I had a boss who was rabidly atheist. He often felt it was his mission to help me see the error or my ways. My favorite was when he came running into my cubicle and said: "You can't eat pork, right?" Right... "Not any amount of pork at all, right?" Right... but there was something about gleeful tone, so I added, "Unless it is less than one part in 60, in which case it is nullified as undetectable."
You should have seen his face fall. "Oh... I was going to point out that it was impossible that with all the pork in the work, that not even one molecule of pork might be in your food. But I guess that doesn't make any difference now." I am pretty sure there is no such thing as a "molecule of pork", but that is really the least ridiculous thing about that event.
While I said that "one in sixty" very matter-of-factly, the whole topic of ביטול/nullification is not simple. The essence of ביטול/nullification is that the Torah forbids benefiting from -- read: being able to taste -- forbidden substances. Things get very interesting when you can't actually discern the taste of the forbidden substance from the rest of the mixture. I don't mean that you have killed your taste buds by over-salting things your whole life (yes, that is an unpaid and unsolicited bit of mussar; you are welcome). No, the problem occurs either when you have non-kosher (usually) meat mixed with the kosher stuff (another TftD, perhaps) or when you have a little bit of (usually) milk mixed with a big chunk of meat. What is the issue?
Introducing: חתיכה נעשית נבלה/the piece (of kosher stuff) becomes/transforms into (a piece of) forbidden stuff. (Google translate render חתיכה נעשית נבלה as "A piece becomes a corpse." Not entirely wrong.) Since it is a bit of a tongue twister and we use that concept all the time (and because we adore acronyms), this is affectionately known as simply, חנ''ן. There is a raging machlokes about how to look at a chunk of kosher food that has absorbed more than one part in 60 of some forbidden substance. For example, suppose that a cup of mashed potatoes has absorbed one tsp -- which is one part in 48 -- of lard. Of course that cup of mashed potatoes is forbidden. But... and here's the fun/machlokes bit: suppose that cup of mashed potatoes gets mashed together with another cup of mashed potatoes. Do we say that we have 96 tsp of potatoes and one tsp of lard -- clearly בטול/nullified; or do we have a cup of kosher mashed potatoes with a cup of non-kosher mashed potatoes -- a clearly forbidden mixture. Fun, right?
Why would you even think that? Because the Torah forbids cooked mixtures of meat and milk. So according to everyone if one tsp of milk gets mixed into one cup of hot ground beef, you now have a cup (ok, ok, 49 tsps) of forbidden -- by Torah decree -- meat/milk mixture. Again, there is no machlokes about this.
Well.... sort of. Suppose you have three one oz chunks of hot beef sitting on top of your cholent sitting on the stove being reheated for leftover night. One family member (there is always one) is going out for ice cream with her friends later and doesn't want to be fleishig. She is having her dairy smoothie instead (teenagers, right?). As she is walking by giving the delicious leftovers the evil eye, she trips and a wee bit of smoothie flies into the cholent and lands on one chunk of meat. A wee bit, but more than one part in 60 of each chunk. GASP! Of course she is flustered. Here's the thing. If she can tell you which chunk it landed on, we are good. Just take that one out. It was on top, so it hasn't infect the rest of the cholent.
But what if she can't tell you? She was so flustered, she knows it landed squarely on one of those three chunks -- not in the pot, but on one of those chunks; she just doesn't know which one. Now what? This should be worse, right? Strangely, no. In this case you can just stir the meat chunks into the rest of the cholent and serve it up.
What?!? Here's why: One whichever chunk that drop of milk fell, we most definitely say חנ''ן, and there is most definitely not sixty times that volume of chunk in the rest of the pot. However, now that we don't know, we invoke another rule: according to the strict letter of Torah law, when dealing with chunks of one variety, a simple majority is enough for ביטול/nullification. Of course we require 60 times. However, in this case where we can't identify the chunk of issur and there would be a substantial loss, we can use the fact that the one chunks is בטול/nullified and that there is well more than 60 times the volume of milk/smoothie in the whole pot.... and TADA! (See Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah 92:2 and the poskim there for more details.)
Can you imagine me trying to explain all that to my rabidly atheist boss? Fortunately, even I have more sense than that. Not a lot more, but sufficient.
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