Masechet Chull Daf 108-115
Mar. 28th, 2019 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI think I came down with a bug or something last week, I was slightly out of it for a few days, and wasn't really able to focus on Talmud. And then when I got better, I got tied up with Galactic Puzzle Hunt. So big catchup post #1. I'm still a half week behind.
I should say in general that these Daf Yomi posts have only covered a small portion of what's on the page, by design. I hope people don't think that if they read my posts they'll understand what I've been learning completely. But these will be particularly cursory, both because of the catchup and because I did not follow everything I learned on these pages, some of which are pretty difficult..
Daf 108
Really fundamental (read esoteric and slightly unpractical) explorations of the meaning and transmission of ta'am which we've been talking about quite a bit since the previous chapter. The expression used is Ta'am k'ikar- the taste of the thing is considered like the thing itself, for purposes of halakha. Ta'am is usually understood as taste, but it doesn't quite seem to mean taste so much as essence. There is some essence of a food. When it is mixed with other foods, it retains that essence up to a certain point where everything becomes sufficiently mixed that the essence is no longer there and you can no longer say that the mixture has the essence of the original food.
This idea of ta'am is connected to taste- if a mixture still has the taste of a component, it inherently is still considered to contain the essence. But it's not fundamentally about taste. A few cases illustrate this: What if you have meat designated for a Temple sacrifice and thus forbidden to be eaten outside of the Temple courtyard, and you cook it with normal chullin? They both are meat, they both have the same taste, so how can you ever distinguish the taste of one from the taste of the other? Since the taste of the forbidden meat is camouflaged by the identical permitted meat taste, is it permitted or forbidden? Or, what if you're cooking a small but greater than shishim amount of a weakly flavored forbidden food in a stew that has other extremely strongly flavored components? Does the fact that the strong flavors overwhelm the weak flavor make it permitted even though if the same forbidden food were cooked in the same volume of water it would be forbidden?
Generally, the answer is that these leniencies don't exist. Ta'am mostly seems to be conceptualized based on the idea of taste, but in cases where taste isn't relevant, you usually construct a concept of idealized taste essence and do reasoning and calculations based on that.
So this page more than most of the rest, I found really difficult to understand. The way this ta'am k'ikar transfers itself is dependent on medium and quantity in really precise and specific ways that don't clearly follow. So I should say, in practice we don't hold by the Gemara very much in kashrut. The Rishonim looked at this crazy parsing of differences in absorption rates and materials and temperatures and proximity and threw their hands up in the air and said "Look, none of our congregants are going to be able to follow this properly, so we're just going to say don't let meat get anywhere near milk at all." If you do have a close case and a lot of money is at stake, you go see the most learned Rabbi you know and hope for a lenient ruling, otherwise we can afford to be strict.
Daf 109
The delightful reappearance of Yalta, who I mentioned in my post on the Gemara's humor. She was the wife of Rav Nachman and clearly was very intelligent and scholarly herself, and she had no whatsoever patience for men. Again, there's a certain prickly humor to her comments here. She mentions to her husband the Rabbinic adage that in God's benevolence, for everything the Torah forbids, there is some equivalent that is permitted. Certain fats are forbidden from domestic animals, but they're permitted from kosher undomesticated animals, so if you want to experience the taste you can. Pork is forbidden, but there is a kosher fish (some say bird) that tastes just like pork. Etc... So she asks her husband "I want to try the taste of milk cooked with meat, what can I do?"
It's such a delightful smartass question, and her husband is 100% game for it. Such a wonderful portrait of affectionate teasing in a marriage. Rav Nachman immediately orders his cook to roast the udder of a cow, with the milk intact. Milk while still in an udder has a different halakhic status than milk that's passed into the world, so one is permitted to eat an udder without removing the milk, at least bedieved. It's a machlokess d'rabbanan about whether it's permited l'chatchila and clearly Rav Nachman held that it was.
Daf 110
Here we meet Rami bar Tamrei, who the Gemara immediately assigns the epithet Rami bar Dikulei, Rami the Master of Leniencies. He's from Pumbedita, one of the two main centers of Torah learning in Babylon, and he travels to Sura, the other major center. And he goes around acting in ways that seem to the untrained observer to be almost unJewish, they're so radical, but whenever asked he has a perfect explanation for why he is able to observe a particular leniency, and it becomes clear that he is a major scholar who is able to deviate from the general norms of halakha because he knows its ins and outs so well.
Rami bar Tamrei is seen not laying tefillin or wearing tzitzit, and when questioned he can explain exactly which obscure kulos he is taking advantage of to do so.
Of course Rabbinic law is based on a bunch of ideas that limit this kind of kula- mar'is ayin and lifnei iver and da'as torah and so on- so it's interesting to see a person live out so many of these kulos at once. I guess once you earn the epithet bar Dikulei, you don't have to worry about mar'is ayin so much anymore. "Why is Rami Dikulei in the middle of that field on Shabbos shechting pigs to avodah zarah?" "I don't know, but I bet he has a good weird halakhic reason, so I'm not going to follow his example until I ask."
Daf 111
So what's kind of weird about basar v'chalav compared to other cases where you consider ta'am k'ikar is that in other cases, the ta'am is of a forbidden food. A pig itself is assur, for example. But kosher meat is muttar, and so is kosher cheese. So this raises questions about how far the idea of ta'am k'ikar goes. On this page, we consider a pareve intermediary. Can a pareve intermediary become fleishig for the purposes of basar v'chalav, if it is in contact with something which is fleishig?
If you cook a piece of fish in a meat dish, does it take on the character of the meat sufficiently that you are forbidden to eat it with cheese? Machlokess Shmuel v'Rav. There's a perplexing story where R' Elazar, a student of Rav, serves Shmuel such a piece of fish and Shmuel eats it, because Shmuel holds that you can't transfer ta'am by way of a pareve intermediary, it's too attenuated. But R' Elazar doesn't eat it, because his teacher Rav holds that the intermediary still transfers ta'am, so the fish has the character of meat and is forbidden with cheese. Shmuel says "Wait a minute, years ago I served Rav fish like this, has he changed his position?"
R' Elazar tells this story to Rav, and Rav says "That never happened, I always held that an intermediary can transfer taste."
Artscroll brings a few different explanations of this story, which is difficult. One possibility is that Shmuel lied, or at least exaggerated, because he had some pedagogical purpose to test Rav Elazar or to see how he would handle a situation where he was in the presence of a master who was not his Rav, or just because he was annoyed with Rav for this disagreement, but it's not exactly satisfying to conclude that Shmuel lied about Rav. Another explanation that's more generous to Shmuel is that Shmuel knew that Rav disagreed with him, but he assumed that Rav knew that the fish had been cooked in a meat dish when in actuality Rav hadn't known, and therefore when he offered the fish and Rav accepted, he assumed that Rav had changed his position. It was all just an accident. This is difficult because of a principle from earlier in the masechet that God intervenes to prevent Tzadikim from eating unkosher food. Artscroll answers this difficulty by saying that since actually the halakha is like Shmuel, it was okay for Rav to eat fish he considered forbidden, but this is unsatisfying. I guess weird metaphysical interventions work in weird metaphysical ways.
Daf 112
A kosher, shechted bird falls into a jar of milk. They fish it out and bring it to Rabbi Hinnana bar Rava, and he declares the bird is muttar. Rava (his father, apparently) exclaims how incomparably wise Rabbi Hinnana is to be able to find this leniency based on a ruling of Shmuel that ta'am only transfers to salted meat if the meat is sufficiently salted, and Rabbi Hinnana had the discernment here to recognize that the bird had not been sufficiently salted.
I am now really curious about the family dynamics of Rava's family, but moreso I just note that this is a common sentiment both in the Talmud and in modern Rabbinics, that the mark of a true gadol Torah is their ability to find leniencies that lesser minds would not be able to conceive of. This is a really ironic sentiment in modern times because the most lenient scholars are, like, Conservative and Reform Rabbis. :P
The rest of the page continues to explore the concept of salting meat and its implications. Salting meat obviously is used for preservation, but in kashrut it also serves the function of drawing the blood out of the meat, as eating blood is a serious issur d'oraysa. But of course even after you completely salt meat and squeeze and soak and do all the procedures to remove blood, when you cook meat some further blood or reddish juices may seep out. So I don't know, the Gemara still seems to consider this blood to some extent but not to the most absurd extent it possibly could.
Daf 113
We get more on salting meat. Rav Huna says you salt, then you rinse. A baraisa says first you rinse, then you salt, then you rinse. The Gemara says actually they agree, Rav Huna was just talking about a case where the butcher does the first rinse for you.
Why this whole procedure? First you rinse to get whatever crap might be on and to prepare the surface for the salt, so that when you first salt you aren't pushing any of the blood back into the animal. Then you salt, preferably with large grain salt that can easily be knocked off and won't get stuck in the meat, to pull the blood out of the meat. Then you knock off the salt, then you rinse to pull off any salt and blood not caught in the salt.
Later on, the new Mishna finally goes through some basic parameters of basar v'chalav that one might expect to have come earlier in the perek. Remember, all this mitzvah comes from the line that says that you shall not boil a kid goat in its mother's milk. So does the mitzvah apply just to goats, or to all kosher domesticated animals, or to all kosher animals, or to all kosher animals and birds, or to all animals, kosher and nonkosher? And does it apply specifically to a kid in just its own mother's milk, or to any goat milk, or to any other species's milk?
It'd be perfectly reasonable to read the mitzvah in that narrowest way. There are other mitzvot like that, which exist to teach a specific principle in a narrow case. But we don't. Our tradition is that the d'oraysa mitzvah is broader than that, that is prohibits cooking any kind of meat and milk together. But there are limits. It is agreed that it only applies to kosher animals- there's no mitzvah prohibiting eating pork with cheese. Which sounds silly, but it has implication for whether you're allowed to derive benefit from it. And there's a debate between R' Akiva and R' Yossi about whether or not it applies to nondomesticated animals.
This is interesting. There was a sense in the earlier perek of Oto v'et b'no that nondomesticated animals did not have the same kind of relationship to their mothers as domesticated animals do, so perhaps the mitzvah would only apply to behemos. But the halakha is with Rabbi Akiva that basar v'chalav does in fact apply to chayos as well.
Daf 114
A lot here is about whether an issur applies on an issur. So is it prohibited to eat pork with cheese, as mentioned on the previous daf, or is it prohibited to eat neveilah with cheese? Interestingly, the answer is different. Because pig is a nonkosher species, there's no issur of eating it with its mother's milk, or even of cooking it with its mother's milk. But neveilah the issur still applies to. The formal reasons for this are confusing- Sometimes the Talmud says that you can't incur two issurs on the same act of eating, sometimes it says you can, and it tries to distinguish these cases but I usually can't figure out the basic logic.
But the simplified version of the logic to this specific case is that since the verse mentions the kid of a goat, we learn that it's talking about kosher species of animals, excluding pig but not neveilah.
Rabbi Linzer talks a lot on this page about a funny distinction- The actual Torah pasuk talks about cooking a kid in its mother's milk, but most of the D'Rabbanan gezeiros are focused on preventing eating milk and meat, not on preventing cooking milk and meat. Some of the Rishonim, especially Rambam, take this and run with it and argue that the essential issur is actually eating, not cooking, but because of how significant the issur of eating is, the Torah forbid cooking to keep people away from eating.
Daf 115
Stepping back a bit, there seem to be two different, interrelated conceptualizations of basar v'chalav that are behind the discussions on this page, which are concerned with deriving the separate issurs on cooking, eating and deriving benefit from meat and milk mixtures in different ways. One is a comparison to shiluach haken and oto v'et b'no and mitzvot like that, laws that clearly seem to have at least a metaphorical concern with moral behavior. At minimum, the motivation behind these mitzvot is that if we treat animals in ways that disregard parental relationships, we may fail to show empathy to humans. There isn't really a discussion in the Gemara about animal rights, but you could take these mitzvot to that place as well.
The second conceptualization is that milk and meat is a kind of kilayim, a mixture of species that is forbidden as part of the Torah's efforts to teach us to attain kedusha. If this is the case, the moral dimension is more at a remove. Obviously kedusha involves being conscious of what we eat and what we do, what is Proper and what is Improper, and living a life that keeps the Proper in and the Improper out, and that must have a moral dimension to it, but it is much more about our personal construction of self than it is about how relationship with others.
I should say in general that these Daf Yomi posts have only covered a small portion of what's on the page, by design. I hope people don't think that if they read my posts they'll understand what I've been learning completely. But these will be particularly cursory, both because of the catchup and because I did not follow everything I learned on these pages, some of which are pretty difficult..
Daf 108
Really fundamental (read esoteric and slightly unpractical) explorations of the meaning and transmission of ta'am which we've been talking about quite a bit since the previous chapter. The expression used is Ta'am k'ikar- the taste of the thing is considered like the thing itself, for purposes of halakha. Ta'am is usually understood as taste, but it doesn't quite seem to mean taste so much as essence. There is some essence of a food. When it is mixed with other foods, it retains that essence up to a certain point where everything becomes sufficiently mixed that the essence is no longer there and you can no longer say that the mixture has the essence of the original food.
This idea of ta'am is connected to taste- if a mixture still has the taste of a component, it inherently is still considered to contain the essence. But it's not fundamentally about taste. A few cases illustrate this: What if you have meat designated for a Temple sacrifice and thus forbidden to be eaten outside of the Temple courtyard, and you cook it with normal chullin? They both are meat, they both have the same taste, so how can you ever distinguish the taste of one from the taste of the other? Since the taste of the forbidden meat is camouflaged by the identical permitted meat taste, is it permitted or forbidden? Or, what if you're cooking a small but greater than shishim amount of a weakly flavored forbidden food in a stew that has other extremely strongly flavored components? Does the fact that the strong flavors overwhelm the weak flavor make it permitted even though if the same forbidden food were cooked in the same volume of water it would be forbidden?
Generally, the answer is that these leniencies don't exist. Ta'am mostly seems to be conceptualized based on the idea of taste, but in cases where taste isn't relevant, you usually construct a concept of idealized taste essence and do reasoning and calculations based on that.
So this page more than most of the rest, I found really difficult to understand. The way this ta'am k'ikar transfers itself is dependent on medium and quantity in really precise and specific ways that don't clearly follow. So I should say, in practice we don't hold by the Gemara very much in kashrut. The Rishonim looked at this crazy parsing of differences in absorption rates and materials and temperatures and proximity and threw their hands up in the air and said "Look, none of our congregants are going to be able to follow this properly, so we're just going to say don't let meat get anywhere near milk at all." If you do have a close case and a lot of money is at stake, you go see the most learned Rabbi you know and hope for a lenient ruling, otherwise we can afford to be strict.
Daf 109
The delightful reappearance of Yalta, who I mentioned in my post on the Gemara's humor. She was the wife of Rav Nachman and clearly was very intelligent and scholarly herself, and she had no whatsoever patience for men. Again, there's a certain prickly humor to her comments here. She mentions to her husband the Rabbinic adage that in God's benevolence, for everything the Torah forbids, there is some equivalent that is permitted. Certain fats are forbidden from domestic animals, but they're permitted from kosher undomesticated animals, so if you want to experience the taste you can. Pork is forbidden, but there is a kosher fish (some say bird) that tastes just like pork. Etc... So she asks her husband "I want to try the taste of milk cooked with meat, what can I do?"
It's such a delightful smartass question, and her husband is 100% game for it. Such a wonderful portrait of affectionate teasing in a marriage. Rav Nachman immediately orders his cook to roast the udder of a cow, with the milk intact. Milk while still in an udder has a different halakhic status than milk that's passed into the world, so one is permitted to eat an udder without removing the milk, at least bedieved. It's a machlokess d'rabbanan about whether it's permited l'chatchila and clearly Rav Nachman held that it was.
Daf 110
Here we meet Rami bar Tamrei, who the Gemara immediately assigns the epithet Rami bar Dikulei, Rami the Master of Leniencies. He's from Pumbedita, one of the two main centers of Torah learning in Babylon, and he travels to Sura, the other major center. And he goes around acting in ways that seem to the untrained observer to be almost unJewish, they're so radical, but whenever asked he has a perfect explanation for why he is able to observe a particular leniency, and it becomes clear that he is a major scholar who is able to deviate from the general norms of halakha because he knows its ins and outs so well.
Rami bar Tamrei is seen not laying tefillin or wearing tzitzit, and when questioned he can explain exactly which obscure kulos he is taking advantage of to do so.
Of course Rabbinic law is based on a bunch of ideas that limit this kind of kula- mar'is ayin and lifnei iver and da'as torah and so on- so it's interesting to see a person live out so many of these kulos at once. I guess once you earn the epithet bar Dikulei, you don't have to worry about mar'is ayin so much anymore. "Why is Rami Dikulei in the middle of that field on Shabbos shechting pigs to avodah zarah?" "I don't know, but I bet he has a good weird halakhic reason, so I'm not going to follow his example until I ask."
Daf 111
So what's kind of weird about basar v'chalav compared to other cases where you consider ta'am k'ikar is that in other cases, the ta'am is of a forbidden food. A pig itself is assur, for example. But kosher meat is muttar, and so is kosher cheese. So this raises questions about how far the idea of ta'am k'ikar goes. On this page, we consider a pareve intermediary. Can a pareve intermediary become fleishig for the purposes of basar v'chalav, if it is in contact with something which is fleishig?
If you cook a piece of fish in a meat dish, does it take on the character of the meat sufficiently that you are forbidden to eat it with cheese? Machlokess Shmuel v'Rav. There's a perplexing story where R' Elazar, a student of Rav, serves Shmuel such a piece of fish and Shmuel eats it, because Shmuel holds that you can't transfer ta'am by way of a pareve intermediary, it's too attenuated. But R' Elazar doesn't eat it, because his teacher Rav holds that the intermediary still transfers ta'am, so the fish has the character of meat and is forbidden with cheese. Shmuel says "Wait a minute, years ago I served Rav fish like this, has he changed his position?"
R' Elazar tells this story to Rav, and Rav says "That never happened, I always held that an intermediary can transfer taste."
Artscroll brings a few different explanations of this story, which is difficult. One possibility is that Shmuel lied, or at least exaggerated, because he had some pedagogical purpose to test Rav Elazar or to see how he would handle a situation where he was in the presence of a master who was not his Rav, or just because he was annoyed with Rav for this disagreement, but it's not exactly satisfying to conclude that Shmuel lied about Rav. Another explanation that's more generous to Shmuel is that Shmuel knew that Rav disagreed with him, but he assumed that Rav knew that the fish had been cooked in a meat dish when in actuality Rav hadn't known, and therefore when he offered the fish and Rav accepted, he assumed that Rav had changed his position. It was all just an accident. This is difficult because of a principle from earlier in the masechet that God intervenes to prevent Tzadikim from eating unkosher food. Artscroll answers this difficulty by saying that since actually the halakha is like Shmuel, it was okay for Rav to eat fish he considered forbidden, but this is unsatisfying. I guess weird metaphysical interventions work in weird metaphysical ways.
Daf 112
A kosher, shechted bird falls into a jar of milk. They fish it out and bring it to Rabbi Hinnana bar Rava, and he declares the bird is muttar. Rava (his father, apparently) exclaims how incomparably wise Rabbi Hinnana is to be able to find this leniency based on a ruling of Shmuel that ta'am only transfers to salted meat if the meat is sufficiently salted, and Rabbi Hinnana had the discernment here to recognize that the bird had not been sufficiently salted.
I am now really curious about the family dynamics of Rava's family, but moreso I just note that this is a common sentiment both in the Talmud and in modern Rabbinics, that the mark of a true gadol Torah is their ability to find leniencies that lesser minds would not be able to conceive of. This is a really ironic sentiment in modern times because the most lenient scholars are, like, Conservative and Reform Rabbis. :P
The rest of the page continues to explore the concept of salting meat and its implications. Salting meat obviously is used for preservation, but in kashrut it also serves the function of drawing the blood out of the meat, as eating blood is a serious issur d'oraysa. But of course even after you completely salt meat and squeeze and soak and do all the procedures to remove blood, when you cook meat some further blood or reddish juices may seep out. So I don't know, the Gemara still seems to consider this blood to some extent but not to the most absurd extent it possibly could.
Daf 113
We get more on salting meat. Rav Huna says you salt, then you rinse. A baraisa says first you rinse, then you salt, then you rinse. The Gemara says actually they agree, Rav Huna was just talking about a case where the butcher does the first rinse for you.
Why this whole procedure? First you rinse to get whatever crap might be on and to prepare the surface for the salt, so that when you first salt you aren't pushing any of the blood back into the animal. Then you salt, preferably with large grain salt that can easily be knocked off and won't get stuck in the meat, to pull the blood out of the meat. Then you knock off the salt, then you rinse to pull off any salt and blood not caught in the salt.
Later on, the new Mishna finally goes through some basic parameters of basar v'chalav that one might expect to have come earlier in the perek. Remember, all this mitzvah comes from the line that says that you shall not boil a kid goat in its mother's milk. So does the mitzvah apply just to goats, or to all kosher domesticated animals, or to all kosher animals, or to all kosher animals and birds, or to all animals, kosher and nonkosher? And does it apply specifically to a kid in just its own mother's milk, or to any goat milk, or to any other species's milk?
It'd be perfectly reasonable to read the mitzvah in that narrowest way. There are other mitzvot like that, which exist to teach a specific principle in a narrow case. But we don't. Our tradition is that the d'oraysa mitzvah is broader than that, that is prohibits cooking any kind of meat and milk together. But there are limits. It is agreed that it only applies to kosher animals- there's no mitzvah prohibiting eating pork with cheese. Which sounds silly, but it has implication for whether you're allowed to derive benefit from it. And there's a debate between R' Akiva and R' Yossi about whether or not it applies to nondomesticated animals.
This is interesting. There was a sense in the earlier perek of Oto v'et b'no that nondomesticated animals did not have the same kind of relationship to their mothers as domesticated animals do, so perhaps the mitzvah would only apply to behemos. But the halakha is with Rabbi Akiva that basar v'chalav does in fact apply to chayos as well.
Daf 114
A lot here is about whether an issur applies on an issur. So is it prohibited to eat pork with cheese, as mentioned on the previous daf, or is it prohibited to eat neveilah with cheese? Interestingly, the answer is different. Because pig is a nonkosher species, there's no issur of eating it with its mother's milk, or even of cooking it with its mother's milk. But neveilah the issur still applies to. The formal reasons for this are confusing- Sometimes the Talmud says that you can't incur two issurs on the same act of eating, sometimes it says you can, and it tries to distinguish these cases but I usually can't figure out the basic logic.
But the simplified version of the logic to this specific case is that since the verse mentions the kid of a goat, we learn that it's talking about kosher species of animals, excluding pig but not neveilah.
Rabbi Linzer talks a lot on this page about a funny distinction- The actual Torah pasuk talks about cooking a kid in its mother's milk, but most of the D'Rabbanan gezeiros are focused on preventing eating milk and meat, not on preventing cooking milk and meat. Some of the Rishonim, especially Rambam, take this and run with it and argue that the essential issur is actually eating, not cooking, but because of how significant the issur of eating is, the Torah forbid cooking to keep people away from eating.
Daf 115
Stepping back a bit, there seem to be two different, interrelated conceptualizations of basar v'chalav that are behind the discussions on this page, which are concerned with deriving the separate issurs on cooking, eating and deriving benefit from meat and milk mixtures in different ways. One is a comparison to shiluach haken and oto v'et b'no and mitzvot like that, laws that clearly seem to have at least a metaphorical concern with moral behavior. At minimum, the motivation behind these mitzvot is that if we treat animals in ways that disregard parental relationships, we may fail to show empathy to humans. There isn't really a discussion in the Gemara about animal rights, but you could take these mitzvot to that place as well.
The second conceptualization is that milk and meat is a kind of kilayim, a mixture of species that is forbidden as part of the Torah's efforts to teach us to attain kedusha. If this is the case, the moral dimension is more at a remove. Obviously kedusha involves being conscious of what we eat and what we do, what is Proper and what is Improper, and living a life that keeps the Proper in and the Improper out, and that must have a moral dimension to it, but it is much more about our personal construction of self than it is about how relationship with others.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-28 05:45 pm (UTC)ahahahahahahahaha facepalm
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-28 07:09 pm (UTC)https://www.sefaria.org/Chullin.110a.6?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
There's a lot in it about the difference between minhag Sura and minhag Pumbedita, and different Amoraic generations, and how you handle halakha while traveling, and what peoples' obligations are to Jewish communities that they aren't wholly a part of.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-28 08:16 pm (UTC)