Blog B'Omer: This is the Tenth Post

Submitted by Rabbim



I know how careful we all are about keeping kosher. But has it ever occur to you just how much that depends on the interpretation of our Sages?

Let me first give you an example you would recoil from:
Let's say they were three (small) pieces of meat in front of you . One of them is "chazzer treif" , the other 2 are glatt kosher. No one knows which is which. I throw one of them away and offer for you to eat one or both of the others. You probably refuse.

Seems like a reasonable position, right? Actually, its pretty close to a denial of the Torah.
Here is a more insidious case: Someone offers you a plain old regular glass of milk, chalav Yisrael, to be sure.

You accept, right?

Note that milk is only kosher if it comes from a kosher cow. If a cow has any disease or injury that would rather it non kosher (treifa), any milk taken from it would also be not kosher.

Have you ever considered the fact that if you would slaughter a dairy cow, you would find that only about 15 percent of them would meet your standards of glatt? 

And in Israel, where the market for non kosher meat is very small and they are much more aggressive at identifying kosher cows, the percentage of slaughtered dairy cows found to be kosher rises to 40 percent.
Because they only kill dairy cows when they are at the very end of their useful life, The working assumption is that cows , when they are in the prime of there milking years, are probably more likely kosher than that 40%. So it rises above 50 percent, let's say 60 percent.

So how do we drink milk?

The sages say that if you have 3 cows in your barnyard and you observe one of them being injured in such a way as to certainly render it a treifa, but it gets mixed back into your herd, you have a problem, since live things do not become nullified under the rule of "Rov".
However, if you let them out of the yard to the shed to milk them one by one or to slaughter them, you may assume that the one you have is kosher as, "it has left from the majority (kol d'parish mruba porish)."
Thus, you can milk all 3 cows, mix the milk and drink it.

Put another way, when you chug back a cup of milk,  40-85 percent of the cows it comes from are not up to your kosher standards.  However, according to our sages, the milk is 100 percent kosher.

Now you can go back and have that meat I offered you earlier.




Same reliance on our Sages who say that the one piece of meat is nullified in the majority of the other two.

 Bon Apetit!