- Beitza – “The Egg” – Making it all Social
- Throughout the previous tractates of Book Moed there’s been a somewhat central theme, the definition of the Jewish people and establishment of the nation, through mandate from God. Holidays which were declared, the design of them to bring people closer to the divine, and a structure, mostly related to the Temple, for administering all that. Beitza looks at “yom tov”, literally “good day” (often used as a greeting in Hebrew), specifically, the festival days that weren’t mandated by God, but created by the biblical rabbis as a way of bringing the Jewish community together socially, bringing the members of the community closer to each other. These festival days include the first and last days of Passover, Shavuot, both days of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur (though, as we saw in Tractate Yoma, this is really its own special category of festival), the beginning of Sukkot, and Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah.
- 9/2/21, Chapter 1, Page 2 – Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The argument between two of the more famed rabbis, long time rivals, Shammai and HIllel, is over whether an egg which is laid on a festival day can be eaten on that day or must be set aside until the next day. On the lenient side is the view that it can be eaten – if the chicken was a laying hen, one designated for egg production, then the egg was fully formed by the day before the holiday and was simply laid on the holiday, and if the chicken was an eating one, destined for the pot, the egg is simply an extension of itself which has become separated. On the restrictive side, the argument is the “no work” rule from the Sabbath and other major holidays, and as the egg is a product of work on the part of the hen, it must be laid aside until the next day. It does seem, for the rabbis, the chicken comes first.
- 9/3/21, Page 3 – Among the philosophical questions you probably haven’t considered… Is an egg more like fruit or fruit juice? Yes, yes, it’s solid, it’s a food, you eat it, you don’t drink it (unless you’re one of those bodybuilders who drinks raw eggs), but, consider. An egg is separate from a chicken, whole and entire, just as a fruit which is picked or falls from a tree. Or, an egg is wholly contained within and as part of a chicken and is squeezed out, just as juice is from from a fruit. Personally, I’m going with the former, but apparently it’s a serious enough dilemma, given the difference in how fruit and juice are treated on festival days. We’re only two days into this tractate and I’m already thinking, just don’t eat eggs a few days out of the year and it’s not an issue you have to confront.
- 9/4/21, Page 4 – You might be asking, what is the big deal with not cooking and eating an egg on these yom tov holidays. For the most part, the same 39 no-work restrictions apply as on the Sabbath or other major holidays, with two major exceptions. It’s permitted to “carry” something within the public domain and it’s permitted to prepare a meal for yourself and your family and friends. So what is the argument as to why can’t you pick up and cook an egg that was laid on the holiday? The debate is whether you’re taking advantage of the chicken having violated the no-work rules – remember, your animals get a day of rest too.
- 9/5/21, Page 5 – Common Jewish wisdom has it that the reason we celebrate certain holidays for two days rather than one in the Jewish Diaspora, because dates were centered on the Temple, and if you were far away, you were never quite sure (and part of why Reform Judaism doesn’t celebrate for two days, because in modern times, we actually do know). Or, there’s a whole mythos about signal fires being prohibited by occupying powers, and messengers might be delayed. According to the Talmudic rabbis it goes back further and is based on witness testimony rules in the courts. What today’s page challenges, is why an egg is being subjected to court rules. As posited, testimony is entrusted to courts, eggs are entrusted to all.
- 9/6/21, Page 6 – Meat and milk, a long standing argument, which I’ve touched on before. The Torah, i.e., God, only prohibits cooking a kid (baby goat/calf) in its own mother’s milk. The Talmud in essence adds to that by prohibiting the eating of any meat (except fish) with dairy. But “adding to the Torah” isn’t allowed, it’s a strict constitutionalist structure. Instead, rabbinic law is considered “building a fence” around the Torah, by creating buffer zones – making things stricter than they need to be so that you don’t come close to violating the actual Torah law. Do they go too far some times? Many would say so, after all, chickens don’t produce milk, it’s about appearances. And, the egg? Both past and not yet meat, can’t be confused with meat, therefore, allowed with dairy.
- 9/7/21, Page 7 – Science: when a hen’s ovary produces an egg it is shell-less, it travels down a pathway to where, over a twenty-hour period, the shell is formed, and then the hen lays it. Anytime prior to the shell formation it can be fertilized. Talmudic sages: a hen produces an egg by absorbing it from a rooster and then producing the shell and laying it. While intercourse is best, as long as the hen can hear the rooster’s call, even from far away, across a rope bridge, on an island, she can absorb an egg, which she will lay during the day. If she lays an egg at night, while roosters are sleeping, she must have absorbed it from the earth, therefore it’s not fertilized. Eggs found in a slaughtered hen which don’t have a shell are considered meat, and are not to be eaten with dairy.
- 9/8/21, Page 8 – Our egg makes only a minimal appearance on today’s page. The discussion is about using ashes from your wood burning stove to cover blood spilled while slaughtering an animal for food. Cold ashes which have been set aside for just such a purpose are fine. However, what about ashes from a fire that was burning on the festival itself? Those cold ashes are no longer permitted, because they were “created” during the festival. However, hot ashes can be used, as they still retain the nature of being coal or wood. And how hot do they have to be? Hot enough to roast an egg in them.
- 9/9/21, Page 9 – It’s about the optics. We’ve seen that many rabbinic prohibitions aren’t aimed at a specific act being performed, but at “what will your neighbors think?” Avoiding the appearance of impropriety seems an inane approach to rule-making. Do the neighbors really care what you’re up to? It puts me in mind of a Facebook group I belong to about happenings in my hometown. It’s a guarantee that every day, someone will post to the effect of “I saw someone doing X” followed by their own and others’ speculations about what might be going on behind the scenes, invariably building into a ridiculous scenario, followed by calls to report the now assumed activity to the authorities.
- 9/10/21, Page 10 – Sometimes, even the Talmudic rabbis have had enough with the questions. In yet another “what if?” scenario, the question is raised, that if you’ve selected a couple of birds, specifically either black or white, from the coop, for your festival lunch, so that they’ve been officially designated as consecrated for the festival, and you return on the festival to claim them, and the birds you wanted aren’t in the same place, can you just randomly pick new birds for your sacred lunch? Have the birds magically changed from white to black or vice versa, or spirited themselves away to escape their fate? Enough already, is the response. Birds move around, they don’t change color overnight, if you didn’t cage them separately, you’re just stupid, and no, you don’t get new birds for lunch.
- 9/11/21, Page 11 – Sometimes, the joy of celebrating trumps the rules of observance. The rabbis single out four cases where they relax the rules for festivals in order not to inhibit people’s participation. The one that stood out was the declaration that, within Jerusalem, which saw an influx of celebrants for each of these yom tov festivals, all wines and all doughs are considered ritually pure for the day, so that folk who came to town didn’t have to worry about whose wares they could eat and drink. Given how stringent the laws are around everything from harvesting to preparation to storage to sale are, that’s a big “relax”, and shows their recognition of the importance of enjoyment on these particular festivals.
- 9/12/21, Page 12 – On Page 4 I noted that the two exceptions to traditional Sabbath and holiday rules are cooking and carrying. How far do those exceptions go? The first is easy – the cooking is supposed to be for your personal enjoyment, understood to include cooking for family and friends. The second is thornier, as Shammai, part of our dynamic duo of arguers, opines that if it’s not carrying related to cooking, i.e., bringing ingredients home to cook with and carrying finished dishes to the party, it’s not allowed. Hillel disagrees, insisting that anything that directly contributes to the celebration is allowed – for example, carrying your baby to a festival if it’s outside the eruv. Shammai thinks that’s overboard and will lead to everyone carrying everything to everywhere. We leave them arguing.
- 9/13/21, Page 13 – Every now and again I’m reminded of how processed our food is in contrast to the way it was prepared and/or eaten in times past. As part of a discussion about separating grains for tithing on the festivals, a discussion ensues around freshly harvested barley. It’s noted that since the “usual manner” of eating barley is to peel off its husk by rubbing it between your fingers and then popping the fresh kernel in your mouth, it’s a level of snacking that doesn’t trigger tithing rules. It brought me up short for a moment, because like I’d imagine most of us, if I think of barley (or other grains), I think of it after it’s been processed and dried, in a form you wouldn’t want to just nibble on.
- 9/14/21, Page 14 – I’ve pointed out before that most of the Talmudic rabbis shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a kitchen. Today they discuss which steps of recipe preparation can be done on the festival itself and which must be done the day before. It’s not really clear why, since the yom tov rules allow for preparation and cooking on the festival, but some of them seem to feel that certain preparations, particularly those that involve grinding or pounding, like salt, spices, and wheat, are the sort of things that you should just know the steps you need to do in advance. Not all of them agree, pointing out that cooking is an art and sometimes the flavorings and additions to a dish come up in the moment.
- 9/15/21, Chapter 2, Page 15 – We’re on the honor system in the kitchen. If one of the yom tov festival days falls on a Friday, the day before the Sabbath, we have a minor dilemma. We’re allowed to cook for the festival day for ourselves, family, and friends, but with the intent to cook just what is needed for the festival celebration. Since we will need food for the Sabbath, which is normally prepared the day before, what do we do? Obviously, we could prepare enough for both days, the day before the yom tov, or… the rabbis decide, as long as our intent is to cook just for the festival on the festival day, if we just happen to make more food than needed and have leftovers, we can eat that on the Sabbath.
- 9/16/21, Page 16 – Amid a litany of foods that can be “accidentally” leftover from the festival for the Sabbath, as this chapter started yesterday, we have a sidebar flashback to one of the Talmud’s creepier moments. It came up on page 10 of Shabbat, and it’s reiterated here. If a man has given a young boy some bread, he would paint the boy’s eyes with blue eyeshadow, a way of letting the boy’s mother know that her child has been singled out. There’s more detail given, including oiling or buttering the boy’s skin, that I swear, given the amount of metaphoric discussion in the Talmud, there’s no way that this isn’t a euphemism for a pedophile’s claim on his victim.
- 9/17/21, Page 17 – I regularly bake my own bread, and when I do, it’s generally a loaf that will last us 3-4 days. While I’m a fan of freshly baked bread, apparently the sages of the Talmud are fanatics about it, as, while they allow for leftover food from the yom tov festival being eaten on the Sabbath (with a long diatribe about pretending to need to make a larger than necessary quantity for the festival), they don’t allow for day old bread. If I’m reading it right, they assert that while the dough can be prepared, it should be baked to order in the waning heat of the oven on the Sabbath. In my mind that seems more of a Sabbath violation than simply baking an extra loaf the day before, but since no one objected, I’m guessing that for whatever breads they were baking, this worked.
- 9/18/21, Page 18 – A ritual, purifying bath is an obligation before the start of a festival or the Sabbath, not during. The reasoning is because in a sense it is an act of repairing oneself, and repair-work is prohibited on the Sabbath and major holidays. In a sidebar it’s noted that if one is immersing for pleasure, which is permitted, one seeks out clear, clean, cool water, versus the ritual bath, the mikvah, which may well be in “bad, murky water, as the ritual bath is not always sufficiently clean”. And while I understand that ritual purification and cleanliness are not the same thing, I’ve never understood why mikvahs are not kept clean, but they rarely are, at least in my limited experience.
- 9/19/21, Page 19 – Like purifying one’s body with a dip in the mikvah, your cooking and serving vessels ofttimes need to be purified. And for that, they require a longer dip, where they are submerged prior to, and left until after, sunset. Ostensibly a separate pool for cooking pots and that’s not why the bathing waters are murky…. The argument is over cutting things close by immersing them at twilight. Were they really immersed prior to sunset or not, or do you have to leave them for 24 hours? It’s quite the conundrum and the arguments range, without conclusion, not surprising, since back on Shabbat 34-35 they couldn’t come to an agreement about what color sky represented twilight, nor how long it lasted.
- 9/20/21, Page 20 – Once again the sages Hillel and Shammai have a face-off over a point of ritual law. While both are good at standing their ground, they’re also smart enough to know when not to. Hillel finds himself surrounded by a hostile mob of students from Shammai’s school, and rather than double down on his side of the argument, he picks a diversionary tactic, diffusing the hostility and letting the students think they’ve won. He then goes back to teaching the law his way while gathering support from other sages, not just based on his opinion, but on how he handled the situation. Perhaps a bit of Talmudic guidance for today’s professors who find themselves the targets of cancel mobs of one or another political or cultural stripe.
- 9/21/21, Page 21 – Rav Huna is kicked back in his orchard and lost in his own thoughts. In response to an unwelcome and uninvited interruption demanding his attention to a complex legal matter, he responds by pointing out a raven flying past and then ignores the questioner, a respected elder, until he goes away. When admonished by his own son for his rudeness, he basically responds with, “I’m constantly expected to figure out complex problems for other people. I need some me time, to recharge, he was interrupting that, and wasn’t going to go away otherwise.”
- 9/22/21, Page 22 – Rabbi Gamliel shares his housekeeping tricks for getting around festival work prohibitions. Sweep the floors the day before and cover them with drop cloths, which you can whisk away moments before guests arrive. Likewise, burn incense and trap the smoke in a sealable container, simply opening the container when visitors are about to knock on the door. And, leave that goat slow roasting at just the right minimum heat so that it’s falling off the bone tender when it’s time to serve dinner. Gamliel would have been first in line for a backyard smoker. The major sages think he’s cheating on the rules, but he’s too wealthy and too important to stop.
- 9/23/21, Page 23 – I love when someone righteous about their position gets hoisted on their own petard. “It’s prohibited on Festivals to put spices or incense over coals because they will produce smoke with a new scent, and creating something new isn’t allowed”. “But you allow the cooking of meat over coals, and that produces smoke with a new scent?” “Yes, but that scent is innate to the meat, and therefore you’re not creating something new.” “Umm, and the scent of spices and incense isn’t innate to them?” “Err… umm… but…” “Just shut up and go flip the steaks.”
- 9/24/21, Chapter 3, Page 24 – It’s been established that we can prepare and cook ingredients on the festival, including meat. It even includes the slaughter of the animal on the day of the festival (refrigeration wasn’t a thing back then). But hunting and trapping prohibitions remain in place for the festival day, so the question arises, with domesticated, cooped, penned, or similar animals, be they four-legged, avian, or fish, where is the line drawn? As is fitting for the theme, if you are responsible for providing food for the animal, then it is considered to have been already trapped, while if it’s an animal that has to roam, fly, or swim about and find its own nourishment, then it’s not, and it’s prohibited to catch, kill, or cook it on the festival.
- 9/25/21, Page 25 – Shades of Sukkah 41, where you could gift, rather than sell, prohibited produce to a merchant, who would then gift you some money, unrelated, of course, to the produce you’d just given him. So what do you do if someone, particularly a gentile, brings you an animal or meat that you’re not sure of its provenance in regard to the hunting and trapping prohibitions on a festival? You give it to a fellow member of the tribe, who can now use it, because… wait for it… he can be comforted by the “fact” that an animal or meat coming from a fellow observant Jew must, innately, be permitted or you’d never have given it to him. Regifting removes all sins. Who knew?
- 9/26/21, Page 26 – An animal falls down into a well. In modern day we’d organize a rescue, and then the animal would become famous on social media, there’d be a whole campaign to make sure that it lived in pampered luxury, got exhibited at state fairs, and all the rest. But we’re dealing with whether or not an animal can be slaughtered, cooked, and eaten on the festival day, and it’s had the temerity to go and fall into a well in the middle of dinner prep. In a different era, instead of hauling the animal out of the well, a rabbi does down to examine it, decides if its injuries make it ritually impure, and thus whether it gets hauled out, slaughtered, cooked, and eaten, or left in the well overnight (because, hauling it out of the well would violate work prohibitions, unless said hauling is part of preparing the feast…). Nothing is said about the work involved in lowering and raising the rabbi in the well.
- 9/27/21, Page 27 – Given the value to a family of a herd animal, especially over time, it may just be that the family doesn’t really want to give their best, unblemished cow, sheep, or goat to the Temple for sacrifice. But you know, a little blemish here or there caused by “accidentally” putting the animals’ feed on the other side of a fence so they might, perhaps, scratch themselves poking their head through to eat, or getting your dog to nip at your animals’ ears by sticking a dog-treat behind an ear or two, would just be “accidental”. Not in any way trying to shirk your sacrificial obligations. Just donate a little cash and take your now blemished animal home with you, to serve you and your family well for years to come.
- 9/28/21, Page 28 – Sometimes, the avoidance of the appearance of doing work on a festival reaches the ridiculous, at least to a layman’s eyes. A butcher can’t weigh out portions of meat using a scale, or by water displacement, involving direct determination of weight. But, he can balance the piece of meat against common objects in his hands, make a note of what object felt like the equivalent weight, and then the next day, weigh that object and send a bill to the customer. He can’t sharpen his knife against a stone or steel, but he can sharpen it against virtually any other object. A customer can’t ask for a specific weight or monetary amount of meat, but can roughly outline how much they want – see point one of this trio of points. It’s no wonder it was, and is, hard to get people to follow rabbinic rulings.
- 9/29/21, Page 29 – We continue with the festival restrictions on quantities of meats and produce, though today focused on the consumer. You can ask for six peaches, but you can’t ask for a pound of peaches. You can ask for a leg of lamb the size for a family of four, but you can’t ask for a three pound leg of lamb. You can’t point to one particular item and say “I want that one”, because that violates the prohibition on “selecting”, but you could point to it and say, “I want one like that”, and get it. And you can’t mention money. When it comes to cooking, you can’t measure things out, unless, by not measuring, you might ruin the dish, in that case, the joy of the festival overrides the prohibition on measuring. It helps to know that all these rules were just made up by a group of control freak rabbis and have no firm basis in the Torah.
- 9/30/21, Chapter 4, Page 30 – Someone points out, via a series of examples, that every prohibition to do something one way to avoid one transgression, pretty much ends up with them violating a different rule. It’s a festival, the purpose is joy, and adding more and more rules, that are harder and harder to follow, is a waste of time. “Better to be an unwitting sinner than an intentional sinner” is the refrain – i.e., don’t tell the people the rules, just let them celebrate. Jeez, one would think you could just end the Talmud right here.
- 10/1/21, Page 31 – How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Well, we could potentially find out on a festival day, as the normal Sabbath or holiday prohibition against chopping wood is sorta kinda lifted. You can’t use a saw, sickle, or axe, but you can use a cleaver, or any other method that “isn’t the usual way of chopping wood”. Actually, you can even use an axe, but only if you use its “female side”. And, perhaps you could use a woodchuck.
- 10/2/21, Page 32 – After all the enumeration of ways to get around Talmud prohibitions relating to preparing food on festival days, there really is a line in the literal desert sand the rabbis won’t cross. You can’t take a lump of clay and make a bowl or pot, even though it’s going to be used for cooking or serving food. You can’t burn wood to make charcoal, even though the charcoal is going to be used for slow cooking. That’s a fine line, since you can burn wood for cooking, and burn charcoal that’s already produced. You can’t cut paper to wrap a fish in. And you can’t break a pot in order to put the shards under said fish in order to prevent it from burning.
- 10/3/21, Page 33 – I doubt it was dental health that was in mind, more likely getting something that was stuck out from between your teeth, but an entire discussion on straws and twigs for doing so was part of today’s page. When it was repeatedly noted that you have to have your straw or twig at the ready, as you can’t break or cut it off from the plant on the Sabbath or a festival, I immediately began to wonder. Sure enough, there are modern rules among the orthodox in regard to flossing. You have to have the piece of floss precut, and you have to be careful not cause any bleeding while flossing. It’s actually just recommended that you floss before sundown starts the holiday and wait until after sundown the next day to floss again.
- 10/4/21, Page 34 – The kosher process has been touted as being a quicker and more humane approach to animal slaughter. So from modern day sensibility, it’s disturbing to read a passage as callous as one that appears in today’s pages. It’s in regard to a fowl which has been either trampled underfoot, thrown against a wall, or crushed by an animal, and remains alive, “twitching”. Rather than put it out of its misery, the ruling is to leave it alone and see if it survives 24 hours. If it does it’s considered kosher and can be slaughtered for meat, if it doesn’t, its carcass is to be discarded. I realize it’s an attempt to salvage a situation in which someone, probably poor, just wants a chicken for the stewpot rather than waste it, but that doesn’t make the process either quick or humane.
- 10/5/21, Page 35 – We’ve established through the course of this tractate that certain limited work is allowed on Festival days that isn’t allowed on days like the Sabbath, or Yom Kippur. Limited work, but not unlimited, having some very clear boundaries. Why? Why not just let people relax and celebrate as they see fit? The rabbis venture that the average person understands how important the weekly Sabbath observance is, and will see that any time an exception is allowed, it’s because it’s critically important, like saving a life. On the other hand, the Festival days are about celebrating life, and if the rules are relaxed too far, people will come to assume that the Festival isn’t all that important, and cease to observe it.
- 10/6/21, Chapter 5, Page 36 – Today’s page enumerates several examples of the “fence around the Torah” for the Sabbath or Festivals concept of making rules outside of Torah law so you don’t get close to violating the original laws. No climbing trees – because you might accidentally break off a branch that you might then use as a tool; no riding an animal – because you might ride it out past the Sabbath limits for travel; no swimming – because you might help someone learn to swim which might entice you to construct a flotation device; no clapping hands or dancing – because you might decide you need music and then go and fashion a musical instrument as accompaniment (and you can’t just use one that’s laying about – because if it gets damaged, you might be tempted to fix it).
- 10/7/21, Page 37 – Way back in tractates Shabbat and Eruvin, we covered the distances one is allowed to travel from one’s home on the Sabbath and Festivals. Today’s page poses an interesting thought experiment, as two people who share common ownership of something (a robe is used as an example, but it could just as easily be a car, in modern life) seek to extend their travel range by combining their respective spheres of travel distance into a sort of figure eight of overlapping circles. Not so fast, say the rabbis. In fact, it works the opposite. Your starting points actually limit the distance you can travel away from each other, not extend it, based on each other’s residences, in essence limiting you to the overlap portion of the circles. Nice try though, thanks for playing.
- 10/8/21, Page 38 – We have likely all visited a farm or orchard, and most of us have picked up a pretty pebble that caught our eye and stuck it in a pocket, to be added to others we have picked up over the years, and displayed in our own home. It’s something we give little thought to, after all, it’s a pebble, worthless to the property owner. Not so, say the sages, though not for some philosophical ownership reason you might think. No, it’s much more pragmatic. That owner, might have one day, intentionally or not, mixed that pebble into a bushel of grain or produce for sale, increasing its weight, and thus, you are depriving him of future earnings. Yup, they went there.
- 10/9/21, Page 39 – One thing necessary to cooking for a festival is a flame (or modern day equivalent). A discussion ensues among the rabbis about how big of a chip of wood can be used to transfer a flame from one cooking spot to another. The decision brings back our egg from the beginning of this tractate, as they decide that any chip not big enough to cook one is okay. That would be a pretty big chip of wood if you think about it. It sent me into a short internet dive over the modern equivalent, a cigarette or stove lighter, where in short order I discovered that the consensus is that lighters do not contain enough butane to cook an egg. Because I knew that the question had probably been asked, by some college student without a hot-plate, somewhere.
- 10/10/21, Page 40 – The Festival meal is over, it’s time for the guests to go home, there’s a ton of food leftover, but you knew that was going to be the case when you cooked twice what you really needed. Let’s pack up some for each guest to take home with them. But wait, they can’t carry food from your home to theirs, carrying is still prohibited on Festival days. A good host plans things out. Pre-Leftovers is now a thing. Make that extra food, set aside a portion for each guest, all nicely wrapped up and with their name on it, and set all those packaged portions aside in a spot which you designate as temporarily belonging to the guests, giving up ownership of a corner of your home for a few hours. Then, they’re simply moving their portion from one part of “their property” to the rest of their home. This convoluted approach is where we end our celebration of the Festival, and tractate Beitza.
And the lima beans laugh and laugh… – Atlas Obscura