Masechet Chullin Daf 10
Dec. 7th, 2018 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 10
The Talmud has this concept of Uncovered Water, which says that one should not leave drinking water uncovered for fear that a snake would crawl in while we're not looking, leave venom behind, and make the water poisonous. Modern halacha essentially ignores this concept- Tosafot say we live in a society that doesn't have snakes as commonly, and the prohibition was only based on concern about the danger.
Rabbi Linzer says it seems pretty likely, based on the fact that modern biology says that snakes don't leave poison behind in this way, that the Rabbis were creating a rule about protecting from germs and other microscopic contamination in a society that didn't have the germ theory. They knew that if you left a liquid uncovered for a while and then drank, you got sick. They knew it was happening by an unseen mechanism, and they knew that snakes darted in and out of things and some were venomous. So they concluded that it was caused by unseen snakes. Nowadays we know that unseen snakes is not a thing, so instead the halacha is that we observe proper hygiene as guided by the germ theory. And I'm inclined toward Rabbi Linzer's approach as a scientist myself.
But if you ask a more traditional scholar of Talmud than Rabbi Linzer, they'll tell you it was snakes. The Gemara said it was snakes, it was snakes. And look, I don't know, maybe it really was snakes. Buildings were a lot more open back then, and nature hadn't been routed to the degree it was today, so there were probably snakes all over the place. And in that era of tzaraat and divinely ordained plagues, the correlation between a person's sin and their punishment was a lot clearer. So maybe it was snakes, I have no way of falsifying the theory.
(c.f. Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream)
But that's not the important topic on this daf. The important topic is safek, or doubt. If we don't know whether something happened or not, what is the halakha?
The big idea on this page is a concept called Chazaka, which Rabbi Linzer renders as status quo, but usage also means something like 'presumption' or 'presumed state'. An object essentially has a halachic status quo, then something may or may not have happened that could alter that status quo. In many cases, we say that if there's a safek, then the status quo remains in place. This might be the more machmir position and it might be the more lenient position, depending on what the original status quo was. Note that the first thing the Gemara establishes is that Chazaka only works as a principle in purely legalistic halakhic situations where we apply formal rules. In the case of the snakes in the water, we don't rely on Chazaka because there is legitimate danger involved, so we have to make an actual real world assessment of the danger.
Daf 11 is going to go into a different strategy for resolving a safek, Rov, which means we go by the majority. This whole thing is very complicated and you should not rely on what I'm saying about it. I worry in general that these posts focus more on the snakes in the water than the chazakas, because Daf Yomi is fast-paced and I am not that skilled a halakhic thinker when it comes to the principles of law, so I talk more about the easy and amusing stuff. I'm trying to cover the more complex legal issues too, but this discussion will be at a fairly simple level.
But the idea that the Gemara seems to be trying to establish on this page is that we have this principle of Chazaka, but how doubtful does a doubt need to be for us to go by this principle? Is it any .0001% chance that something went wrong, or is it, you know, a general, reasonable doubt?
Needless to say, that answer is that it depends, and that there is disagreement. The case is of a knife with a nick. The shochet checked before shechita, it was clean and had no nicks. After shechita, the shochet checks again and there is a nick. We inspect the simanim and they appear kosher. But we have a safek about whether the knife got its nick before the simanim were cut (the hide of the animal damaged the blade as it went in) or after (the knife cut bones of the animal afterward but before the inspection). The law holds in most cases by Rav Huna, who says that the animal is not kosher because it had the status of unkosher before the shechita and the doubt is enough to make us say that because of the Chazaka the animal is considered a treifa.
But in the process of establishing that we hold by Rav Huna, the Gemara interrogates his opposing, more lenient opinion from Rav Chisda, and it emerges from this discussion that in most situations, we need the safek to be a real safek. It can't be one of these 0.0001% doubts, there has to be a legitimate basis for concern that the thing could have happened.
The Talmud has this concept of Uncovered Water, which says that one should not leave drinking water uncovered for fear that a snake would crawl in while we're not looking, leave venom behind, and make the water poisonous. Modern halacha essentially ignores this concept- Tosafot say we live in a society that doesn't have snakes as commonly, and the prohibition was only based on concern about the danger.
Rabbi Linzer says it seems pretty likely, based on the fact that modern biology says that snakes don't leave poison behind in this way, that the Rabbis were creating a rule about protecting from germs and other microscopic contamination in a society that didn't have the germ theory. They knew that if you left a liquid uncovered for a while and then drank, you got sick. They knew it was happening by an unseen mechanism, and they knew that snakes darted in and out of things and some were venomous. So they concluded that it was caused by unseen snakes. Nowadays we know that unseen snakes is not a thing, so instead the halacha is that we observe proper hygiene as guided by the germ theory. And I'm inclined toward Rabbi Linzer's approach as a scientist myself.
But if you ask a more traditional scholar of Talmud than Rabbi Linzer, they'll tell you it was snakes. The Gemara said it was snakes, it was snakes. And look, I don't know, maybe it really was snakes. Buildings were a lot more open back then, and nature hadn't been routed to the degree it was today, so there were probably snakes all over the place. And in that era of tzaraat and divinely ordained plagues, the correlation between a person's sin and their punishment was a lot clearer. So maybe it was snakes, I have no way of falsifying the theory.
(c.f. Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream)
But that's not the important topic on this daf. The important topic is safek, or doubt. If we don't know whether something happened or not, what is the halakha?
The big idea on this page is a concept called Chazaka, which Rabbi Linzer renders as status quo, but usage also means something like 'presumption' or 'presumed state'. An object essentially has a halachic status quo, then something may or may not have happened that could alter that status quo. In many cases, we say that if there's a safek, then the status quo remains in place. This might be the more machmir position and it might be the more lenient position, depending on what the original status quo was. Note that the first thing the Gemara establishes is that Chazaka only works as a principle in purely legalistic halakhic situations where we apply formal rules. In the case of the snakes in the water, we don't rely on Chazaka because there is legitimate danger involved, so we have to make an actual real world assessment of the danger.
Daf 11 is going to go into a different strategy for resolving a safek, Rov, which means we go by the majority. This whole thing is very complicated and you should not rely on what I'm saying about it. I worry in general that these posts focus more on the snakes in the water than the chazakas, because Daf Yomi is fast-paced and I am not that skilled a halakhic thinker when it comes to the principles of law, so I talk more about the easy and amusing stuff. I'm trying to cover the more complex legal issues too, but this discussion will be at a fairly simple level.
But the idea that the Gemara seems to be trying to establish on this page is that we have this principle of Chazaka, but how doubtful does a doubt need to be for us to go by this principle? Is it any .0001% chance that something went wrong, or is it, you know, a general, reasonable doubt?
Needless to say, that answer is that it depends, and that there is disagreement. The case is of a knife with a nick. The shochet checked before shechita, it was clean and had no nicks. After shechita, the shochet checks again and there is a nick. We inspect the simanim and they appear kosher. But we have a safek about whether the knife got its nick before the simanim were cut (the hide of the animal damaged the blade as it went in) or after (the knife cut bones of the animal afterward but before the inspection). The law holds in most cases by Rav Huna, who says that the animal is not kosher because it had the status of unkosher before the shechita and the doubt is enough to make us say that because of the Chazaka the animal is considered a treifa.
But in the process of establishing that we hold by Rav Huna, the Gemara interrogates his opposing, more lenient opinion from Rav Chisda, and it emerges from this discussion that in most situations, we need the safek to be a real safek. It can't be one of these 0.0001% doubts, there has to be a legitimate basis for concern that the thing could have happened.