Maseches Pesachim 6-8
Daf 6
Okay, so what's interesting here to me is that there are large sections of the Mishna and the Talmud that are about ownership and contract law and debts and obligations and are purely legalistic and have very little to do with the Torah per se, except that the Torah lays out clear general principles about this kind of law- that the law should be just and fair and uniformly applied. And there are large sections of the Mishna and Talmud that are about ritual practice and religious observance, which tend to involve the close reading of Torah verses to learn how to do the laws, and if the close reading doesn't give enough information, you next go to Mesorah, the transmitted tradition. My point is that these are two general approaches to law that both appear in the Talmud but don't necessarily overlap that much.
But the removal of leaven from a house is a ritual law about ownership, in that the language of the ritual law is that one is prohibited to own chametz for the seven days of Pesach. So the Gemara is trying to work out whether you apply principles of interpreting ritual law or you apply principles of ownership law. It's weird but kinda neat.
So think about the removal of leaven from a house, as an actual process with multiple steps that takes place in the weeks before Pesach. First, you stop buying new chametz and try to eat all of the chametz you have in the house, as much as possible. Then, you start cleaning areas of your house that had chametz products in them and purging them of chametz by moving it all to a more consolidated area. As Pesach grows closer, you have more and more areas that have been converted for Pesach already, and fewer and fewer areas that still contain chametz. Eventually, your whole kitchen and pantry and any other places with food have been cleaned of chametz and the only food you have is pesadik, with the possible exception of those foods that you are going to sell, as mentioned yesterday, to a goy. Those foods are put away in a sealed area where you can't see them over the holiday but where the goy theoretically can gain access to if they want to.
After you've done all this, it's time for Bedikas Chametz, the formal ritual process the night of the 14th of Nisan when you go around your house and search for chametz, which you will burn the next morning. What are you going to find? You've already removed the chametz from your house as part of the cleaning process. You might find crumbs of bread under the table that got missed when you swept, but crumbs are... crumbs. They're essentially a legal nullity, they're well below the minimum shiur to have any consequence as food. So some people have a tradition of, when they're cleaning the house, holding on to some small but significant amount of bread and stashing it around the house in the rooms they're going to search, so that during Bedikas chametz they'll actually 'find' something to remove and burn.
As part of the ceremony of Bedikas Chametz, the householder makes a declaration at this point that all leaven still in their home should be considered as dust. The Gemara struggles with this. What is the leaven that's still in the home at this point? Crumbs? As I said, the crumbs are negligible. So maybe the answer is that in this case they're not negligible from a legalistic perspective. They may be negligible from a ritual perspective, where we say anything less than the shiur doesn't matter, but as a legal matter you're making a declaration about ownership and so the crumbs still count.
Rav Yehuda in the name of Rav looks at other cases where one makes a legalistic assumption of negligibility/renounced ownership so that a declaration isn't necessary. A scenario is presented where a farmer has fields that have both figs and grapes in them (Presumably not planted in the same area, as that ought to be a Torah violation, but right next to each other, let's say) The figs are harvested before the grapes, so that one might still be guarding their field to make sure nobody steals the grapes, but wouldn't care if any late, shriveled figs are lost because the fig harvest is over. In this case, says the Tosefta, if someone steals the old figs they're not liable for robbery because one can assume the owner has renounced ownership of the figs even though they're still guarding their fields. The exception is if the owner does anything in particular to note that they're still guarding the figs in particular.
So to we can say that there's a default presumption here that the owner is not going to want to retain ownership of their bread crumbs so they can be considered renounced from an ownership point of view without a verbal declaration.
Rav instead argues that the declaration of nullification is in case one had a more substantial piece of leaven that they accidentally failed to remove. Here the question is why not just remove it, why make this declaration? Well, what if you believed you'd removed all leaven but had missed this piece, and now it's afternoon on the 14th of Nisan after the prohibition on deriving benefit from chametz has kicked in, and it's too late to legally renounce it because once you can't derive benefit from it it has no monetary value and therefore you don't really own it? This question is that intersection of ritual and legal law. Rabbi Elazar teaches that two things fall into a category where you don't legally own them but you're still D'oraysa responsible for them with regard to the law as if you owned them: a pit in the public domain that you dug, where you're still liable for damages even though you don't own the land or the pit, and chametz you didn't get rid of on the afternoon of the 14th of Nisan.
There's still time on the morning of 14 Nisan to make this declaration, but we make it in the evening instead because this is the time when we're doing this formal ritual, so better to tie it all in at once to make sure you don't forget.
Daf 7
When we do bedikas chametz, we recite a blessing. What's the blessing? Rav Pappi in the name of Rava says "לְבַעֵר חָמֵץ" Rav Pappa in the name of Rava says "עַל בִּיעוּר חָמֵץ" . These are nearly identical blessings in the name of nearly identical Rabbis. The first means something like "Blessed Are You, the Lord our God, who commanded us to remove chametz." The second means somehting like "Blessed Are You, the Lord our God, who commanded us concerning the removal of chametz." The disagreement seems to be over what the blessing is covering. Since some part of the removal process won't happen until the morning, do you say a blessing over what you've already done, per Rav Pappi, or do you say a blessing over what you will do in the morning, per Rav Pappa?
The Gemara then goes down into the weeds of whether there actually is a meaningful difference between these formulas, since they're both referring to that which God commanded us, so how much does it matter which you use?
So when bris milah is performed, before the actual circumcision the father of the child says a blessing "al milah", which according to our theory of Rav Pappi vs Rav Pappa ougth to be the bracha one recites afterward, not before. But this is different, says the Gemara, since the father may not actually be the one carrying out milah, so here 'al milah' isn't about timing, it's about making the beracha more general.
And in the case of lulav, we recite 'al netilat lulav' after taking the lulav but before shaking it, so the Gemara says that the reason is that the actual mitzvah of taking lulav was completed by taking it even before shaking it.
In any case, the halacha here is that the we hold by Rav Pappa and say "al biur chametz."
Moving on, a double (or maybe triple) gezeirah shavah which is probably just a remez is used to learn the mechanism of the search. The search for chametz is compared to the search that Yosef did when he hid the cup on Binyamin to frame him, which was a thorough search starting with the oldest and concluding with the youngest. This passage then contains a word for search that is the same as a word using in Zephaniah (I barely know who he is, one of the Trei Asar) in describing a search by the light of a lamp. For extra fun this is linked to a line in Proverbs about searching the souls of Man with the light of God, which seems extra. The Gemara says this is there to teach that you should use a small light, a candle, not just a big room light, but I think it also reiterates the themes of light and darkness and chametz and matzah and the whole way in which Pesach is about shedding that which keeps us away from holiness and becoming holier people.
Daf 8
The Gemara asks why you should use a small light preferably over a big light, or sunlight or moonlight. Rav Nachman bar Yitzhak says it's because you have control of the candle and can point it toward dark areas, whereas you can't point the big light anywhere you want. Rav Pappa says it's because if you used a bigger light where you did try to carry it around you'd run a risk of burning down your house. The Gemara is anti burning down your house, for the record.
The Gemara then brings a few baraisas about specific areas that you do or don't need to search, but again the basic principle is that if it's a place where anyone might ever conceivably put chametz, you need to search, and if it's a place where it would be difficult or unlikely to put chametz, you don't need to search.
It discusses different kinds of food storage of non-chametz food one eats during the rest of the year, such a wine storage, oil storage, and fish storage. If it's a sort of food where one takes what they're going to need for a meal from the storage vessel before the meal and is not going to go back for more, it does not need to be searched, but if it's something like wine storage where mid-meal one might decide they want more and go get more, there's a risk they would carry leaven with them and leave it in the storage, so it needs to be searched.
One interesting little bit of trivia in the Gemara's discussion of the debate I mentioned on Daf 2 between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammai of what parts of a wine cellar need to be searched... So they both agree that a wine cellar only needs to be partially searched. They both agree that it's some outer parts of the cellar, the most frequently travelled parts, where there's a risk that someone may have carried in chametz. But they disagree on the exact parameters of the search and it's unclear from the terse language of the Mishna exactly where the disagreement is.
Rav Yehuda says that Beis Shammai holds that you search the outermost two rows, the ones closest to the entrance, in full. Rav Yochanan says that Beis Shammai holds you search the outermost row and the outermost column which follows from the end of the outermost row at a right angle. He explains this shape as being a gamma, the Greek letter Γ. I think it's interesting that Rav Yochanan uses a Greek letter to explain the shape.
Meanwhile, Beis Hillel is more lenient and says that if you imagine the wine storage in this cellar as consisting of a bunch of stacked wine bottles/barrels, and the stacks are then in rows, you only need to search the upper two bottles/barrels on the stack in the outermost row, not the ones below them. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/362876.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
Okay, so what's interesting here to me is that there are large sections of the Mishna and the Talmud that are about ownership and contract law and debts and obligations and are purely legalistic and have very little to do with the Torah per se, except that the Torah lays out clear general principles about this kind of law- that the law should be just and fair and uniformly applied. And there are large sections of the Mishna and Talmud that are about ritual practice and religious observance, which tend to involve the close reading of Torah verses to learn how to do the laws, and if the close reading doesn't give enough information, you next go to Mesorah, the transmitted tradition. My point is that these are two general approaches to law that both appear in the Talmud but don't necessarily overlap that much.
But the removal of leaven from a house is a ritual law about ownership, in that the language of the ritual law is that one is prohibited to own chametz for the seven days of Pesach. So the Gemara is trying to work out whether you apply principles of interpreting ritual law or you apply principles of ownership law. It's weird but kinda neat.
So think about the removal of leaven from a house, as an actual process with multiple steps that takes place in the weeks before Pesach. First, you stop buying new chametz and try to eat all of the chametz you have in the house, as much as possible. Then, you start cleaning areas of your house that had chametz products in them and purging them of chametz by moving it all to a more consolidated area. As Pesach grows closer, you have more and more areas that have been converted for Pesach already, and fewer and fewer areas that still contain chametz. Eventually, your whole kitchen and pantry and any other places with food have been cleaned of chametz and the only food you have is pesadik, with the possible exception of those foods that you are going to sell, as mentioned yesterday, to a goy. Those foods are put away in a sealed area where you can't see them over the holiday but where the goy theoretically can gain access to if they want to.
After you've done all this, it's time for Bedikas Chametz, the formal ritual process the night of the 14th of Nisan when you go around your house and search for chametz, which you will burn the next morning. What are you going to find? You've already removed the chametz from your house as part of the cleaning process. You might find crumbs of bread under the table that got missed when you swept, but crumbs are... crumbs. They're essentially a legal nullity, they're well below the minimum shiur to have any consequence as food. So some people have a tradition of, when they're cleaning the house, holding on to some small but significant amount of bread and stashing it around the house in the rooms they're going to search, so that during Bedikas chametz they'll actually 'find' something to remove and burn.
As part of the ceremony of Bedikas Chametz, the householder makes a declaration at this point that all leaven still in their home should be considered as dust. The Gemara struggles with this. What is the leaven that's still in the home at this point? Crumbs? As I said, the crumbs are negligible. So maybe the answer is that in this case they're not negligible from a legalistic perspective. They may be negligible from a ritual perspective, where we say anything less than the shiur doesn't matter, but as a legal matter you're making a declaration about ownership and so the crumbs still count.
Rav Yehuda in the name of Rav looks at other cases where one makes a legalistic assumption of negligibility/renounced ownership so that a declaration isn't necessary. A scenario is presented where a farmer has fields that have both figs and grapes in them (Presumably not planted in the same area, as that ought to be a Torah violation, but right next to each other, let's say) The figs are harvested before the grapes, so that one might still be guarding their field to make sure nobody steals the grapes, but wouldn't care if any late, shriveled figs are lost because the fig harvest is over. In this case, says the Tosefta, if someone steals the old figs they're not liable for robbery because one can assume the owner has renounced ownership of the figs even though they're still guarding their fields. The exception is if the owner does anything in particular to note that they're still guarding the figs in particular.
So to we can say that there's a default presumption here that the owner is not going to want to retain ownership of their bread crumbs so they can be considered renounced from an ownership point of view without a verbal declaration.
Rav instead argues that the declaration of nullification is in case one had a more substantial piece of leaven that they accidentally failed to remove. Here the question is why not just remove it, why make this declaration? Well, what if you believed you'd removed all leaven but had missed this piece, and now it's afternoon on the 14th of Nisan after the prohibition on deriving benefit from chametz has kicked in, and it's too late to legally renounce it because once you can't derive benefit from it it has no monetary value and therefore you don't really own it? This question is that intersection of ritual and legal law. Rabbi Elazar teaches that two things fall into a category where you don't legally own them but you're still D'oraysa responsible for them with regard to the law as if you owned them: a pit in the public domain that you dug, where you're still liable for damages even though you don't own the land or the pit, and chametz you didn't get rid of on the afternoon of the 14th of Nisan.
There's still time on the morning of 14 Nisan to make this declaration, but we make it in the evening instead because this is the time when we're doing this formal ritual, so better to tie it all in at once to make sure you don't forget.
Daf 7
When we do bedikas chametz, we recite a blessing. What's the blessing? Rav Pappi in the name of Rava says "לְבַעֵר חָמֵץ" Rav Pappa in the name of Rava says "עַל בִּיעוּר חָמֵץ" . These are nearly identical blessings in the name of nearly identical Rabbis. The first means something like "Blessed Are You, the Lord our God, who commanded us to remove chametz." The second means somehting like "Blessed Are You, the Lord our God, who commanded us concerning the removal of chametz." The disagreement seems to be over what the blessing is covering. Since some part of the removal process won't happen until the morning, do you say a blessing over what you've already done, per Rav Pappi, or do you say a blessing over what you will do in the morning, per Rav Pappa?
The Gemara then goes down into the weeds of whether there actually is a meaningful difference between these formulas, since they're both referring to that which God commanded us, so how much does it matter which you use?
So when bris milah is performed, before the actual circumcision the father of the child says a blessing "al milah", which according to our theory of Rav Pappi vs Rav Pappa ougth to be the bracha one recites afterward, not before. But this is different, says the Gemara, since the father may not actually be the one carrying out milah, so here 'al milah' isn't about timing, it's about making the beracha more general.
And in the case of lulav, we recite 'al netilat lulav' after taking the lulav but before shaking it, so the Gemara says that the reason is that the actual mitzvah of taking lulav was completed by taking it even before shaking it.
In any case, the halacha here is that the we hold by Rav Pappa and say "al biur chametz."
Moving on, a double (or maybe triple) gezeirah shavah which is probably just a remez is used to learn the mechanism of the search. The search for chametz is compared to the search that Yosef did when he hid the cup on Binyamin to frame him, which was a thorough search starting with the oldest and concluding with the youngest. This passage then contains a word for search that is the same as a word using in Zephaniah (I barely know who he is, one of the Trei Asar) in describing a search by the light of a lamp. For extra fun this is linked to a line in Proverbs about searching the souls of Man with the light of God, which seems extra. The Gemara says this is there to teach that you should use a small light, a candle, not just a big room light, but I think it also reiterates the themes of light and darkness and chametz and matzah and the whole way in which Pesach is about shedding that which keeps us away from holiness and becoming holier people.
Daf 8
The Gemara asks why you should use a small light preferably over a big light, or sunlight or moonlight. Rav Nachman bar Yitzhak says it's because you have control of the candle and can point it toward dark areas, whereas you can't point the big light anywhere you want. Rav Pappa says it's because if you used a bigger light where you did try to carry it around you'd run a risk of burning down your house. The Gemara is anti burning down your house, for the record.
The Gemara then brings a few baraisas about specific areas that you do or don't need to search, but again the basic principle is that if it's a place where anyone might ever conceivably put chametz, you need to search, and if it's a place where it would be difficult or unlikely to put chametz, you don't need to search.
It discusses different kinds of food storage of non-chametz food one eats during the rest of the year, such a wine storage, oil storage, and fish storage. If it's a sort of food where one takes what they're going to need for a meal from the storage vessel before the meal and is not going to go back for more, it does not need to be searched, but if it's something like wine storage where mid-meal one might decide they want more and go get more, there's a risk they would carry leaven with them and leave it in the storage, so it needs to be searched.
One interesting little bit of trivia in the Gemara's discussion of the debate I mentioned on Daf 2 between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammai of what parts of a wine cellar need to be searched... So they both agree that a wine cellar only needs to be partially searched. They both agree that it's some outer parts of the cellar, the most frequently travelled parts, where there's a risk that someone may have carried in chametz. But they disagree on the exact parameters of the search and it's unclear from the terse language of the Mishna exactly where the disagreement is.
Rav Yehuda says that Beis Shammai holds that you search the outermost two rows, the ones closest to the entrance, in full. Rav Yochanan says that Beis Shammai holds you search the outermost row and the outermost column which follows from the end of the outermost row at a right angle. He explains this shape as being a gamma, the Greek letter Γ. I think it's interesting that Rav Yochanan uses a Greek letter to explain the shape.
Meanwhile, Beis Hillel is more lenient and says that if you imagine the wine storage in this cellar as consisting of a bunch of stacked wine bottles/barrels, and the stacks are then in rows, you only need to search the upper two bottles/barrels on the stack in the outermost row, not the ones below them. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/362876.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.