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Masechet Keritot Daf 4
Aug. 29th, 2019 08:02 amDaf 4
The Gemara is continuing to wrestle with its problem of enumeration, and more generally the question of when a particular prohibition that has multiple parts or multiple versions incurs multiple punishments, or if it's a prohibition that incurs karet b'mezid, when it incurs multiple chatat offerings when done b'shogeg.
Now it moves on to chelev, the forbidden fats. As we learned in Masechet Chullin, these are not the fats that are interspersed with meat, they are sheaths of fat that surround certain organs. They seem to be forbidden on chullin precisely because they are offered as part of certain sacrifices, and for this reason only the chelev of domesticated, kosher animals is forbidden.
The verse prohibiting eating chelev specifically mentions shor, kesev, or ez, ox, goat, or sheep. Rabbi Yishmael holds that this means that if you eat chelev from all three animals, you incur three punishments. The Rabbis hold that if you eat chelev from all three, you incur only one penalty. It is a little unclear here whether they are discussing karet/chatat or just the normal malkut for violating a lo ta'aseh.
What's the disagreement? The Gemara has several explanations, most of which it rejects. First, remember that Rabbi Yishmael is famously the formalist who developed the 13 Hermeneutical Principles of Torah Exegesis. The first theory is that he has a disagreement with the Rabbis on formal grounds about how to interpret a 'general prohibition'. Meaning, as a first principle, perhaps Rabbi Yishmael always thinks that if you have a prohibition with multiple parts covered with a single prohibition, you always punish separately for each part? The Gemara immediately rejects this as inconsistent with his formalism, but says that in this case, he thinks that the language of having three separate animals mentioned is superfluous and therefore not a simple 'general prohibition'.
Rabbi Yishmael thinks that they could have just forbid chelev stam, but the Rabbis point out that that would have also forbidden chelev of chayot, undomesticated kosher animals, so that's untenable. So Rabbi Yishmael suggests they could have just forbid chelev shor, the ox, and we would have generalized the prohibition from that, so therefore mentioning the goat and sheep must be there to prove that those are separate prohibitions. But ox is sometimes used as a generic term for domestic animal, including unkosher ones, say the Rabbis, and Rabbi Yishmael concedes the point. But then he holds that they could have just prohibited the chelev of sheep and we'd have generalized, and that seems to be the line he holds. In contrast, the Rabbis hold that if it had just mentioned a sheep, we would have assumed it was just forbidding the chelev of a sheep and not generalizing to all kosher domesticated animals, because a sheep has extra chelev in its tail that the other animals don't.
The Gemara is continuing to wrestle with its problem of enumeration, and more generally the question of when a particular prohibition that has multiple parts or multiple versions incurs multiple punishments, or if it's a prohibition that incurs karet b'mezid, when it incurs multiple chatat offerings when done b'shogeg.
Now it moves on to chelev, the forbidden fats. As we learned in Masechet Chullin, these are not the fats that are interspersed with meat, they are sheaths of fat that surround certain organs. They seem to be forbidden on chullin precisely because they are offered as part of certain sacrifices, and for this reason only the chelev of domesticated, kosher animals is forbidden.
The verse prohibiting eating chelev specifically mentions shor, kesev, or ez, ox, goat, or sheep. Rabbi Yishmael holds that this means that if you eat chelev from all three animals, you incur three punishments. The Rabbis hold that if you eat chelev from all three, you incur only one penalty. It is a little unclear here whether they are discussing karet/chatat or just the normal malkut for violating a lo ta'aseh.
What's the disagreement? The Gemara has several explanations, most of which it rejects. First, remember that Rabbi Yishmael is famously the formalist who developed the 13 Hermeneutical Principles of Torah Exegesis. The first theory is that he has a disagreement with the Rabbis on formal grounds about how to interpret a 'general prohibition'. Meaning, as a first principle, perhaps Rabbi Yishmael always thinks that if you have a prohibition with multiple parts covered with a single prohibition, you always punish separately for each part? The Gemara immediately rejects this as inconsistent with his formalism, but says that in this case, he thinks that the language of having three separate animals mentioned is superfluous and therefore not a simple 'general prohibition'.
Rabbi Yishmael thinks that they could have just forbid chelev stam, but the Rabbis point out that that would have also forbidden chelev of chayot, undomesticated kosher animals, so that's untenable. So Rabbi Yishmael suggests they could have just forbid chelev shor, the ox, and we would have generalized the prohibition from that, so therefore mentioning the goat and sheep must be there to prove that those are separate prohibitions. But ox is sometimes used as a generic term for domestic animal, including unkosher ones, say the Rabbis, and Rabbi Yishmael concedes the point. But then he holds that they could have just prohibited the chelev of sheep and we'd have generalized, and that seems to be the line he holds. In contrast, the Rabbis hold that if it had just mentioned a sheep, we would have assumed it was just forbidding the chelev of a sheep and not generalizing to all kosher domesticated animals, because a sheep has extra chelev in its tail that the other animals don't.