Masechet Chullin Daf 95
Mar. 4th, 2019 08:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 95
There's a great story at the beginning of the page about an Asshole Butcher, Or, Rabbis Were Dealing With the Same Shit Two Thousand Years Ago.
Asshole butcher shechts an ox, then he goes up to his enemy and says "Man, it's a shame I hate you so much, or I'd have given you some of that delicious ox yesterday." His enemy says "Jokes on you! I bought some of that ox from the non-Jewish merchant you sold it to [which I could do because you're permitted to eat meat from a non-Jew if it's a town where all the butchers are Jewish and they make announcements when they sell treifas to non-Jews]" Asshole butcher says "No, jokes on you! I actually slaughtered two oxes yesterday and I sold the treifa to that non-Jew, and I didn't tell anyone"
Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi goes holy shit, does this mean everyone was eating treifa or at least safek treifa yesterday?
He thinks about it and comes to a conclusion that he can leave things alone that the Gemara reports in two completely inconsistent ways.
In the first report, clearly the particular non-Jewish meat seller that Asshole Butcher says he sold to is forbidden for a few days until everyone can be sure it's gone, but Rebbi concludes that the whole overall system of announcements is under a chazaka of being permitted so the safek doesn't change that for other non-Jewish meat sellers.
In the second report, Rebbi concludes that the asshole butcher was lying to mess with his enemy, and he didn't actually sell treifa meat to the non-Jew without making a community announcement, so therefore the system is not threatened at all. But according to this version of the report, if the asshole butcher wasn't lying, Rebbi would have to shut down the system of announcements altogether. At least temporarily, I think.
Most of the rest of the page is about a chumra of Rav that meat must be watched from the moment of shechita until the moment of consumption to make sure it's not swapped with unkosher meat. The chumra even holds if you just leave your meat on your own table and turn your back for a moment, and relevant to this section of Gemara, it even holds in a town where all the butchers are Jewish and we can even buy meat from non-Jews, because Rav is concerned that 'a raven might have carried non-kosher meat from another town". This is pretty strict! The Gemara spends the rest of the page demolishing this chumra piece by piece, finding all the exceptions. For our purposes today, the most significant kula is that if the meat is in some way marked as a specific piece of meat that is known to be kosher, the need to be watched goes away. But it's irrelevant because the halakha anyway is we don't hold by Rav's chumra.
There's a great story at the beginning of the page about an Asshole Butcher, Or, Rabbis Were Dealing With the Same Shit Two Thousand Years Ago.
Asshole butcher shechts an ox, then he goes up to his enemy and says "Man, it's a shame I hate you so much, or I'd have given you some of that delicious ox yesterday." His enemy says "Jokes on you! I bought some of that ox from the non-Jewish merchant you sold it to [which I could do because you're permitted to eat meat from a non-Jew if it's a town where all the butchers are Jewish and they make announcements when they sell treifas to non-Jews]" Asshole butcher says "No, jokes on you! I actually slaughtered two oxes yesterday and I sold the treifa to that non-Jew, and I didn't tell anyone"
Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi goes holy shit, does this mean everyone was eating treifa or at least safek treifa yesterday?
He thinks about it and comes to a conclusion that he can leave things alone that the Gemara reports in two completely inconsistent ways.
In the first report, clearly the particular non-Jewish meat seller that Asshole Butcher says he sold to is forbidden for a few days until everyone can be sure it's gone, but Rebbi concludes that the whole overall system of announcements is under a chazaka of being permitted so the safek doesn't change that for other non-Jewish meat sellers.
In the second report, Rebbi concludes that the asshole butcher was lying to mess with his enemy, and he didn't actually sell treifa meat to the non-Jew without making a community announcement, so therefore the system is not threatened at all. But according to this version of the report, if the asshole butcher wasn't lying, Rebbi would have to shut down the system of announcements altogether. At least temporarily, I think.
Most of the rest of the page is about a chumra of Rav that meat must be watched from the moment of shechita until the moment of consumption to make sure it's not swapped with unkosher meat. The chumra even holds if you just leave your meat on your own table and turn your back for a moment, and relevant to this section of Gemara, it even holds in a town where all the butchers are Jewish and we can even buy meat from non-Jews, because Rav is concerned that 'a raven might have carried non-kosher meat from another town". This is pretty strict! The Gemara spends the rest of the page demolishing this chumra piece by piece, finding all the exceptions. For our purposes today, the most significant kula is that if the meat is in some way marked as a specific piece of meat that is known to be kosher, the need to be watched goes away. But it's irrelevant because the halakha anyway is we don't hold by Rav's chumra.
spite and edge cases
Date: 2019-03-04 04:44 pm (UTC)* spite houses
* spite as an engine of edge case creation (and, thus, theoretical work to resolve those edge cases) throughout history
* "Joke's on you" in comparison to "I'll show them all"
Re: spite and edge cases
Date: 2019-03-04 04:57 pm (UTC)Very much so! The Hugo nominating process worked with minimal problems for several decades until trolls decided to attack it, for example! And so E Pluribus Hugo pissed me off because it made what had been an essentially working system much more complicated and hard to understand solely to fight against spite.
The Rabbis weigh this kind of question fairly often in the Talmud because the Talmud is all about edge cases. And often they have mechanisms that allow you to ignore the possibility of spite driven edge cases, like making it an axiom that you can assume a fellow Jew wouldn't do something out of spite. We know that sometimes Jew do in fact do things out of spite, but the Rabbis often just say to ignore the possibility unless there's actually evidence.