Daily Talk
A chick drowns in a vat of wine, and whether it can become impure depends on whether the one lifting it out pictures a gentile's table or a dog's bowl. A soaking wet loaf touched by the flesh of a corpse stays pure because the liquid on it was pomegranate juice. Why does a new treatise on impure food begin by insisting that nothing is food until a person decides it is?
Nothing Is Food Until Someone Means It
Loading...
About This Talk
Chapter 1 opens Hilchot Tum'at Okhalin with the two gates every food must pass before it can become impure, designation for human consumption and moistening by one of seven liquids, water, dew, oil, wine, milk, blood and honey, falling as the owner desired, ruling that fruit juices and the liquid of grapes and olives under a third grown are pure forever, that spices eaten only for flavor are not food, that thought can make congealed milk into food but not into liquid and snow into liquid but not food, and that orlah, meat and milk, the red heifer and piggul are forbidden for benefit yet still susceptible. Chapter 2 adds that nothing attached to the ground can become impure, that the blood of slaughter prepares an animal's meat, that liquid must have been lifted from the earth to prepare food, that a flowerpot with a hole is treated as the ground, that impure liquid defiles food even against the owner's will unless it lies on the earth, that food spoiled before impurity is outside the system while impure food that spoils stays impure until unfit for a dog, that only water among liquids can be purified in a mikveh, and that impure seeds that take root come up pure. Chapter 3 lays out the grid of foods needing intent, liquid, both or neither, lets local custom decide when intent is required, disregards intent formed while produce is attached, and closes with a chick drowned in wine whose status turns on whether it was meant for a person or a dog, and on the rule that a minor's deeds count where his thoughts do not.