Masechet Chullin Daf 8

[seekingferret]

I'm pleased to have made it through a full week without falling behind. There haven't been a lot of comments on my Daf posts, which is fine, but I don't know if it's because people generally aren't interested in them or if it's because they don't understand them. So I'm declaring this an open post, please ask any questions you have about my previous Daf Yomi posts or the Talmud in general.


Daf 8

Finally we're back to discussion of shechitah. And whereas the initial shechitah discussion was primarily about who is permitted to shecht, and only incidentally covered some of the mechanics of shechitah, here we are for the first time directly discussing the process of shechitah. Now we're cooking.

And it's even physics adjacent shechitah process stuff! The gemara is curious how heat affects the halakha of shechitah, in a few ways.

First, Rabbi Zeira asks in the name of Shmuel, if you heat a knife until it's white hot, and then shecht, is the slaughter kosher? The concern is that the heat will damage body parts before the shechita is finished, and thus render the animal a trefah. But Shmuel says no, the sharpness of the knife trumps the heat- the knife's sharp edge will complete shechitah before the hot side wall of the knife can start doing damage to the trachea and esophagus, and once the knife starts cutting, the two sides of those tubes will separate from each other and pull away from the knife so they won't get burned then.

I'm not really sure why you would want to do this.

I think perhaps the two topics of today's daf are sort of backwards... because what comes next is a discussion of knives that have absorbed unkosher meat in previous shechting, and how to clean them of the residue so they can be used again in kosher shechting. The answer depends on exactly what kind of unkosher meat it was, whether it was used in an idolatrous sacrifice (in which case no amount of cleaning will help), whether it was used in shechting a kosher animal that turned out to be a treifah, in which case it can be cleaned simply with clean water according to Rabba bar bar Hannah, or cleaned by being soaked in boiling water, according to Rav. But the gold standard way of cleaning a knife that has been habitually used in shechting neveilah- animals slaughtered not in accordance with Jewish law- is libun. You heat the knife up until it's white hot so the unkosher material will de-absorb and be destroyed. So maybe Shmuel's question is whether, if you've kashered a treif knife by heating it, you need to wait for it to cool down before you can shecht with it. You can imagine that when trying to shecht a lot of animals efficiently, you might not want to wait until the metal has cooled down before using a knife again.

I have a lot of questions about the idea and mechanism of libun, and the general Talmudic idea of absorption of unkosher flavor, and how it relates to modern materials science, but I think the full discussion of this is going to be later in the masechet.


But this is for about the first time in Chullin practical halacha. Ordinary Jews in their kitchen need to think about utensils that have been treifed and how they can untreif them.

Comments

[lannamichaels]

I'm reading along and enjoying! I didn't manage all that long with podcasts (two weeks or so?) but now I've been thinking about tracking down some blogs since this is so much easier for me to follow.

[wendylove]

(Speaking only for myself, it's because I'm at a busy time of the semester and anyway I usually catch up on Saturday afternoons - of which there is very little this time of year. But I'm only like four dapim behind... )

thoughts/questions from a complete am haaretz

[78nanosieverts]

- under what circumstances would someone have to shecht a lot of animals and kasher the knife between each one? is this a case where you could assume that a shechted animal might be discovered to have been a treifa later, and so as a matter of course someone should be heating the knife each time just in case?

-skipping ahead a bit, in chullin 9a, the shochet should be examining the simanim afterwards. if there is burning damage from the knife, might that not make that examination difficult? (maybe this depends on whether the sides of the neck are physically pulled apart while cutting so that the sides of the knife never touch them? maybe it's super obvious if esophagus/trachea were cut and burn damage doesn't really matter?)

-this whole discussion brought me to watch a few "hot knife cuts [various items]" youtube compilations. it LOOKS like even the sharp edge of the knife being hot is enough to cause a bunch of burn/melting damage, but it's not entirely clear. either way, they're very satisfying to watch.

(also, re: why people aren't commenting on daf yomi posts-- I will be commenting more on them! I only just joined dreamwidth and so haven't seen them until now. thanks for writing.)

[melannen]

I have been reading them all and finding them very interesting and you're doing a really good job in explaining in a way that at least feels like I understand everything!

I am the one who does not even know enough to ask if it's appropriate to call myself the one who doesn't know to ask, though, so I am just reading and absorbing and don't feel like I have anything to say. But I would definitely miss them if you stopped!

Re: thoughts/questions from a complete am haaretz

[seekingferret]

1. There will be more on this topic later, so for the most part I think we'll just put a pin in it. I think Artscroll says most of the discussion is in Chapter 8, so... not for a while. My explanation of wanting to shecht a lot of animals without waiting for the knife to cool down is purely mine. Neither Rabbi Elefant nor Rabbi Linzer nor Artscroll featured an explanation for why one would want to do shechita with a knife that was just heated for Libun.

But I want to clarify that my explanation is not that you would have to kasher the knife between each shechita. A knife that's been heated to the point of libun may retain heat for a significant amount of time. So one could take a sakkin shel avodat kochavim, heat it, and then conceivably shecht several animals before it cooled down below yad soledet bo, the point where it is no longer hot to the touch.

The law if you shecht an animal that turns out to be a tereifa, as I mentioned, is that you can just clean the knife with water and move on, because the assumption is that at most there's just a thin residue of unkosher meat on the knife that you need to wipe off. Libun is called for in a case where a knife has habitually been used with unkosher meat and the assumption is that it's absorbed a significant amount of unkosher meat over time.


2. Forget might make that examination difficult. Burning damage from the knife qualifies as a hole in the tube, which is a disqualifying treifa. So yeah, the assumption here is that the knife is not damaging the simanim at all. I don't know whether that's a true assumption... Yad soledet bo is at lowest only 120F or so according to OU, https://oukosher.org/blog/kosher-professionals/master-list-of-temperatures/ , which is not really that hot, so perhaps what we're talking about is a knife that's hot but not hot enough to visibly damage the simanim unless you held it there for a while, and the answer is that since the whole shechitah process is supposed to be in one quick stroke, you're not holding it there long enough to do damage.

Welcome to Dreamwidth!

[seekingferret]

Fair enough. Feel free to ask questions even if you feel like you don't know what to ask. :)

[seekingferret]

I don't know of many. Adam Kirsch has a weekly blog at Tablet where he writes about some topic from the last week of Daf Yomi. https://www.tabletmag.com/author/akirsch And of course there are many text resources at https://www.dafyomi.co.il/main.php .

[seekingferret]

Don't feel pressure to comment, I'm posting for myself as a habit to keep me in the routine and force me to make sure I understand what I'm learning. I was just wondering if there was something I could do differently that would help others get more from what I'm posting.

Re: thoughts/questions from a complete am haaretz

[78nanosieverts]

ah, that makes more sense. I didn't follow at first but thank you for clarifying. looking forward to more!

[liv]

I am very very much interested in and enjoying your DY posts, but my life slightly imploded this week so I haven't been commenting on anything at all, let alone Gemara.

I have some responses to this particular post, though. This may be too Reform an attitude, but I'm not sure "why would you want to [shecht using a white-hot knife]?" is the right question. I mean, I quite like your theory that maybe someone had to re-kasher their knife and wanted to get on with using it before waiting for it to cool! But I don't get the impression that's what this discussion is really about.

To me, the question is more, what point of halachic principle are Chazal elucidating with the example of the white-hot knife? Based purely on your summary here, I think the key point is in fact that the sharpness of the knife trumps the heat. You're not allowed to burn the animal – that's halacha lemaaseh too. There have been several attempts in various European countries to ban "non-stun slaughter", which is a way of banning shechita and halal slaughter while disguising the fact that your aim is religious discrimination. So European Jews often have to argue to legislators that we can't use electrical stunning, because it causes burns and is forbidden, and this Gemara is key to that argument. So, given that we can't normally use anything burning hot in shechita, and we must use a properly sharp knife, which of the two rules dominates when a knife is both white-hot and very sharp? Shmuel: sharpness is more important than being at a non-damaging temperature.

And if a white-hot knife is permitted, then we can assume that a normally hot knife, let's say one that's been in the sun and is painful to touch, is also permitted. Whereas if they rule about about a more likely case of shechita with a hot knife, we might doubt whether that ruling applied to a knife that was really really hot.

[seekingferret]

I think you're pretty much on base, but I find this a somewhat unsatisfying answer, though I haven't really been able to put words on why. I think part of it is what 78nanosieverts pointed out above- the shochet still checks the simanim after shechitah, and if they do see a burn, surely they declare it a treifah regardless of what Shmuel said?

So even if Shmuel is teaching that l'chatchila you can shecht with a hot knife, it doesn't guarantee that it won't end up a trefah because of it. Unless what he's teaching is that you ignore any sign of burn damage on the simanim, because it must have happened after shechitah was completed. I don't think that's a likely conclusion.

[brainwane]

Like some of your other readers, I appreciate these posts even if I often don't quite understand them.

I'm declaring this an open post, please ask any questions you have about my previous Daf Yomi posts or the Talmud in general.

When did you start studying the Talmud? And is that even a sensical question to ask?

[seekingferret]

Heh, it's a sort of sensical question to ask.

I mean, you start teaching children Jewish law at a very early age, so that a) when they reach Bar/Bat Mitzvah, they an accept their obligation in mitzvot with an understanding of exactly what that is, and b)so that they can start following the law and not messing up their parents, i.e. at a certain age a child is old enough to understand that their parents don't turn on and off lights on Shabbat, so if they run around turning off lights in the house it will inconvenience their parents.

So in some sense I started learning the laws that are contained in the Talmud at a very, very early age, maybe four or five years old.

But my first encounter with the Talmud as an actual text to study was when I was thirteen or fourteen, shortly after Bar Mitzvah. If I'd gone to Day School, that's about the age I would have started learning Talmud in class, but I didn't, and my Hebrew school didn't teach Talmud, but my father had started going to a weekly Talmud class theoretically aimed at adults who didn't have much familiarity with Talmud, and he started taking me along. My first experience learning Talmud in a more formal academic setting was when I was fifteen at a Jewish summer program.