Monday, July 03, 2006

kli rishon which is no longer hot

A brief word on yerushalmi, as I have not touched on it for a long time. It's just too hard to do more than girsa at this point, but this caught my eye as a fascinating machlokes (for those following the daf, I think I am slightly ahead, so this will be more relevant next week). Bishul in a kli rishon is kovea for ma’aser, meaning once food is cooked, one can no longer eat even achilas ara’ye, snacking, without first being mafrish ma’aser. The gemara (Ma’asros 1:4 or daf 6a) tries to define what a kli rishon vs. kli sheni is in this context: R’ Yosi bar Bun says the distinction is whether ‘yad sholetes bo’ or not; R’ Yona says both kli rishon and kli sheni are ‘ ain yad sholetes bo’, but the chachamim made a harchakah to call the kli cooked in a kli rishon. The Magen Avraham (318:28) learns that the term ‘yad sholetes bo’ means the same as the phrase ‘yad soledes bo’ we are used to from the Bavli. Based on this, he reads R’ Yona as a chumrah - even if a kli rishon is not yad soledes bo, meaning it is cool to the touch, the chachamim made a gezeirah to still treat it as if it was mevasheil (MG”A quotes Maharashal who limits the rule to kli rishon al haeish). The GR”A disagrees. ‘Yad sholetes bo’, says the GR”A, means exactly the opposite of ‘yad soledes bo’ – it means the kli is cool enough so that it may be touched with the bare hand. R’ Yona is saying that both a kli rishon and a kli sheni are too hot to be touched ('ain yad sholetes bo'), but only in the case of a kli rishon did the chachamim make a harchakah to treat it as bishul. If a kli rishon has cooled off, then according to GR”A it is no longer mevasheil. The entire machlokes l'halacha revolves around the simple point of understanding the Yerushalmi's language - is 'sholetes' a corruption of the term 'soledes' found in the Bavli, or it means just what it says!

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