Butchering by Torchlight: b.Hullin 13

In which not every foreigner is a heretic!

Berenice Abbott, Joseph Heyman Butcher Shop, 345 Sixth Avenue, Gelatin silver print, 1938, courtesy Met Museum open source collection

We have two short mishnayot for today. The first says that slaughter by a foreigner is not kosher, and that it imparts ritual impurity through carrying.

The Gemara specifies that, while the meat is forbidden to eat, it is not forbidden to financially benefit from it (e.g., through selling). Rabbi Eliezer disagrees, worrying that meat slaughtered by foreigners might involve some idolatry plan. Rabbi Amei supports this view by citing a (probably fake) derogatory baraita about how everything heretics do is for idolatry—and even their kids are children of adultery (which the first tanna denies).

Thing is, this last baraita assumes that foreigner=heretic, with which Raba bar Avuh disagrees by saying “there are no heretics among the nations” (אֵין מִינִין בָּאוּמּוֹת). This is pretty remarkable! Rabbi Yohanan has an interesting thing to say about this: foreigners living in the world are not idolators, but rather followers of their ancestors’ traditions (for this reason, as the Gemara later explains, the foreign-slaughtered animal imparts impurity only upon contact; whereas the idolator-slaughered animal imparts purity just by being in a tent or another enclosed space).

[This reminds me of a story my partner, a son of Evangelical missionaries who spent years proselytizing in South America, told me: he always used to ask why indigenous populations were damned to hell, which didn’t seem fair if they didn’t know about Jesus. He never got a satisfying answer. Looks like Rabbi Yohanan agrees with him.]

Anyway, one corollary of this is that one can accept an offering from gentiles (though not from a meshumad! see here). This is interesting for me to read, because it sheds interesting light on one of the Temple destruction stories in b.Gittin 56a. We’ll get to that round of stories in detail when we hit Seder Nashim, but here’s the gist of it: A man had a friend, named Kamtza, and an enemy, named Bar Kamtza. He ordered his servant to invite Kamtza to a banquet, but the servant made a mistake and Bar Kamtza showed up. When the host saw his unexpected guest, he yelled at him: “Get out of my house!” Bar Kamtza, shamed, said, “at least let me pay for my food and drink; don’t shame me by casting me out.” But the man did not relent and threw Bar Kamtza out of the house.

Shaking with mortification and insult, Bar Kamtza remembered that all the sages were seated at the host’s banquet and had not said a thing. “Now I’ll take my revenge on all of them,” he thought. Bar Kamtza went to the Roman Emperor and told him that the Jews had rebelled. “I don’t believe you!” said the Emperor. “Oh, you want proof?” asked Bar Kamtza. “Tell you what: send them the gift of an animal for sacrifice and you’ll see that they do not sacrifice it.” The Emperor, perhaps curious, sent a three-year-old calf with Bar Kamtza. On the way to Jerusalem, Bar Kamtza, still full of spite, blemished the animal (perhaps in the eye, perhaps in the lip.)

At the temple, the priests immediately saw that the calf was not fit for sacrifice, per the rules in Leviticus. But now they were stuck in a bind. If they did not sacrifice the animal, the Emperor would be offended and calamity would descend on Jerusalem. But then Rabbi Zekharia son of Avkulas said that, if they did, they’d be violating the purity laws and creating confusion in the public. Some of them advocated killing Bar Kamtza, to prevent him from denouncing them to the Emperor. Rabbi Zekharia piped up again, however, and dissuaded them: killing him would also create confusion about the rules. The priests, then, allowed the slander to remain uncontradicted—and that is what started the war between the Romans and the Jews.

What would the Talmud have the priests do? Rabbi Yohanan comments on this story: “The excessive humility (anvetanuto) of Rabbi Zekharia destroyed Jerusalem.” It seems that the right word here is not humility, but rather paralysis. At a time that foresight and strategy should have led to decisive action, the priests chose inaction, thus allowing rumors and conflicts to fester and sowing the seeds of destruction.

There’s lots of interesting stuff that can be learned from this story, but for our purposes, I think the Gemara’s comments in Hullin at least explain how the priests would be even amenable to sacrificing a calf sent by a Roman emperor - and why the issue is the blemish, rather than the fact that, ahem, it was sent by the Roman emperor. Indeed, the Gemara continues by saying that the use of “ish ish” (man man, any man, every man) in Leviticus 22:18, rather than just “ish” (man) accounts for the possibility that even foreigners could bring offerings. And this, of course, reminds me of the Righteous Among the Nations (חסידי אומות העולם) who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

Our second mishnah today pithily says: the outcome of a nighttime butchery, or of butchery by a blind person, is kosher. The Gemara flags a contradiction (urminhi!) between two approaches: (1) you shouldn’t slaughter in the dark, but if you did, fine, and (2) it’s okay to slaughter in the daytime and in the nighttime). Rav Pappa sorts things out: one can slaughter using a torchlight. But if that’s the case, says Rav Ashi, what about our blind butcher? They conclude that the first approach is probably the correct one.

I also find it fascinating that the Gemara has such an enlightened approach toward blind people when it is horrendously biased against deaf people. It seems that blindness was not uncommon (perhaps more common than deafness), and people fear more (and are more bigoted against) what they are less familiar with. Also, the absence of sign language meant that people who were deaf had no means of communicating and thus might have been thought to be feebleminded. I’m thrilled and relieved to live in more enlightened times.