Daily Talk
The Rambam spends a chapter naming eleven kinds of people who do not have to come up to Jerusalem, and then rules that at Hakhel almost every one of those exemptions falls away. Then he opens the laws of the firstborn with an animal that became holy before anyone said a word over it. What is the difference between a holiness you declare and a holiness that simply arrives?
Eleven Exemptions and a Firstborn Already Holy
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About This Talk
Chagigah 2 lists the eleven categories of people exempt from appearing before God, ties the burnt offering of appearance to ordinary funds alone, and ends by ruling that a man who eats his festival offering shut in with his own wife and children has not performed a whole mitzvah. Chagigah 3 gathers the entire nation once in seven years to hear the king read, and obligates even the convert who understands nothing to listen as though the mountain were still smoking. Bechorot 1 rules that a firstborn kosher animal is consecrated the moment it emerges from the womb whether or not its owner ever consecrated it, and then makes that owner keep it thirty or fifty days before handing it to a priest.