does it mean that we were given these two specific mitzvot because of the merit of Avraham?
The Gemara teaches that these two mitzvot provide specific personal benefit to the person who performs them. The tefillin, because R' Eliezer haGadol teaches that the tefillin are a siman to the other nations that God protects the Jewish people, and tzitzis because the techeilis are the same color as the Kisei haKavod that God sits upon, and thus the tzitzis when we wear them remind God of the Jewish connection to God's glory.