Thoughts from the Daf
Chulin 97: It Tastes Great
Rabbinic debates are not for the faint-hearted. They can be most intense, and sadly, can lead to tragic consequences. One of the most famous of Talmudic debates, that regarding the tanur shel achnai, led to the excommunication of Rabbi Eliezer Hagadol and the death of Rabban Gamliel (see here for further analysis).
An discussed here an obscure debate regarding the ritual purity of a knife led to the end of the...
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Chulin 94: Let's Have Some Wine
In our last post, we spoke about geneivat da’at, generating false goodwill, in the context of gid hanasheh. I imagine very few people reading this devar Torah have ever sent a cut-up thigh containing a gid hanasheh to a non-Jew, and fewer still would be able to identify the gid hanasheh even if it was staring them in the face. We can more easily relate to some...
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Chulin 94: What a Nerve!
One would not normally associate the prohibition to eat the gid hanashe, the sciatic nerve, with issues of business ethics. But related they are.
The Mishna teaches that “One may send the thigh [of an animal] to an idol worshipper [even though] it contains the gid hanasheh, because one can recognize its place” (Chulin 93b). The Gemara immediately notes one can only send a whole thigh to the non...
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Chulin 83: Cow and Calf
One of most famous mitzvot of the Torah is that of shiluach haken, the obligation to send away the mother bird before taking her little chicks or even unhatched eggs. So important is this mitzvah that it is one of the very few in which we are promised long life for its observance.
This well-know mitzvah has a “cousin”, one not quite as well-known—that of oto v’et beno,...
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Chulin 60: The Essence of Torah
One of the teachings that is ingrained in us from a young age is that every letter, and surely every verse and story, found in the Torah is of great significance. We have elsewhere discussed that this premise is far from unanimous, with some of the greatest rabbis throughout the ages maintaining that “the Torah speaks in the language of men” (see, for example, here) and hence, not every word is necessarily of great...
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