Masechet Chullin Daf 90

Daf 90

New perek is Gid Hanasheh, the forbidden sinew in the hindleg of animals. The mitzvah is a remembrance of Yaakov's wrestling with the angel. Yaakov was injured in this sinew, and therefore it is holy and we are forbidden to eat it.

The Mishna on the previous daf opens with what has become a standard Mishnaic formula to open prakim in Chullin. This Mitzvah applies in Israel and in Galus, it applies to Chullin and to Kodshim, it goes on and on in this manner. The same sort of formula opened the perek on oto v'et b'no and the perek on kisui hadam.

Nonetheless, the Gemara assumes there must be some chidush, some novel teaching, in the formula, so it tries to reason out why the Mishna says that it applies to kodshim when it's obvious that it applies to kodshim. Two explanations are explored in some depth: the first that it's teaching that in weird cases where a fetus inherits consecrated status from its consecrated mother, the prohibition of gid hanasheh still has some sort of priority. The second, which is more intuitive, is that it's a teaching about a Tannaitic dispute over whether gid hanasheh applies to olah offerings, which are burnt rather than eaten. Rabbi Yehuda haNasi teaches that the gid is burnt with the rest of the olah, whereas the Rabbis teach it is separated and tossed in the ash heap.

This leads to a short but fascinating detour where they bring down a Midrash about the vast size of the temple ashheap, and then Rava dismisses it as an exaggeration. The Gemara then detours to discuss the fact that Torah and Rabbinic literature does in fact contain exaggeration and hyperbole and metaphor, and the Rabbis are aware of this! This is really critical because the Talmud is a collection of legalistic close readings of texts, and if you apply these procedures on texts that are not meant to be read literally, you can run into dangerous places. The Talmud is emphatically not about Biblical literalism. It's about the teaching of the Oral Traditions of how to properly understand the Law.

New Vid

Title: In An MMMBop They're Gone
responsible for the lack of consistency in title block from vid to vid: seekingferret
Fandom: Avengers: Infinity War
content notes: spoilers, extreme crack, character death
Song: MMMBop by Hanson
Time: 0:47

"In An MMMBop They're Gone" (Watch on YouTube)

Masechet Chullin Daf 91

Daf 91

The Mishna said that it doesn't matter which of the rear legs the gid hanasheh comes from, it's equally forbidden. But the Gemara brings an alternate opinion of Rabbi Yehuda that only the gid hanasheh from the right rear leg is forbidden. Why? Because the pasuk where this commandment is brought down after the story of Yaakov wrestling with the angel says "hayarech", the thigh. Because of the definite article, he understands it to only be referring to one particular thigh, not either thigh.

Why the right thigh? Essentially because the right is considered the dominant, but Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi takes a fascinating leap and tries to learn out the halacha from the story of Yaakov's wrestling match. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says that when two people are grappling with each other and their hands are around each other in order to try to throw the other two the ground, the natural default position is with the hands on the right hand of the opponent, and therefore this must have been what happened there.

Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani and Rabbi Shmuel bar Aha then offer alternate explanations which are similar in some ways and different in others. Both say that before the wrestling began Yaakov and the Angel would have been walking next to each other and Yaakov would have been to the left of the Angel, and therefore his right side was exposed to the Angel. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani says this is because the Angel was associated with Esav and the Rabbis teach that when a Jew is walking with a goy, the Jew should walk to the left because it's a better defensive position. Rabbi Shmuel bar Aha says this is because Yaakov recognized that the Angel was an Angel and the Rabbis teach that when a Jew is walking next to a gadol, they should walk to the left to give primacy to the gadol. Either way, the result is the gid hanasheh on the right side is the one involved in the story and thus the prohibited one according to Rabbi Yehudah.

The Rabbis simply say that they understand both thighs to have been injured in the fight, but what they're really saying, I think, is that they understand the verse to not be specifically talking about one gid hanasheh but about any gid hanasheh, and therefore since there isn't actually any clear evidence in the story of Yaakov's fight they feel welcome to interpret the fight anyway that makes sense to them.


The Gemara continues with some less halakhically significant aggadah about Yaakov and his fight with the angel.

A Midrash teaches that the reason the Malach said he had to leave at dawn was that his turn had come up and it was going to finally be his opportunity to go up to heaven and sing God's praises. The Midrash expands on this that according to Rav Chananel, angels have a rotation of which angel sings the praises of God every day, and they are limited in how they sing the praises of God. And because of this rotation, a particular angel only gets to sing praises to God once per day, or some say once per week, or some say once per month, or some say once per year, or some say once per yovel cycle. (Or some say once per Jeremy Bearimy?)

In contrast, Jews can sing God's praises any time we want to, whenever we feel inspired, and our praises go up to the heavens.

The Jewish people are more dear to the Holy One, Blessed be He, than the ministering angels, as the Jewish people may recite a song of praise to God at any time, but ministering angels recite a song of praise only one time per day...