Masechet Chullin Daf 104/105
Mar. 12th, 2019 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 104
New Perek! Milk and Meat! Stuff that's actually relevant to the day to day practice of observing kashrut!
To start, the whole source of this mitzvah is five words in one verse, Exodus 23:19. Lo tivashel g'dei b'chalav imo. Don't boil a kid in its mother's milk. There's no reason given for the mitzvah, but intuition, and the Rabbis, tell us that the reason is to help us learn basic empathy. A mother loves her child, so using her own milk to cook her child displays an insensitivity about how one's actions impact others. So every time we observe this mitzvah of separation we are intended to be thoughtfully choosing to put this mother's love above our own physical desires.
The scope of this mitzvah is expanded far beyond the literal sense of the verse, both through midrashic expansion of the straightforward Torah obligation, and through extensive Rabbinic gezeirah. Much of the Gemara seems ultimately to be about teasing out the lines between what is Torah obligation and what is Rabbinic gezeirah. The significance of this line-drawing, which is quite common in Talmudic exegesis, is usually that the ancillary laws about observance of Rabbinic gezeirah are more lenient, but in some cases here the Rabbinic gezeirahs are held to be observed more strictly than is usual. This may imply that there are more expansive opinions about which parts of the mitzvah are d'oraysa, or it may imply that the Rabbis' felt that because their gezeirahs here touched so deeply on the day to day observance of kashrut for regular people, who aren't shochets and aren't Rabbis, they had a special significance that needed careful guarding.
As a result of this expansion in scope, meat and milk has taken on a greater significance in Jewish thought than other similar mitzvot. It's an essentially paradigmatic law of separation, not just the concept of separating milk and meat, of maintaining separate sets of dishes, but a law that by its overarching nature creates separation between Jews and non-Jews. We can't eat with them because it's impossible to negotiate the laws of hilchos basar v'chalov while eating with people who don't.
The first Mishnah identifies the first major expansion of the parameters of the law- we don't just observe the mitzvah with regard to boiling a kid in its own mother's milk- we observe it with regard to any meat and any milk. This is regarded midrashically as the intention of the original Torah commandment, not as a gezeirah.
What is meat? Meat is the meat from kosher beasts, both behemah and chayah, and from birds, but not from fish or grasshoppers. The Mishnah continues that one is forbidden to even have both cheese and meat at the same table even if you're not eating both.
Why birds? Birds don't have milk, so it's an unintuitive read of the verse to include them. The Gemara wants to say based on the phrasing of the Mishnah that the Tannaim are asserting a d'oraysa issur of birds and milk, but this doesn't really seem consistent with the mesorah- Rabbi Akiva and most of the other Tannaim discussed hold that birds and milk is a d'rabbanan gezeirah. But that raises a problem. The prohibition to have both at the same table is obviously a d'rabbanan gezeirah and we don't typically have a gezeirah on a gezeirah, it's seen as too attenuated. So this implies that birds must be part of the d'oraysa!
No, the Gemara says. Actually it's just a gezeirah of a gezeirah of a d'rabbanan and in this case we have no problem with it because it's part of a slippery slope and the Rabbis are actually worried this time about the consequences of even violating the gezeirah of the gezeirah leading to violation of the d'oraysa issur.
The Gemara cements the idea that birds and milk is a d'rabbanan by citing the opinions of Rabbanim who are extremely mekil on birds and milk, like Beis Shammai who permits them at the same table, or in the case of Agra, the father in law of Rabbi Abba, who seems to hold that it is permitted altogether. But the majority are stricter.
Daf 105
We introduce the concepts of waiting between eating milk and meat or washing your mouth out between eating them.
If you eat dairy, some say you can eat meat right away, or at least you just rinse your hands and mouth out and then you can eat meat. If you eat meat, you have to wait some amount of time first. It seems to be an idea that meat has a tendency to leave more of a residue or taste, though whether that means more of a residue in your mouth or it means takes longer to digest is unclear.
Also, how long you have to wait is unclear. Mar Ukva says his father waited 24 hours! But Mar Ukva himself says that you just have to conclude your current meal, bentsch, and start a new meal. Some even seem to say that if you have a clear delineation within the meal between the meat course and the milk course, that's enough, although that might just be if you do milk first and then meat, it's hard to say because the Gemara keeps jumping around.
The general Ashkenazi minhag is to wait 6 hours, although the Rema (R' Moshe Isserles, the leading Ashkenazi commentator on the Shulchan Aruch) seems to hold to something closer to the start a new meal theory. There are communities with different wait times; the amount of time to wait is almost entirely a matter of minhag.
The Gemara then goes off on a tangent, having mentioned handwashing, about mayim rishonim and mayim acharonim- the washing before eating and washing after eating. These are a strange combination of ritual and practical. They are both explained as having to do with having clean hands for eating and removing the residue of food from eating, but they clearly also have a ritual component, either as actual ways of removing tumah from the hands, or as symbolic reminders of handwashing in the Temple era that removed tumah.
These multiple handwashings are specifically mentioned by Jesus as one of the pointless Jewish rituals surrounding food that he opposed. Check out Mark Chapter 7.
New Perek! Milk and Meat! Stuff that's actually relevant to the day to day practice of observing kashrut!
To start, the whole source of this mitzvah is five words in one verse, Exodus 23:19. Lo tivashel g'dei b'chalav imo. Don't boil a kid in its mother's milk. There's no reason given for the mitzvah, but intuition, and the Rabbis, tell us that the reason is to help us learn basic empathy. A mother loves her child, so using her own milk to cook her child displays an insensitivity about how one's actions impact others. So every time we observe this mitzvah of separation we are intended to be thoughtfully choosing to put this mother's love above our own physical desires.
The scope of this mitzvah is expanded far beyond the literal sense of the verse, both through midrashic expansion of the straightforward Torah obligation, and through extensive Rabbinic gezeirah. Much of the Gemara seems ultimately to be about teasing out the lines between what is Torah obligation and what is Rabbinic gezeirah. The significance of this line-drawing, which is quite common in Talmudic exegesis, is usually that the ancillary laws about observance of Rabbinic gezeirah are more lenient, but in some cases here the Rabbinic gezeirahs are held to be observed more strictly than is usual. This may imply that there are more expansive opinions about which parts of the mitzvah are d'oraysa, or it may imply that the Rabbis' felt that because their gezeirahs here touched so deeply on the day to day observance of kashrut for regular people, who aren't shochets and aren't Rabbis, they had a special significance that needed careful guarding.
As a result of this expansion in scope, meat and milk has taken on a greater significance in Jewish thought than other similar mitzvot. It's an essentially paradigmatic law of separation, not just the concept of separating milk and meat, of maintaining separate sets of dishes, but a law that by its overarching nature creates separation between Jews and non-Jews. We can't eat with them because it's impossible to negotiate the laws of hilchos basar v'chalov while eating with people who don't.
The first Mishnah identifies the first major expansion of the parameters of the law- we don't just observe the mitzvah with regard to boiling a kid in its own mother's milk- we observe it with regard to any meat and any milk. This is regarded midrashically as the intention of the original Torah commandment, not as a gezeirah.
What is meat? Meat is the meat from kosher beasts, both behemah and chayah, and from birds, but not from fish or grasshoppers. The Mishnah continues that one is forbidden to even have both cheese and meat at the same table even if you're not eating both.
Why birds? Birds don't have milk, so it's an unintuitive read of the verse to include them. The Gemara wants to say based on the phrasing of the Mishnah that the Tannaim are asserting a d'oraysa issur of birds and milk, but this doesn't really seem consistent with the mesorah- Rabbi Akiva and most of the other Tannaim discussed hold that birds and milk is a d'rabbanan gezeirah. But that raises a problem. The prohibition to have both at the same table is obviously a d'rabbanan gezeirah and we don't typically have a gezeirah on a gezeirah, it's seen as too attenuated. So this implies that birds must be part of the d'oraysa!
No, the Gemara says. Actually it's just a gezeirah of a gezeirah of a d'rabbanan and in this case we have no problem with it because it's part of a slippery slope and the Rabbis are actually worried this time about the consequences of even violating the gezeirah of the gezeirah leading to violation of the d'oraysa issur.
The Gemara cements the idea that birds and milk is a d'rabbanan by citing the opinions of Rabbanim who are extremely mekil on birds and milk, like Beis Shammai who permits them at the same table, or in the case of Agra, the father in law of Rabbi Abba, who seems to hold that it is permitted altogether. But the majority are stricter.
Daf 105
We introduce the concepts of waiting between eating milk and meat or washing your mouth out between eating them.
If you eat dairy, some say you can eat meat right away, or at least you just rinse your hands and mouth out and then you can eat meat. If you eat meat, you have to wait some amount of time first. It seems to be an idea that meat has a tendency to leave more of a residue or taste, though whether that means more of a residue in your mouth or it means takes longer to digest is unclear.
Also, how long you have to wait is unclear. Mar Ukva says his father waited 24 hours! But Mar Ukva himself says that you just have to conclude your current meal, bentsch, and start a new meal. Some even seem to say that if you have a clear delineation within the meal between the meat course and the milk course, that's enough, although that might just be if you do milk first and then meat, it's hard to say because the Gemara keeps jumping around.
The general Ashkenazi minhag is to wait 6 hours, although the Rema (R' Moshe Isserles, the leading Ashkenazi commentator on the Shulchan Aruch) seems to hold to something closer to the start a new meal theory. There are communities with different wait times; the amount of time to wait is almost entirely a matter of minhag.
The Gemara then goes off on a tangent, having mentioned handwashing, about mayim rishonim and mayim acharonim- the washing before eating and washing after eating. These are a strange combination of ritual and practical. They are both explained as having to do with having clean hands for eating and removing the residue of food from eating, but they clearly also have a ritual component, either as actual ways of removing tumah from the hands, or as symbolic reminders of handwashing in the Temple era that removed tumah.
These multiple handwashings are specifically mentioned by Jesus as one of the pointless Jewish rituals surrounding food that he opposed. Check out Mark Chapter 7.