(no subject)

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

Masechet Chullin Daf 139

Daf 139

In Gemara logic this makes sense: The Mishna said that shiluach haken does not apply to kodshin. Therefore there must have been a type of consecrated bird that we might have thought shiluach haken did apply to. But you shiluach haken applies to wild birds, not to birds you already own, but you can't consecrate birds that you don't own, so no normal kodshin would be eligible for shiluach haken anyway. You might say that's the point, that's how the Mishna derived the fact that it does not apply to kodshin, but you could derive that without the Mishna explaining it explicitly so it must exist to teach some other case.

Rav and Shmuel both have slightly different versions of the same explanation: It was a domesticated bird that you owned and consecrated, and then it escaped before you could actually bring it to the Beis Hamikdash. Having established its own nest in the wilderness, you come across it, realize that it's your old bird that you consecrated, and therefore though you might think that the mitzvah of shiluach haken applies, comes the Mishna to tell you that it's exempted because of your prior consecration.

In Rav's version, it's a dove designated to be a sacrifice. In Shmuel's version, it's a hen designated for Temple maintenance. If we hold by Shmuel, Rav's position is a kal vachomer. But if we hold by Rav, we make a distinction where if you designate a bird merely for temple maintenance and it's then lost, it loses the status of being kodshin.

This leads the Gemara off on a merry detour about what happens in various situations where you lose consecrated property before it makes it to serve its designated function. There's all sorts of different answers for different situations. Sometimes you need to redeem your offering with a monetary redemption, sometimes not, sometimes if you recover the lost property later you have to bring it to the Beis Hamikdash, sometimes you don't. Sometimes the difference is as simple as how you phrased your neder. If you said you designated it "alay", on your behalf, then you have to make it up, but if you used various circumlocutions that mean the same exact thing, maybe you don't. The Gemara doesn't really understand the magic of 'alay', and neither do I. I guess if you build a system around the formal power of words to change the metaphysical status of objects, you're subject to the seemingly arbitrary rules of the system.