Masechet Chullin Daf 57/58/59
Jan. 27th, 2019 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 57
A really great example of the Gemara itself working through the question of what to do when a Rabbi's teaching is scientifically questionable.
The Mishna on the previous page listed treifas for birds. As I mentioned, it was a much shorter list than the Mishna at the start of the perek about treifas for animals. In particular, there is no mention of any treifas involving lungs. Nevertheless, the Gemara's assumption is that there can be treifas involving lungs, and in fact, halakha l'maaseh today is that the lungs are one of the only places on birds that we do affirmatively check for treifas even if we don't have any reason to suspect a treifa.
But Chizkiya makes a bold statement. Ein raya l'of. There are no lungs on a bird.
What!!!
Rabbi Yochanan immediately says wait a minute, there are lungs on birds. And for good measure he describes what they look like. So fine, we're not out on this ridiculous position for very long. But what is the Gemara doing bringing this ridiculous opinion that birds don't have lungs at all? That's what we're going to ask now.
The Gemara's first attempt to explain it is to go back to my note about the Mishna. The Mishna didn't mention lungs, so perhaps Chizkiya is trying to say not that birds don't have lungs, but that for halakhic purposes we treat birds as if they don't have lungs, i.e. we don't consider whether the lung might have a treifa.
But this is plainly not right, because again of the baraisa in the name of Levi that unless the anatomy is different, all the treifas of animals apply to birds. So the Gemara tries again.
So the Gemara's second attempt to explain it is to say that perhaps Chizkiya is saying that when it comes to the special halachos of treifa involving birds, lungs are not considered. There are special checks on the liver, heart, and gizzard of birds that have been exposed to fire to see if they've been damaged, for example. Perhaps Chizkiya is saying that we consider a bird as not having lungs for purposes of this analysis.
But the Gemara objects that this can't explain Chizkiya's statement because if that had been his meaning, Rabbi Yochanan would not have objected as he did, by saying that birds do have lungs and this is what they look like. Rabbi Yochanan was responding as if Chizkiya was stating that birds don't actually have lungs.
The Gemara brings a conclusion in the name of Rabbi Yosei ben Chanina that... Chizkiya just doesn't know much about chickens.
This is a really satisfying discussion of how to deal with statements in the Gemara that don't seem to match our scientific understanding. First, we do everything we can to try to understand them in a viable context, and when we've exhausted all of our options there, we can finally set aside the statement and conclude that it was based on an incorrect understanding of the science.
Daf 58
As I wrote yesterday, there's this notion that a treifa is an animal that meets certain technical qualifications- it has a wound on an internal organ that will result in it dying. And there's a notion that a treifa is an animal that meets certain arbitrary qualifications- Moshe taught a set of treifas and we just have that tradition of what the treifas are.
Here the Gemara tackles the former principle and tries to define what constitutes dying. In other words, once it gets the wound, does it have to die right away? Within days? Within weeks? Years? What if sometimes it gets better, do we still treat it as a treifa?
As a general rule we seem to hold much more by the non-empirical idea of treifa, so it's unclear just how relevant practically the question is, but maybe if there are Rishonic disagreements about whether something is a treifa, we can use this question of whether animals recover from it as a mechanism for resolution.
In any case, there are a variety of opinions, that three months is the period you check to see if it survives, or that two to three years is the period... The most agreed upon period seems to be a year, and it actually seems to derive from the three month idea, but with a twist. It's suggested that there are some ailments that animals are likely to die from in the summer, and some that they're more likely to die from in the winter. I guess because the heat exacerbates the wound, or the cold, or something like that. So the three month period is the idea that if the animal with that wound is able to survive the bad season, it'd not be a treifa. And twelve months means that whichever the bad season is for a particular treifa, we know the animal has passed it.
Daf 59
Ugh, I wish it weren't 11PM and that I wasn't three dapim behind, because this daf is kind of the reason I'm doing this and I do not have the energy or brainpower to discuss this daf right now. So let me say a little briefly and commit to writing more thoroughly about this daf in the next week or so.
We're done with treifas for the moment. The new Mishna goes over the characteristics of kosher animals and birds and insects, vs. the characteristics of nonkosher ones. This is Judaism 101- kosher animals need fins and scales. Kosher fish need hooves and chewing their cud. Yes, I flipped that as a joke and not because it's 11PM and I don't have the energy or brainpower to discuss this, but only barely. And birds there are no such defining characteristics, we just have a list of the kosher birds, and this is sort of a problem. The Mishna says that actually, we know that the nonkosher birds are the birds that are birds of prey. But it's more complicated than that, what exactly is a bird of prey is complicated, and whether we can eat a bird just because we know it's not a bird of prey, without a tradition of knowing it's kosher. The Gemara will go deeper into this in further pages.
And then it starts to look at other simanim of kosher and unkosher animals. Why? Because sometimes the Torah's simanim are inconvenient. You can't check if an animal chews its cud without dissecting it, and that means you can't check without killing it, but what if you don't want to kill it in case it turns out not to be kosher, and you only have the one examplar around.
So if there is some characteristic of the teeth, or the horns, that can tell you what makes an animal kosher, that'd be really handy. The Gemara goes through some examples, but I'll go into this more later.
What I do want to mention now is that the Gemara discusses the keresh as an example of a wild kosher animal that it says has one horn. Kosher Unicorn!!!
A really great example of the Gemara itself working through the question of what to do when a Rabbi's teaching is scientifically questionable.
The Mishna on the previous page listed treifas for birds. As I mentioned, it was a much shorter list than the Mishna at the start of the perek about treifas for animals. In particular, there is no mention of any treifas involving lungs. Nevertheless, the Gemara's assumption is that there can be treifas involving lungs, and in fact, halakha l'maaseh today is that the lungs are one of the only places on birds that we do affirmatively check for treifas even if we don't have any reason to suspect a treifa.
But Chizkiya makes a bold statement. Ein raya l'of. There are no lungs on a bird.
What!!!
Rabbi Yochanan immediately says wait a minute, there are lungs on birds. And for good measure he describes what they look like. So fine, we're not out on this ridiculous position for very long. But what is the Gemara doing bringing this ridiculous opinion that birds don't have lungs at all? That's what we're going to ask now.
The Gemara's first attempt to explain it is to go back to my note about the Mishna. The Mishna didn't mention lungs, so perhaps Chizkiya is trying to say not that birds don't have lungs, but that for halakhic purposes we treat birds as if they don't have lungs, i.e. we don't consider whether the lung might have a treifa.
But this is plainly not right, because again of the baraisa in the name of Levi that unless the anatomy is different, all the treifas of animals apply to birds. So the Gemara tries again.
So the Gemara's second attempt to explain it is to say that perhaps Chizkiya is saying that when it comes to the special halachos of treifa involving birds, lungs are not considered. There are special checks on the liver, heart, and gizzard of birds that have been exposed to fire to see if they've been damaged, for example. Perhaps Chizkiya is saying that we consider a bird as not having lungs for purposes of this analysis.
But the Gemara objects that this can't explain Chizkiya's statement because if that had been his meaning, Rabbi Yochanan would not have objected as he did, by saying that birds do have lungs and this is what they look like. Rabbi Yochanan was responding as if Chizkiya was stating that birds don't actually have lungs.
The Gemara brings a conclusion in the name of Rabbi Yosei ben Chanina that... Chizkiya just doesn't know much about chickens.
This is a really satisfying discussion of how to deal with statements in the Gemara that don't seem to match our scientific understanding. First, we do everything we can to try to understand them in a viable context, and when we've exhausted all of our options there, we can finally set aside the statement and conclude that it was based on an incorrect understanding of the science.
Daf 58
As I wrote yesterday, there's this notion that a treifa is an animal that meets certain technical qualifications- it has a wound on an internal organ that will result in it dying. And there's a notion that a treifa is an animal that meets certain arbitrary qualifications- Moshe taught a set of treifas and we just have that tradition of what the treifas are.
Here the Gemara tackles the former principle and tries to define what constitutes dying. In other words, once it gets the wound, does it have to die right away? Within days? Within weeks? Years? What if sometimes it gets better, do we still treat it as a treifa?
As a general rule we seem to hold much more by the non-empirical idea of treifa, so it's unclear just how relevant practically the question is, but maybe if there are Rishonic disagreements about whether something is a treifa, we can use this question of whether animals recover from it as a mechanism for resolution.
In any case, there are a variety of opinions, that three months is the period you check to see if it survives, or that two to three years is the period... The most agreed upon period seems to be a year, and it actually seems to derive from the three month idea, but with a twist. It's suggested that there are some ailments that animals are likely to die from in the summer, and some that they're more likely to die from in the winter. I guess because the heat exacerbates the wound, or the cold, or something like that. So the three month period is the idea that if the animal with that wound is able to survive the bad season, it'd not be a treifa. And twelve months means that whichever the bad season is for a particular treifa, we know the animal has passed it.
Daf 59
Ugh, I wish it weren't 11PM and that I wasn't three dapim behind, because this daf is kind of the reason I'm doing this and I do not have the energy or brainpower to discuss this daf right now. So let me say a little briefly and commit to writing more thoroughly about this daf in the next week or so.
We're done with treifas for the moment. The new Mishna goes over the characteristics of kosher animals and birds and insects, vs. the characteristics of nonkosher ones. This is Judaism 101- kosher animals need fins and scales. Kosher fish need hooves and chewing their cud. Yes, I flipped that as a joke and not because it's 11PM and I don't have the energy or brainpower to discuss this, but only barely. And birds there are no such defining characteristics, we just have a list of the kosher birds, and this is sort of a problem. The Mishna says that actually, we know that the nonkosher birds are the birds that are birds of prey. But it's more complicated than that, what exactly is a bird of prey is complicated, and whether we can eat a bird just because we know it's not a bird of prey, without a tradition of knowing it's kosher. The Gemara will go deeper into this in further pages.
And then it starts to look at other simanim of kosher and unkosher animals. Why? Because sometimes the Torah's simanim are inconvenient. You can't check if an animal chews its cud without dissecting it, and that means you can't check without killing it, but what if you don't want to kill it in case it turns out not to be kosher, and you only have the one examplar around.
So if there is some characteristic of the teeth, or the horns, that can tell you what makes an animal kosher, that'd be really handy. The Gemara goes through some examples, but I'll go into this more later.
What I do want to mention now is that the Gemara discusses the keresh as an example of a wild kosher animal that it says has one horn. Kosher Unicorn!!!