Bugging Out

Chavvos Yair: I have been fleeced! I can no longer eat the stew. Any bite I take of the stew may contain the indiscernible flea.

Shimon: Too many fleas would indeed spoil the stew but this is only one! Isn’t the flea nullified by the other ingredients? After all, the flea is less than 1/60th of the total mixture.

Chavvos Yair: I see that your mind is fast and fleet, but your argument is not relevant here. A non-kosher ingredient may be nullified but not when the non-kosher ingredient is an entire bug. An entire bug is called a beryah and by rabbinical statute an entire bug may never be nullified.

Reuven: You can eat the stew, no need to flee. Only important bugs can’t be nullified. The example in Makkos of a bug that can’t be nullified is an ant. Shlomo HaMelech encouraged a lazy person to learn alacrity from an ant. So an ant is a significant creature. Surely a flea is an unimportant creature and can be nullified.

The Chavvos Yair thought, “I know that Reuven is incorrect. I better just leave because those who lay down with dogs get up with fleas. Surely, any creature that has life is significant. Also, a flea is able to cause pain to creatures much larger than it. That fact alone gives it much significance.”

When the Chavvos Yair went home he had second thoughts. “Perhaps Reuven, who is in truth a talmid chacham and older than me, is correct. Maybe I was just ticked off because of the flea.” He sent the query to the Panim Meiros. The Panim Meiros answered, “There was no need for you to purchase other food from the flea market. The stew with the hidden flea was fine.”

The Panim Meiros said that we can find a leniency from the Rema. The Rema (Y.D. 103:1) writes that any creature that doesn’t have a bad taste cannot be nullified. The implication is that a creature that does have a bad taste can indeed be nullified. Though he never tasted a bowl full of fleas, the Panim Meiros was confident that fleas have a bad taste. The stew was permitted because the bug that jumped into the stew had a bad taste and it couldn’t hurt a flea.

After stewing it over for a while, the Panim Meiros noted that the Rema is difficult to understand. His source for his halacha is a passage in the Rashba. However, the Rashba only permitted a creature that disintegrated and was therefore no longer considered whole. The law of beryah only applies to a complete bug. Incomplete bugs and bug parts can indeed be nullified. There seems to be no basis for the Rema’s leniency to nullify a complete foul-tasting bug. The Panim Meiros concluded, “My permit to ingest the stew was just a fleeting thought. You were correct to abstain.”

Rabbi Shlomo Eiger suggests that the Rema’s leniency was only for a creature that originally had a good taste but then lost it due to its putrification after its death. The loss of its good taste makes it no longer considered a complete bug. It changed from its original form and can now be nullified. However, a bug that had a bad taste throughout its life cannot be nullified even upon its untimely demise. A complete flea can therefore not be nullified.

If you’re reading this on Yom Kippur during the break, I hope it helped you lose your appetite.