General Guidelines for a Shliach in a Sephardic Community - Rabbi Eliyahu Gabbai shlita

00:02 Speaker 1 You’re listening to “Lema’an Yishme’u,” a podcast from Machon Halacha Chabad.

00:09 Speaker 2 Today we’ll talk about a Chabad shliach who becomes the rabbi of a Sephardic community. Sometimes it’s a full rabbinic position: a Sephardic community invites the rabbi to serve, with all that the position entails. Sometimes you’re invited to give a lecture, a Chassidus class, or a series of classes, and you encounter various differences in halacha and have to answer questions about them. There’s another difference to bear in mind, a difference in outlook. Say you’re the rabbi of a community and someone asks you a halachic question, but you don’t know the source of the custom they follow. Don’t dismiss it; study the subject. Otherwise, you can create unnecessary emotional tension and leave people feeling that you’re either unprofessional, don’t know what you’re talking about, or are somehow opposed to the traditions of their parents’ home. You need to know the roots of these practices and how to handle things properly, so that a lack of halachic knowledge on the community’s part doesn’t create emotional tension between you and them. And don’t try to change their customs. There are clear instructions from the Rebbe about what not to change—for example, customs of davening and similar matters. There’s no reason to touch those. Our role as shluchim is to bring in Chassidus and raise the standard of observance in the details of mitzvos, not to turn people into something they’re not. That won’t accomplish anything. This is an important point to keep in mind. The community is attuned to emunas chachamim and to reverence for tzaddikim, and they’re open to studying Chassidus as well. There’s a longstanding Moroccan custom for the community to gather every Motzaei Shabbos to study Zohar.

02:26 Speaker 2 So they’re familiar with these subjects and sensitive to them, and you can build on that. I’ll also give an example of sensitivity. There was a time when the children of Tehran faced a very serious problem, and the Rebbe asked for them to be brought to the United States to save them from various difficulties. The Rebbe then asked that rice be prepared for them on Pesach. Before the Seder, the Rebbe personally went to see how the Seder was being prepared for them, and opened the pots to check that rice had been made for them. In other words, there was sensitivity to their customs, even though Chabad and other Ashkenazi authorities follow the practice of not eating kitniyos. Here, special sensitivity was called for. There are also differences in how certain practices are viewed. For example, based on a responsum of the Rosh and Moroccan custom, they say “Baruch Hu uvaruch Shemo” during davening, and for them it isn’t considered an interruption. Once, at a wedding officiated by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Baba Sali was among the honored guests invited to recite a blessing. The crowd said “Baruch Hu uvaruch Shemo” during the blessings. Rabbi Ovadia said not to say it, and the Baba Sali responded that they should say it—a disagreement between two great Torah sages. The community followed the Baba Sali and did say “Baruch Hu uvaruch Shemo” after every blessing, because that was the custom of the Moroccan community, an integral part of their davening. Kabbalistic works also discuss various intentions and unifications involving malchus and so on when saying “Baruch Hu uvaruch Shemo.” So again, this is a difference to be aware of. More broadly, in terms of how the customs developed, customs from the time of the first Beis Hamikdash were preserved in Yemenite communities because they went into exile after its destruction, while customs from the time of the second Beis Hamikdash were preserved in communities in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Djerba, Iraq, Kurdistan, and elsewhere. Every custom has an ancient source and an explanation

04:43 Speaker 2 in the revealed teachings of Torah and in Chassidus, grounded in the halachic authorities. So you can’t simply dismiss customs without knowing the basis of the law. You need to know what to do and what not to do. Incidentally, the terms “Sephardim” and “Ashkenazim” aren’t accurate or helpful, either halachically or socially. Many Sephardic authorities, such as the Ben Ish Chai, rule like the Alter Rebbe. You can look in the Ben Ish Chai’s books: he calls the Alter Rebbe “the Gra”z,” meaning “the Gaon Rabbi Zalman,” and whenever he cites the Alter Rebbe, he takes his opinion into account. So it isn’t a matter of Sephardim versus Ashkenazim; it depends on the halachic authority. Some rule one way, and others rule another way. I’ll give another example concerning rice on Pesach. Communities such as the Moroccans and Algerians also adopted the stringency of not using rice on Pesach, and that practice is grounded in the halachic literature. So this isn’t an Ashkenazi-Sephardic difference; it’s a question of which halachic authority the community you belong to follows, has traditionally followed, or which authority you guide it to follow—whether that’s the Shesilei Zeisim for a Yemenite community, the Ben Ish Chai for Iraqi communities, or the Beis Yosef for Sephardim generally. It depends on each community’s customs. We should try to focus on what matters most: raising the standard of Jewish observance, of modesty, and of care in observing mitzvos. Don’t try to take away customs people feel attached to. Focus instead on spreading Chassidus in these areas, while remaining aware of the customs and their roots. Don’t give answers off the cuff that could be understood as belittling one custom or another. Today I wanted to focus primarily on treifos of the lung in meat. You may hear people say, “What’s kosher for Ashkenazim is treif for Sephardim.” We need to see where that comes from. So we’ll focus on the laws of treifos in general, and the lung in particular,

07:15 Speaker 2 down to the details. In the laws of treifos, halacha prohibits eating a treifah, meaning an animal with a defect in its biological structure. For example, it may be missing a lung lobe or an umma. There are eight categories of treifos, referred to by the mnemonic “Dam Chanak Nefesh.” If there’s a defect in the animal’s body, it’s forbidden. We need to distinguish between a treifah and a neveilah. A neveilah results from a defect in the slaughtering process, which generally has to do with the person performing the shechitah, the shochet. For example, the shochet must make sure the knife is twice the length of the animal’s neck. He has to make sure the knife has no nicks, and so on. There are all the laws of shechitah: not slaughtering too high, in the area of the ring of the esophagus, or too low, in the area of the lung, and so on. These are matters connected to the shochet himself. If he isn’t careful, or performs derasah, chaladah, hagramah, or ikur, or violates any of the other details set out in the laws of shechitah, then he renders the slaughtered creature a neveilah—whether it’s a bird, a goat, or another animal. A treifah, by contrast, has to do objectively with the slaughtered animal itself. That’s the difference between a neveilah and a treifah. Now, regarding a treifah itself, halacha determines that if an animal has a health or biological problem such that it could not survive for a year, it is a treifah. It is forbidden to eat an animal that is sick or has such a defect. The Shulchan Aruch then goes through the animal’s entire anatomy, from siman 29 onward, examining every organ: which injuries can heal, which cannot—or, in halachic terms, what renders the animal a treifah and what does not. So, for example, if an animal can survive with a hole in one of the lung’s membranes, there are different opinions among the halachic authorities about which kind of hole, what it looks like, and what it means. Or there may be a problem with the membrane of the brain or the structure of the skull.

09:38 Speaker 2 Or in the brain, heart, liver, lungs, spleen, or what is called the digestive system—the omasum and so on. There are halachic terms for every organ. So a rabbi who comes to certify an animal’s meat has to be half a doctor and understand the animal’s entire biological structure, because it closely parallels the human body. Our Sages established a rule: you cannot examine every detail of the animal’s 248 limbs and 365 sinews before certifying it. So the lung serves as a way of seeing: if it is intact, functions properly, and has no defects, that reflects the animal’s overall state of health, and the meat is kosher. That is why there are halachic terms in today’s kosher meat market: “glatt lung” and “regular glatt.” “Glatt lung” means that the lung and everything around it are perfect. “Regular glatt” refers not only to the lung but also to the other details. Now, to understand the halachic distinctions—when a lung is called glatt, when it is kosher, when it is glatt, or when it is “glatt lung,” and so on—I’ll first describe the lung’s basic physical structure. It has ten parts. The first, on which the whole discussion rests, is the windpipe itself, through which air enters. Attached to the windpipe are what you might call the balloons. There are three lobes on the right, three lobes on the left, an umma, which is a very large part on the right, a lobe on the left, and a small part called the “little ear” [?], like a little ear inside a pocket. That, too, is another part of the lung’s structure. Beneath the lung is the diaphragm. When it pulls downward, when the muscle moves downward, it causes the lung to expand and breathe in air; and when the diaphragm rises

12:02 Speaker 2 upward, the lung releases air. Those are the parts of the lung’s structure. Now, the lung’s function, of course, is to take in air, after which the oxygen enters the bloodstream. If there is a defect in the lung—if there is a hole, a perforated lung—the animal is treif. All the halachic authorities agree on this: it is in the Gemara, the Mishnah, the early authorities, and the later authorities. No one disputes it. Where do the halachic differences begin? When there is a membrane on the lung. Rashi, the Rambam, and other authorities discuss whether an adhesion on the lung indicates that there was once a hole. If it definitely indicates a hole, then every adhesion means there was a hole, the lung is treif, and the entire animal is treif. That is Rashi’s position. The Rashba says no: an adhesion on the lung does not necessarily mean there was a hole. It can develop through the lung’s activity, or from mucus [?] moving around. As part of an animal’s normal bodily processes, various kinds of mucus move around its body, so an adhesion does not necessarily make it treif. There is also the question of what doctors say about this. Generally speaking, doctors say that an adhesion results from pus in the lung. Sometimes it is severe enough to create a hole in the lung cavity or its wall, while sometimes it is something minor, like a temporary cold the animal has had, and does not necessarily mean there was a hole. This is where the main disagreement begins. The Rashba says that the approaches to lungs and lung adhesions are among the most widely discussed and complex subjects, with many fine distinctions made about them. We won’t go into all the details and differences in the laws of adhesions, but we will

14:21 Speaker 2 explain a few general rules behind four distinctions concerning adhesions. As we described, the lung has several parts. If an adhesion runs from one lobe to an adjacent lobe, with nothing separating them, that is one case. But if the adhesion skips over a lobe and attaches to another one, so the two are not next to each other, that is a different case. There is also what is called a hanging adhesion, attached at only one end. Now, immediately after slaughter, the shochet runs his hand over the lung. If it is smooth and he does not feel any adhesion, that is a sign that the lung is intact and the animal is glatt. If he encounters a membrane so insignificant that it comes away as his hand passes over it, that is also glatt. But if he encounters a very thick adhesion that catches against his hand, the question arises whether the lung has suffered a perforation, and there are several approaches to this. The first is called handling: he tries to work the adhesion with his fingers and see whether it has caused damage. The Rema cites this as the central disagreement. He says that a genuine adhesion indicating a hole cannot be moved away from the lung wall by handling it, and the animal is treif. But if the adhesion comes away through handling, the animal is kosher. Another procedure, mentioned by the Rambam and other authorities—not all authorities agree with it, but it is used in practice in the world of shechita today—is to remove the lung, inflate it with air, and place it in lukewarm water. If bubbles

16:51 Speaker 2 appear, that is a sign there was a hole in the lung, and the animal is treif. But if no air bubbles appear, the lung wall is intact and the animal is kosher. Now, the Shulchan Aruch does not accept this approach to adhesions at all. If there is any adhesion, the animal is ruled treif. On the other hand, as the Rema relates, there are many communities that permit the meat when the adhesion can be worked away by hand, or the lung can be tested in water, or other methods show that the adhesion is not firm or genuine, or can be removed. Nowadays, Ashkenazi halachic authorities and Ashkenazi observant Jews also try to follow this stringency of what is called glatt meat. The halachic standard has risen considerably in this respect, so most Ashkenazim, too, try to be stringent and eat glatt meat. That is the basic law, and Sephardim are very careful to eat specifically glatt meat. There are several grades and levels, but that is the essence of the disagreement. So when you come as a Chabad rabbi to a Sephardic community and they ask whether they must eat specifically glatt meat, you need to tell them yes, because that is how the Shulchan Aruch ruled. That is how the overwhelming majority of Sephardic halachic authorities ruled: the meat must indeed be glatt. In other words, the lung must be smooth, with no problem in that regard. That covers lung defects that render an animal treif. There are also details concerning the lung’s appearance: it must have the color of living flesh rather than another shade, and so on, but we won’t go into that now. Another distinction a Chabad rabbi needs to be aware of when ruling for a Sephardic community concerns wine. The Gemara says that people were not accustomed to drink wine in its pure form, without any water at all, but specifically diluted wine, both for health reasons and for economic reasons. Now, wine producers are very

19:42 Speaker 2 They like this halachah and dilute wine with water. The question is: what percentage of water can wine contain and still be kosher? I’ll tell you an interesting story. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef once came to officiate at a wedding, and they poured him a cup of wine for the blessing. He looked at the certification, recognized the factory that made the wine, and then said the blessing “Shehakol nihyeh bidvaro” and began conducting the ceremony. The whole crowd was very embarrassed that the rabbi had said Shehakol over wine. Of course, strictly speaking, you can say Shehakol even over bread, over anything, because everything came into being by Hashem’s will. But he was hinting at something very significant: in some places, the amount of water mixed into the wine does not meet the Beis Yosef’s standard. What is the difference? The Beis Yosef says that one-third wine and two-thirds water is the dividing line between the blessings Shehakol and Borei pri hagafen. In other words, if there is more than thirty percent wine, you can say Borei pri hagafen. If there is less, the blessing is Shehakol nihyeh bidvaro. According to the Rema, on the other hand, even with one-sixth wine and five-sixths water you can still say Borei pri hagafen; below that, its blessing is Shehakol. Now, from my visits to all sorts of wineries, I’ve seen that there are many ways to make water look exactly like wine. They mix in beets, alcohol, and all kinds of coloring for smell and taste, and so on. You could have a bottle of wine without a drop of wine in it, without a drop of grapes, lacking everything that matters halachically, yet it looks like wine, smells like wine, and tastes like wine. That is where the kosher certifications come in. So according to the basic law, as brought by the Shulchan Aruch, the Beis Yosef, and many other poskim,

22:02 Speaker 2 there has to be at least one-third genuine wine made from grapes in it. According to the Rema, one-sixth is enough. That is the difference between the poskim. Today, as standards gradually rise, the various kosher-certification organizations that call me in to conduct inspections try to ensure that most of the product is wine, and that the water or other wine substitutes make up less than half. This has been adopted by many wine factories. But you need to know the difference. In other words, for the wine’s blessing to be Borei pri hagafen even according to the Beis Yosef, it must contain at least one-third wine. So when you see a particularly cheap wine, or one that does not say it meets the Beis Yosef’s standard, you can infer that the percentage of water or wine substitute in it is probably so high that its blessing really is Shehakol. Although it says “wine” on the label, it is what you might call wine without fruit. So as a rabbi serving a Sephardic community, you need to be alert to this, to avoid a blessing in vain and all the related issues. It is especially important when you come to officiate at a wedding, at sheva brachos, or at any occasion where halachah actually requires wine. You need to be aware of the halachic differences between the Mechaber and the Rema—or, as they are commonly described, between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Another point a Chabad rabbi needs to pay attention to when he becomes a halachic authority in a Sephardic community concerns prayer. I’ll give an example. In the shofar blowing, we blow tekiah, shevarim, teruah, tekiah: tashrat, tashat, tarat, and so on. Now, in the time of the First Beis Hamikdash, the teruah was not produced with the tongue, but by fluttering the air from the lungs. So when you want to fulfill the obligation for a Yemenite congregation, you need to know that the blowing—the teruah—

24:38 Speaker 2 has to follow that method. In other words, it is a method whose origins go back to the First Beis Hamikdash. That is also why the shape of the shofar is different, and it sounds different too. With the blowing from the time of the First Beis Hamikdash, it sounds like “tu-tu-tu-tu-tu,” a kind of flutter. But with us, the teruah is simply a quick movement of the tongue: “tu-tu-tu-tu-tu.” Yes. So that is a particular difference: the Yemenite way of blowing has its roots in a practice followed in the First Beis Hamikdash. There are great Torah sages who, for shofar blowing, also invite a Yemenite shofar blower so they can fulfill the obligation according to all opinions, even when the community is Ashkenazi—and vice versa. Why? Because it is a Torah mitzvah, so they are meticulous about every detail. Another thing to keep in mind is to respect someone else’s custom and to know that it has a basis in sacred tradition. Take the esrog. The Yemenite esrog is larger and more fragrant, and they have a tradition that this is what an esrog should look like. If you look in the Mishnah, you see that the smallest esrog is the size of an egg, while the largest is one you cannot hold in one hand but must hold in two. No other esrog can be so large that you cannot hold it in one hand and need two hands—except the Yemenite esrog. So you see that, in terms of the roots of the law and halachah, there really is a place for the Yemenite esrog. That is why there are great Torah sages who have made a practice of taking both a Yemenite esrog and a Calabrian esrog, or whichever esrog they customarily take. You can see this in the other details too: the esrog’s structure, the appearance of its peel and its walls, and all the features passed down by tradition. Another thing to pay attention to in halachah—sometimes it’s... I’ll

26:56 Speaker 2 give another example from Yoreh De’ah. Can a woman be a shochet, yes or no? The Mechaber in the Shulchan Aruch cites the Gemara that a woman can be a shochet, but the Rema immediately writes that no, that is not the custom. So very often, a disagreement between the Mechaber and the Rema is not about the basic law; it is simply a matter of custom. I’ll give another example: sleeping in the sukkah on Sukkos. Here the difference also has to do with the climate where the poskim lived. Someone who suffers discomfort is exempt from the sukkah. If you live in Europe—as I did when I was on shlichus in Ukraine—there, during Sukkos, we went out of the house to the sukkah and everything was covered in snow, at minus twenty degrees. How can you sleep in a sukkah under those conditions? So of course the Rema would write that the custom is not to sleep in the sukkah, for several reasons, including this one. In Eretz Yisroel, by contrast, where the weather on Sukkos is comfortable and pleasant, people sleep in sukkahs. The same applies to questions of defects in an animal’s lungs and the kosher certification of meat. Today, when meat can be imported and is plentiful, and animals are raised everywhere, that is one situation. But when a Jewish community in a small town spends the entire week trying to find an ox or a cow to slaughter for meat for Shabbos for the whole community, and suddenly there is a question about the lungs, the entire community has no way to provide for Shabbos. You cannot insist on the strictest ruling in that situation. If there are lenient opinions that say a particular adhesion is not definitely an adhesion indicating a defect in the lungs, and the meat can be declared kosher, then the meat is declared kosher and the community benefits from it. If the rabbi wants to be stringent for himself, that’s fine; he need not eat the meat himself. But you cannot leave a community that depends on meat—whether nursing mothers or various elderly people, for whom eating meat

29:19 Speaker 2 For them, it’s something essential and meaningful, not just a pleasure. And if, according to the basic law, the meat is kosher, then the meat is kosher. So a rabbi often needs to pay attention to the difference between stringencies he takes upon himself and what he requires of the community. He can be stringent with himself—put on Rabbeinu Tam, Shimusha Rabba, and Raavad tefillin, daven at sunrise, and take on all kinds of other stringencies, including immersions, whatever he wants. But when he deals with the community, he needs to be aware of what people are capable of, what they need, and how to tailor his ruling to them. Another issue to consider when you come to rule on halachah in a Sephardic community, or a community whose customs you aren’t used to: the average Chassidic young man grew up in a Chabad community, studied [unclear], and is used to a different set of practices, customs, and what you might call a different halachic culture. But when he comes to issue a ruling, he needs to be aware of what’s going on with the community. I’ll tell a story to illustrate the point. In Jerusalem, a frightened woman came to a rabbi and said, “Oh no, I accidentally spilled half a cup of milk into the pot of meat I prepared for Shabbos, and I don’t know whether it’s kosher. What should I do?” The rabbi saw that this was truly a matter of vital importance to her, so he told her, “Leave the pot here. Show me how much milk spilled into it, tell me which milkman you bought it from, and wait outside.” So she waited outside, and he summoned the milkman who sold the milk. He said to him, “Tell me the truth now; this is an important halachic matter. What percentage of the milk is actually milk?” Because real milk is thick. They extract the cottage cheese from it, the soft white cheese, and all the other products, the yellow cheese and so on. What remains in the end is called, in halachic terminology, whey. What’s left is a liquid that

31:37 Speaker 2 looks white but, halachically, has no direct connection to milk. It contains water and various other ingredients that resemble milk, but the actual percentage of milk isn’t high. After the rabbi heard the milk seller’s precise scientific explanation of how much milk there was in the milk, he called the woman in and told her, “There’s nullification in sixty here. You can eat it, and if there’s a little left in the pot, bring it to me—I’ll eat it too. Everything is fine; you can relax.” In other words, when you have the halachic responsibility of ruling on a particular practice—whether it concerns meat and milk, mixtures, or things like that—you need to know the basic law. That doesn’t mean you have to lay out every halachic consideration for the person asking, so as not to harm the milk producers or the wine producers, and so on. But you do need to know the halachic truth and how to apply it to the community the question comes from and to which you’re directing your answer. That’s true in other areas of halachah as well.