Laws of Meat and Milk - Rabbi Pinchas Kadish shlita

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

00:09 Speaker 2 Meat and milk are among the things we encounter most often in our kitchens. Preparing food on a meat countertop or a dairy countertop. Pots—one pot next to another, something jumping from one to the other. Using a meat oven to prepare something pareve, then eating that pareve food with dairy. That’s one of the most common questions. Or say we’re making pasta with a cream sauce, stirring it, and suddenly it splashes—a few drops of milk land on the cholent pot left over from Shabbos, which we haven’t touched yet. It splashed—but wait, was it hot? Was it cold? There are all sorts of questions. Or coffee spills on the countertop. Is it a meat countertop or a dairy countertop? What do you do? Knives, onions, sharp foods—it’s a whole body of law. The Rebbe spoke about this seventy—sixty-nine years ago. The Rebbe said that young men should study the laws of issur v’heter, what is forbidden and what is permitted, before their weddings. These are among the most complex laws in the Shulchan Aruch: the laws of meat and milk, mixtures, things getting mixed together, and salting meat. Salting is part of it too—how to salt the different cuts of meat. Most salting today—what do I mean, “most”? Today the factories do it. We buy meat already prepared, salted and rinsed. It’s all kosher, all fine. Apart from liver, we generally don’t deal with salting. Our mothers, or perhaps our grandmothers, dealt with it. We don’t know how to salt meat; we don’t do it. But meat and milk are complex, because in any given case there can be several details that, once you investigate a little further, can change the ruling one way or the other—from permitted to forbidden, to forbidden by Torah law or forbidden by rabbinic law, with entirely different implications. I cut—

01:55 Speaker 2 Let me give you just one example. I cut an onion with a meat knife and fried it in a dairy pan with pieces of cheese. What’s the ruling? Can you eat it or not? Is that onion meaty or not? What about the knife? Did a meat knife make the onion meaty? At first glance you say, “Listen, there’s no actual meat here. There are absorbed flavors. There’s a knife that’s considered meaty.” But it turns out that this has consequences. Wait—was the onion fried or not? Is it meaty? Had the knife been used that day or not? With sharp foods, that doesn’t make a difference. With ordinary foods, it does.

02:28 Speaker 8 Does it matter whether it’s cold or hot?

02:30 Speaker 2 With a knife, if I cut an onion?

02:32 Speaker 8 Oh, I cut cold meat with a knife.

02:35 Speaker 2 That matters too. You took a dairy knife and cut cold meat with it. Let’s say it was a steak you took out of the fridge, and you had to press the knife into it firmly. What happens to the knife? Can you use it? It’s a dairy knife. Does it need washing? How do you—what, do you have to kasher it by boiling?

02:50 Speaker 8 That’s an unusual case.

02:50 Speaker 2 It’s a whole issue. The knife is dairy, and I’ve just used it to cut cold meat. Has the knife become meaty?

02:56 Speaker 8 Ah.

02:56 Speaker 2 Has it changed sides? Is it in favor of Reform? No. There’s a whole body of law here. But before we get to that, let’s first lay out a few principles so we understand where this all comes from. Then we’ll dive into our kitchens and see that there’s a whole fascinating world here—a beautiful world. The Torah says, “Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” It says that three times. Once it says—three times? Three times. Once in Parshas Mishpatim, once in Parshas Ki Sisa, and once in Parshas...?

03:27 Speaker 8 Ki Seitzei.

03:29 Speaker 2 Ki Seitzei or Re’eh. I think it’s Re’eh.

03:31 Speaker 8 Re’eh.

03:31 Speaker 2 If not—could be. Okay, we disagree about that too. “Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk”—three times. Why? Our Sages tell us—three times, three. Why is it written three times? To teach us three things. The first is the prohibition against cooking. The Torah tells me that I may not cook meat and milk together directly: take a steak, put it in a bubbling pot of milk, and cook it. That is the prohibition against cooking. Nobody does that, but that is the original Torah prohibition. The second is the prohibition against eating. You didn’t cook it, but you want to eat meat and milk together—meat from a domesticated animal together with milk. That’s forbidden. The second—

04:18 Speaker 8 Meat from a domesticated animal with poultry.

04:20 Speaker 2 Huh?

04:20 Speaker 8 Same thing.

04:21 Speaker 2 Wait, hold on. I haven’t talked about poultry yet. And of course, if meat was cooked in milk and I want to taste it—someone cooked meat in milk for me, and as a chef I want to taste it—I may not, because that meat was cooked in milk. It’s forbidden to me by Torah law. The third is the prohibition against deriving benefit. Someone cooked meat and milk together and says, “Listen, I can’t have it. I’m religious, right? I don’t eat meat and milk. Give it to the dog, throw it to Rexy. Let him enjoy a cream-flavored steak.” That too is forbidden. Which means that—

04:53 Speaker 8 His own dog?

04:54 Speaker 2 His own dog.

04:55 Speaker 8 And if it’s a dog...

04:56 Speaker 2 Even then. A stray dog—that’s a good question. With a stray dog, for example, you might say, “What benefit do you get from it? Rexy from the street is eating it. Why should I care? For all I care, let him get rabies.”

05:09 Speaker 8 How do you know his name is Rexy?

05:10 Speaker 2 Never mind. If you know his name, he has a collar. But if so, what benefit is there? Our Sages also forbade giving it to a dog I don’t know. This meat is forbidden altogether. So what do I do with it—a burial ceremony? What do I do? You have to discard—destroy it. That means throwing it away, pouring bleach on it, whatever, so that no one can derive any benefit from it at all. That is the original Torah prohibition. Then our Sages came and said, “Wait, what kind of meat was the Torah talking about?” It says, “Do not cook a kid.” Is a kid a domesticated animal or a wild animal? A domesticated animal. The Torah is speaking about small livestock, but it’s a domesticated animal. So what about a wild animal?

05:53 Speaker 8 I think that’s called a wild animal.

05:55 Speaker 2 A kid generally refers to a domesticated animal. The Torah forbade cattle—domesticated animals. What about meat from a wild animal or a domesticated animal? Okay. What about poultry? No, you’ve confused me. Wait a second. A kid is meat from a kosher domesticated animal. Wild animals and poultry are forbidden by rabbinic law. That’s it. Meat from a domesticated animal is forbidden—steaks, calves, cows. What if I want to cook liver in cream?

06:21 Speaker 8 Altogether.

06:22 Speaker 2 That’s not meat from a domesticated animal. By Torah law, please—that’s not what I was talking about. Poultry liver. Liver from a domesticated animal is not an animal. Liver—poultry liver. Okay, let’s focus. Poultry liver is poultry.

06:34 Speaker 8 Is it a grasshopper, huh?

06:36 Speaker 2 Grasshoppers, by the way, are snacks—that’s for later. But take drumsticks, chicken legs, or boneless chicken cooked in milk or cream. Our Sages came and said, “No, we forbid that by rabbinic law.” It isn’t forbidden by Torah law. Why the distinction? What difference does it make whether something is forbidden by Torah law or rabbinic law? Both are forbidden. The difference is in deriving benefit. Can I benefit from it by giving my Rexy chicken cooked in milk? Yes, you can give it to him. You may not eat it. You may not cook it. But you may derive benefit from it. Our Sages extended the prohibition further. For example, taking a meat pot and cooking something dairy in it. Say I want to make pasta with a dairy sauce, a cream sauce. I took a pot—a meat pot—and, as they say, I wasn’t paying attention. I had used that meat pot for chicken at lunchtime. I washed it, put it on the stovetop, and made a dairy sauce in it. May I eat that sauce? No, the sauce is forbidden by rabbinic law. By Torah law, there is no meat and milk here. There is a meat pot—a pot that absorbed meat—and now you’re cooking a dairy sauce in it. There’s no actual meat here. The meat is inside, in theory, potentially. So by Torah law, that doesn’t count, and it’s permitted. Our Sages came and said, “No, even the flavor of meat counts.” When I cook, what happens to the pot, to the metal? It expands. As it expands, it absorbs what’s in the pot. It absorbs what you’re cooking, and that enters the pores of the metal itself. And it’s not just metal; it can also happen with glass, and with other

08:26 Speaker 2 All sorts of things. And the moment I cool the pot, the pot, so to speak, contracts and closes, and all the dairy or meat gets absorbed into the metal. When I cook something else in it—milk, for example—then the meat that was absorbed gets released as the pot opens up and expands. It’s not just that the pot absorbs dairy when it also absorbed meat two hours earlier, making it thoroughly treif. It also releases the flavor absorbed in it into the liquid. Now, you can’t detect it in the liquid. You don’t taste cholent; you taste the milk. There’s no meat flavor. You say, “Listen, there’s no taste of milk—fine, of meat. Fine, maybe one and a quarter percent meat came out of it.” It doesn’t matter. The Sages came and said—

09:11 Speaker 9 One part in sixty?

09:13 Speaker 2 One part in sixty—wait, hold on, we’ll get to that. In a case like this, it’s forbidden. We’re talking about a little coffee pot. Okay, let’s make it much more specific. That, too, would be forbidden. Or there are other things, like soaking: meat and milk soaking together. I mean, none of us goes around pickling things—except pickles. But suppose I have a pot of meat in my refrigerator, and somehow I come along, see that pot of meat, and, you know... As Yosef said, “For indeed I was stolen from the land of the Hebrews.” So he takes a piece—after all, those who taste it merit life—and one piece falls onto the other thing. It’s dark, no one sees. He closes the pot and that’s the end of it. Closes the refrigerator. That piece of meat fell onto a piece of cheese, or into the container of cheese; it doesn’t matter. It fell onto cheese and stayed that way for twenty-four hours. No trace of it was known. After twenty-four hours, it’s forbidden. But it’s cold. It wasn’t cooked; it wasn’t mixed together. After all, why does the Torah forbid cooking meat and milk? Because then meat and milk mix, and each enters the other. The meat is permitted, and the milk is permitted. When you combine the two, it becomes forbidden. We’re not going into Kabbalah now—chesed, gevurah, all of that. Those are deeper matters. We’re speaking in practical halachic terms: when you mix them, the Torah says, “I don’t want you combining these two things here. Don’t mix meat and milk together.” So through cooking, one enters the other. When one is resting on top of the other, neither enters the other. You can’t say that if you’re holding a piece of yellow cheese, for

10:55 Speaker 2 example, and it touches some pastrami—let’s say it touched some pastrami, both of them dry—then the cheese has absorbed something from the pastrami. No. If twenty-four hours haven’t passed and they touched, and I immediately notice the mistake, I take it out, wash it with water, and it’s completely kosher. Not to eat them together, of course, right? But set that aside. So when one rests on top of the other, that too is called soaking. Over time, the soaking acts, so to speak, with a force like cooking: a little penetrates, seeping into the cheese underneath, and then it becomes forbidden. That would be forbidden. Another thing—

11:33 Speaker 9 After twenty-four hours it would be forbidden?

11:34 Speaker 2 Twenty-four hours, yes.

11:36 Speaker 9 And if it’s less than that, it’s okay?

11:37 Speaker 2 Less than that is okay. Soaking takes effect only after twenty-four hours. Unless it’s soaking in something sharp, like brine.

11:45 Speaker 9 Salty cheese.

11:46 Speaker 2 Salty cheese too, right. In something that’s—actually, I’d say even cheese that isn’t just salty, but sharp cheeses like Camembert, cheddar, and the like.

11:56 Speaker 9 Don’t know them.

11:57 Speaker 2 Neither do we.

11:58 Speaker 9 I do.

11:58 Speaker 2 Parmesan. Wait, Shavuos is coming soon; we’ll get to know them. Another thing the Sages forbade is eating cheese after meat. The Torah forbade me to cook them or eat them together. I ate meat just now, and an hour later I had something dairy, drank a coffee. Did I violate a Torah prohibition? No. The Torah told me not to eat meat that was cooked together with milk. That’s what it said. The Sages extended it. They said, “Wait—even if you eat meat and then eat dairy an hour later, it’s forbidden.” If you do that, you violate a rabbinic prohibition—from the Sages. Why? What’s behind this decree? What’s the reason? And this is why we wait six hours. I ate meat at three in the afternoon. I have to wait six hours. Why? What’s the idea?

12:45 Speaker 10 So they don’t mix inside your body on the way down.

12:48 Speaker 2 Everything can mix inside your body; what happens inside your body happens inside your body. Even six hours later, I might still have some remnants of the steaks I ate this afternoon, and then I drink coffee. So in that sense they’re mixing too. But there are two reasons. What’s the issue here? There are two explanations from the Rishonim: Rashi’s explanation and the Rambam’s. Rashi says, “Listen, meat keeps leaving a taste in your mouth. Even after two or three hours, whether you drink black coffee or chamomile tea, it doesn’t matter—you still have the taste of steak in your mouth. Only after six hours does that time pass. That’s it; you no longer have the taste in your mouth.” Unless you have meat between your teeth. Then, according to the basic law, Rashi says you don’t even need to remove it; as far as I’m concerned, its taste is already gone. Sorry—according to Rashi, you do need to remove it. The Rambam says, “Wait, it isn’t because of the taste.” Our friend eats steak, finishes his meal, as you can see, and drinks black coffee. He does this and checks the taste. He has no taste of meat. “I don’t have any. That’s it, the taste has passed. I ate Turkish delight, drank black coffee, and that’s it. There’s no taste left at all.” Rather, for six hours the meat is still considered undigested. In other words, it’s still

14:07 Speaker 10 In the process.

14:08 Speaker 2 It’s in the process. After six hours, when it has been digested—meaning it has been digested and is no longer meat—then it would be permitted. Now, say I ate steak. With steak, it’s very common for meat fibers to get stuck between the teeth. That happens a lot, especially for people with fillings and so on. It gets stuck in all sorts of places between the teeth. Then he goes to drink milk and suddenly feels a fiber stuck there. Exactly. What is that? The Rambam says, “Wait, that’s considered digested. It’s not meat anymore; it’s sort of ragged. It’s no longer meat.” He says you don’t need to take it out; six hours have passed and everything is fine. But the halachic authorities, including the Rishonim and the Shulchan Aruch, ruled—and this is how everyone rules—that we wait six hours for both reasons: because there’s a taste in the mouth and because the meat isn’t considered digested. What practical difference do the reasons make? In the end, I wait six hours either way. For example, in the past there was no Gerber baby food. So what did our ancestors do? More precisely, our foremothers would take meat and chew it themselves, grind it up, and then give it to the baby. Forgive me for describing it, but they would give it to the baby as mashed meat. There were no blenders, shakes, or Gerber products of any kind. “Give the baby yogurt”—none of that. There was no such thing. There was grinding, you could say—not by hand, but with the mouth. It was as fresh as could be. But that’s what they did. I don’t want to think about how someone without teeth would grind it, but okay. So she would chew it and take it out. What do we tell her? “No, ma’am, wait six hours.” “I didn’t swallow it,

15:43 Speaker 2 and I don’t have a taste in my mouth. I chewed it and took it out.” As far as taste goes, there is a taste. You have a taste in your mouth; you can’t say you don’t. As far as digested or undigested meat goes, there’s no meat being digested. “I didn’t digest it. I didn’t swallow it. The meat didn’t go down my throat. I chewed it in my mouth and took it out.” So because of these two reasons, we say: we are stringent and wait six hours. Someone who chews meat for a baby waits six hours, and someone who swallows meat also has to wait six hours. Even someone fed through a feeding tube—forgive me for describing it, and may no one need one—also waits six hours. He can’t go and eat dairy. We’ll get to young children later, but in this situation, one has to wait six hours between meat and milk. If a person eats something dairy within those six hours, he has violated a prohibition instituted by the Sages. The Torah only forbade eating meat and milk together—meat and milk that were cooked together and that you eat together. Eating one after the other is forbidden only by the Sages.

16:37 Speaker 11 And with chicken, is it also six hours?

16:39 Speaker 2 With chicken too, it’s six hours.

16:41 Speaker 11 Some people say the Yemenites waited four hours, three hours.

16:44 Speaker 2 Oh, wait.

16:44 Speaker 11 So what are they relying on?

16:46 Speaker 2 First of all, it’s not the Yemenites. Don’t blame them. It’s, it’s probably—Eastern Europe.

16:51 Speaker 11 Not the Yemenites.

16:52 Speaker 2 Hungarians slash Dutch slash Germans.

16:54 Speaker 11 Hungarians.

16:55 Speaker 2 These days it’s not good to mention Germans, but Jews—German Jews, of course. What’s the point here? The Gemara says they would wait from one meal to the next before eating dairy after meat. If someone ate meat, he could eat dairy afterward, from one meal to the next. Meaning, from one meal to another. Now, it wasn’t like today, when a meal might be at two in the afternoon and then at four you polish off another laffa. We’re not talking about an hour or two. They would have a meal in the morning and another meal—or a meal at midday and then another in the evening. There was a substantial gap. The Sages estimated that it was around six hours. That’s where the six hours comes from. It doesn’t say “six hours” anywhere. The Sages estimated that from one meal to the next meant six hours. The Dutch, though, wait one hour, based on a calculation of their own. So yes, the six hours between meat and dairy comes from that estimate.

17:46 Speaker 12 Are those seasonal hours, or...?

17:48 Speaker 2 No, they’re hours—

17:48 Speaker 11 They established it as hours.

17:50 Speaker 2 Exact hours. There are opinions that say—for example, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, of blessed memory, in... which book did he write it in? I think he even wrote it in connection with Shavuos—that one can wait less.

18:00 Speaker 12 Because for a yeshivah student it’s more of a problem.

18:01 Speaker 2 Right, because in—

18:02 Speaker 11 Soldiers, too.

18:03 Speaker 2 In camps, the interval is shorter.

18:04 Speaker 11 Soldiers and yeshivah students.

18:07 Speaker 2 Yes, that’s where the six-hour issue comes up more often, and there he was lenient. He said you can rely on the opinion that these are seasonal hours. So if they’re served dairy after five and a half hours, or a little more than five, you can rely on that and be lenient. But ideally, we wait six hours—Sephardim, Ashkenazim, it doesn’t matter. In places like hospitals, for example, or for soldiers, they serve lunch at twelve or twelve-thirty. A soldier gets there at twelve-thirty, sits down, eats and finishes everything—that takes an hour. Then supper is at six in the evening. You can’t tell him—or expect him to say—“All right, listen, I still have an hour; I’ll come back to the dining hall then.” You can’t. It’ll be closing soon. The meal is now. So what is he supposed to do? In principle, nobody said he has to eat dairy. On the other hand, everything there is dairy except the cucumber and tomato—and that’s assuming nothing got spilled on them. So in that situation, if he wants to be stringent with himself, wait six hours and follow the law to the letter, by all means, he can wait six hours. But a Sephardi who follows Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s rulings and wants to rely on his ruling can confidently go ahead and eat.

19:11 Speaker 12 Not five hours.

19:12 Speaker 2 Just five, a little over five hours. I think even a little over five.

19:15 Speaker 12 Most say toward the end of the sixth hour.

19:18 Speaker 2 So five and a half or more.

19:19 Speaker 12 Even five and a half is already called the end of the sixth hour.

19:21 Speaker 2 Yes, once most of that hour has passed, so to speak. But the general practice is six hours.

19:26 Speaker 12 That doesn’t happen.

19:26 Speaker 2 Yes, sort of. On the other hand, Jews came from various communities and said, “No, we accepted upon ourselves something other than six hours. After all, it doesn’t say six hours. The Sages of later generations estimated it at six hours; we estimated it at three.” In Holland they wait three hours. German Jews waited four hours. In Hungary they also waited about four hours, and that continued among them for a long time; that was their practice. They wait four hours, three hours, and that’s fine. Now it’s traditional. I mean, it’s passed down as a tradition, in their genes, in their genetics.

19:59 Speaker 11 According to what you’re saying, then in Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s view, they did commit a transgression.

20:03 Speaker 2 No. Why would they have committed a transgression? They have an opinion to rely on. Because halachah doesn’t explicitly state a full six hours. The Sages estimated it at six hours.

20:12 Speaker 12 By the time the Sages made that estimate, they had already...

20:15 Speaker 11 Things.

20:17 Speaker 2 They accepted it upon themselves. Uh, they accepted upon themselves a different number of hours in other places. Here, for example, he writes: “There are places among the Jewish communities of the Diaspora where the custom was to suffice with a wait of three hours between meat and dairy, or even just one hour.”

20:37 Speaker 11 One hour?

20:38 Speaker 2 One hour. “However, the custom today is to wait six hours, and this is the proper custom for anyone with even a scent of Torah about him.” Yes. Why? Here’s one of the reasons he gives: “This may be attributed to the fact that those countries, particularly Holland—the Low Countries—have faster digestion. The people of Holland also customarily chew a kind of spice called licorice, which constantly cleans their mouths of any food remnants.”

21:06 Speaker 11 Licorice? Licorice.

21:08 Speaker 2 That kind of licorice.

21:09 Speaker 11 Candy. Licorice candy.

21:11 Speaker 2 The black stuff.

21:12 Speaker 11 Licorice root.

21:12 Speaker 13 Yes.

21:13 Speaker 11 Nowadays there are capsules.

21:15 Speaker 2 Yes.

21:15 Speaker 11 There are, uh...

21:16 Speaker 2 I don’t know. I didn’t like it because it tasted like arak, and we were kids; I didn’t like arak.

21:20 Speaker 13 In colder countries, too, it’s faster, uh...

21:24 Speaker 11 It cleans things out.

21:24 Speaker 13 The system works.

21:25 Speaker 2 The system works faster. Some say that after a night’s sleep you can eat dairy even if six hours haven’t passed. There are various opinions on this.

21:32 Speaker 13 [unclear], it’s cold there.

21:34 Speaker 11 Oh, really?

21:35 Speaker 13 Yes.

21:36 Speaker 11 Do you feel it?

21:37 Speaker 2 Yes. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, there’s, for example, an opinion of one of the later authorities. The Rebbe of Buchach—one of the Ashkenazi rebbes—wrote a work of halachah on the Shulchan Aruch, a collection of rulings of sorts. He really has an interesting way of putting things; we’ve mentioned him several times. He has a book called Daas Kedoshim, where he also writes novel insights on the laws of meat and dairy. He too says that if a person sleeps after eating meat, he can wait one or two hours less. Why? Because sleep makes digestion proceed faster. That’s his view.

22:12 Speaker 11 If he slept for an hour.

22:13 Speaker 2 It moves things along right away.

22:14 Speaker 11 If he slept for an hour, or if he waited?

22:15 Speaker 2 If he slept after eating meat, he can wait one or two hours less. You finished eating meat at two, went to sleep, and woke up at six: you can drink coffee with milk. Drink coffee. That’s his view. Because what’s the idea here, after all? Digestion. During the day, the digestive system takes about six hours, so you need to wait six hours. But at night even less—even four hours is enough. Why? Because it’s a night’s sleep.

22:42 Speaker 11 What counts as night?

22:43 Speaker 2 The taste in the mouth still hasn’t...

22:44 Speaker 11 Wait, someone eats meat at two in the morning, goes to sleep and wakes up at six.

22:50 Speaker 2 He wakes up at six, and according to that opinion he can already drink coffee with milk.

22:53 Speaker 11 According to that opinion.

22:55 Speaker 2 The other halachic authorities didn’t accept it. They said no, they didn’t accept it. Why? Six hours means six hours.

23:00 Speaker 11 Wait, are you telling me the stomach works faster at night?

23:06 Speaker 2 It digests things faster.

23:09 Speaker 11 An hour.

23:11 Speaker 2 In terms of digestion, it gets digested.

23:17 Speaker 11 The Dutch.

23:18 Speaker 13 An hour.

23:20 Speaker 11 One a minute.

23:21 Speaker 2 No, no, no, no.

23:22 Speaker 13 At least six hours.

23:23 Speaker 11 Six hours. Six hours.

23:24 Speaker 13 The Dutch also wait three hours.

23:26 Speaker 2 No, the issue is six hours. I’ll tell you exactly.

23:29 Speaker 13 Leave it.

23:31 Speaker 2 Yes. Wait, I’ll tell you exactly how it works. Here. Wait, I’ll tell you exactly. I think it’s because of the time digestion takes.

23:44 Speaker 11 That’s cheese.

23:44 Speaker 13 Come on, let’s take this to...

23:45 Speaker 11 Not an hour—what hour?

23:47 Speaker 13 It works out to an hour.

23:48 Speaker 11 They go out for coffee.

23:50 Speaker 13 No, hang on. Rabbi, in Chabad do we wait after eating cheese?

23:55 Speaker 2 After cheese.

23:56 Speaker 13 Hard cheese.

23:57 Speaker 11 We don’t wait at all. Oh yes, an hour.

24:00 Speaker 2 That’s regarding meat before dairy: six hours. Even someone whose custom is three hours or one hour, when he comes to Eretz Yisroel he needs to follow the practice of everyone there—meaning six hours. If he wants to continue his family tradition, that’s his choice. As for dairy before meat, this is very relevant to Shavuos, when we eat cheeses and all kinds of dairy foods. So before we get to hard cheeses, let’s talk about our soft cheeses, Tnuva and the like. With soft cheese, I have no reason to wait six hours.

24:31 Speaker 14 White cheese.

24:32 Speaker 2 Because white cheese is soft. Have you ever seen black cheese? There is a Hungarian cheese with paprika, paprika. But soft cheeses, puddings, yogurts—these are very liquid slash thick, but they don’t really have a very, very dominant flavor. So you... First of all, they digest more quickly, and second, their taste doesn’t linger in the mouth for long. For that reason, the basic law, as Maran writes in the Shulchan Aruch, is that rinsing the mouth is enough, and that’s that. Of course, saying an after-blessing is obligatory. I mean, this also relates to the previous rule. A person ate meat and waited six hours. Well, now I want to eat dairy. Wait—if you haven’t said an after-blessing, you’re still in the middle of a meal. Yes, after six hours you can’t say the after-blessing anymore; it’s a new occasion. Seventy-two minutes have passed. The time it takes food to digest on an empty stomach has passed. But suppose he’s at a Purim meal.

25:31 Speaker 14 The other way around. Let’s say it the other way around: from cheese to meat.

25:33 Speaker 2 Wait, let’s start with this one. Someone was at a Purim seudah, ate meat at two in the afternoon, drank alcohol, all that, challah. He didn’t eat any more meat during the six hours. He finished eating the meal, but mixed Purim and Pesach together: after the meat, for all six hours he just had popcorn, sweets, all sorts of things, challah, l’chaim, and everything was fine. Eight in the evening arrives. He says, “Six hours have passed. Wow, I could really use a coffee now. Instant coffee with whipped cream—come on, with the foam. Even if you don’t drink the foam. Come on, let’s have it. Six hours have passed.” Someone tells him, “Hello, you’re still in a meat seudah.” “Fine, but six hours have passed.” Sir, it’s six hours plus bentching or an after-blessing. In other words, you can’t have it just because you’ve waited six hours. You also have to say an after-blessing or bentch.

26:21 Speaker 14 A seudah.

26:22 Speaker 2 Or an after-blessing. With dairy it’s the same issue; you need that too. So when the Shulchan Aruch writes that, strictly speaking, rinsing your mouth is enough, you still need an after-blessing. You’ve just finished eating dairy: say Borei Nefashos, rinse your mouth, eat some bread, and then bring on the steaks. That’s common.

26:39 Speaker 14 You have to say an after-blessing.

26:40 Speaker 2 You must say an after-blessing. Otherwise it’s forbidden, because you have to go from one seudah to another.

26:45 Speaker 14 If you want to keep eating bread.

26:47 Speaker 2 I still can’t eat.

26:49 Speaker 14 Wash your hands again.

26:50 Speaker 2 Yes, because I can’t eat meat while I’m in a dairy seudah, and that’s the basic halachah.

26:53 Speaker 14 Yes, but you can’t. Some people say...

26:55 Speaker 2 It’s required.

26:56 Speaker 14 Rinse your mouth—or eat bread, because bread takes away the taste of everything.

27:00 Speaker 2 That’s called cleansing: it cleanses the mouth.

27:03 Speaker 14 Bread always leaves a lot of taste in the mouth.

27:05 Speaker 2 So that means...

27:06 Speaker 14 Bentching.

27:07 Speaker 2 So he waits. He rinses his mouth and says an after-blessing.

27:13 Speaker 14 Not like fish.

27:13 Speaker 2 And then he goes on.

27:15 Speaker 14 That’s also a problem.

27:16 Speaker 2 With fish too. What about washing between courses? What about washing between courses? There’s a danger there.

27:21 Speaker 14 But that’s also a stringency.

27:23 Speaker 2 What is?

27:24 Speaker 14 It’s not really a stringency if you’re saying an unnecessary blessing.

27:26 Speaker 2 Why is it an unnecessary blessing? It’s an explicit halachah that I can’t eat meat in a dairy seudah, according to everyone. So I have to say the blessing. And more than that: if I don’t say it and I eat, I’ll violate a rabbinic prohibition, because I’m eating a meat seudah within a dairy seudah—even if I waited an hour. That’s violating a prohibition of the Sages, and someone who violates a prohibition of the Sages receives disciplinary lashes. That’s a serious smack, very, very severe.

27:53 Speaker 14 Even a Polish one.

27:54 Speaker 2 That too. Yes, now he’s become a kohen.

27:57 Speaker 14 It comes out that he bentches twice. You eat dairy and bentch.

28:01 Speaker 2 You eat dairy—bread with cheese—and bentch. Yes, two seudos.

28:08 Speaker 14 He wants to separate them.

28:08 Speaker 2 Separate seudos. On Shavuos, this is what we generally do. The custom isn’t only a Chabad custom. We’ve mentioned several times that many others do it too, including Ashkenazim. They basically follow what Yemenite Jews do all year: they make Kiddush and eat dairy—all sorts of dairy foods, lasagnas and the whole works.

28:27 Speaker 14 So, without Hamotzi.

28:28 Speaker 2 Lasagnas, without Hamotzi. Some people also have a dairy meal with Hamotzi—good for them—but you have to know that you also need to have a meat seudah. We finish eating, all well and good. We need an after-blessing or bentching. We wait an hour; that’s the one-hour waiting period brought by the Sages. The Rema cites it, as do many other poskim.

28:46 Speaker 14 There.

28:47 Speaker 2 For all dairy, an hour. Now, many later poskim—I think Rabbi Yosha[?] brings this too—say it applies only to dairy that leaves some taste in the mouth. Salty cheese, for example: an hour, not six hours. So, an hour for something that leaves a taste. With something liquid like milk, there’s no lingering taste. That’s it; it’s gone, finished, as though it had disappeared from the world.

29:07 Speaker 14 All Ashkenazim wait an hour after dairy.

29:09 Speaker 2 Most Ashkenazim do, yes.

29:12 Speaker 14 Rabbi Yosha[?].

29:12 Speaker 2 Rabbi Yosha[?] says this regarding milk.

29:14 Speaker 14 I say a blessing.

29:14 Speaker 2 Look at it in a moment. Yes, only with milk.

29:17 Speaker 14 Not Ashkenazi.

29:19 Speaker 2 But they all rule that it’s an hour.

29:21 Speaker 14 At a Purim seudah. Some people wait until twelve at night.

29:25 Speaker 15 That’s what those who are stringent about yellow cheese do.

29:27 Speaker 2 Ah, hold on with yellow cheese. We haven’t started that yet.

29:30 Speaker 14 An hour.

29:30 Speaker 2 Wait, we haven’t started with yellow cheese yet. That’s a whole separate story.

29:34 Speaker 14 What’s a person supposed to do?

29:35 Speaker 2 According to Chabad, you’ve finished eating cheese—or even drinking coffee? Say an after-blessing. Wait an hour.

29:43 Speaker 14 An hour?

29:43 Speaker 2 Yes.

29:44 Speaker 14 I told you, that’s excessive.

29:46 Speaker 2 We wait an hour; it isn’t excessive. It’s something that appears in the holy Zohar.

29:50 Speaker 14 In the Zohar?

29:51 Speaker 2 In the holy Zohar.

29:51 Speaker 14 People do this a lot. I’ve heard that at Kiddushim they have a long stretch beforehand and so on.

29:55 Speaker 2 The Zohar says to wait an hour.

29:57 Speaker 15 Ashkenazim.

30:00 Speaker 2 Yes, wait, I’ll tell you exactly.

30:01 Speaker 14 If you want some dairy dishes, it’s an hour in between now.

30:05 Speaker 2 [unclear] and then.

30:08 Speaker 14 No, bentch, and then again.

30:10 Speaker 15 I think you can have meat now, after the hour.

30:14 Speaker 2 If you want.

30:16 Speaker 14 Between ten and a million years.

30:17 Speaker 2 An hour.

30:17 Speaker 14 An hour.

30:18 Speaker 2 An hour.

30:18 Speaker 14 Ten million years.

30:20 Speaker 2 All right, we rule differently: wait an hour between dairy and meat.

30:28 Speaker 14 But you said...

30:28 Speaker 2 Before meat, after dairy.

30:29 Speaker 14 But you said that doesn’t apply, that rinsing your mouth is enough.

30:33 Speaker 2 Right, because it depends on whose ruling you follow.

30:34 Speaker 14 By the way, let me ask: what’s the answer?

30:37 Speaker 2 Let’s put this in order so it’s clear. According to the Shulchan Aruch, in section 89, paragraph 3... paragraph 2, sorry. And Chazon Ovadia and several other Sephardi poskim hold this way too—yes, strictly speaking. What do you need to do? You’ve just finished coffee or cottage cheese; it doesn’t matter what. Not strong, sharp cheeses like Camembert and the like—the ordinary cheeses we have today.

31:02 Speaker 14 Yes.

31:02 Speaker 2 Rinse your mouth or eat something to remove the taste. Say an after-blessing. A second later, you can eat. Make sure you don’t have any cheese left on your hands or anything like that, and eat your laffa. Enjoy. Ashkenazim are stringent and wait an hour. Here too, they wait an hour to separate one seudah from the next. They wait an hour. Yes, the Zohar says so.

31:27 Speaker 14 [unclear].

31:28 Speaker 15 What does the Zohar say?

31:29 Speaker 2 The Zohar writes in Parshas Mishpatim, page 125a, where it says not to eat—I don’t know exactly how it phrases it—meat and milk, but it says it in Aramaic: “be-sha’ata chada,” meaning not to eat them... When it discusses “Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk,” it says not to eat them “be-sha’ata chada.” That’s what people learned from it. And what does “be-sha’ata chada” mean? It could mean “at one time”—together, at the same time. But many understood it to mean one hour: wait an hour afterward.

32:01 Speaker 14 In the summer it’s an hour and a half, a seasonal hour.

32:03 Speaker 2 An hour, not a seasonal hour.

32:06 Speaker 14 An hour.

32:07 Speaker 2 An hour. Six o’clock: if you finished at six, you can eat at seven. Not a seasonal hour. We don’t go by seasonal hours; we mean sixty minutes. So we wait an hour, and that is the Chabad custom. And not only that: many Ashkenazim follow it too. Some are more lenient with something liquid, such as milk, coffee, and the like. That’s where they’re more lenient, but not with cheeses or things like that—only with something completely liquid.

32:32 Speaker 3 Without hard cheese.

32:34 Speaker 2 Oh. What about hard cheese? What does “hard” mean? Let’s take it to the extreme: Camembert, cheddar—all those very hard cheeses that, when you take a bite, have a very strong, dominant dairy taste.

32:48 Speaker 14 Dairy.

32:48 Speaker 2 Here in Israel there are some cheeses like Parmesan, cheddar and Camembert, and there are blue cheeses too. They’re imported, but many such cheeses are brought from abroad. These are cheeses for which you wait six hours.

33:03 Speaker 14 Those hard ones.

33:04 Speaker 2 From the delicatessens, yes.

33:05 Speaker 14 Eight percent is hard? What is that? Yes.

33:08 Speaker 2 Wait. Hold on with yellow cheese; I’m treating yellow cheese separately.

33:12 Speaker 14 Earlier you mentioned instant coffee. I heard from a source...

33:16 Speaker 2 Yes.

33:16 Speaker 14 The instant coffee we drink today is three-quarters water, and you add just a drop of coffee, milk—you know, to make coffee. He says the milk is already nullified in it.

33:27 Speaker 2 It isn’t nullified.

33:28 Speaker 14 I’m asking.

33:29 Speaker 2 Does all your coffee turn the color of milk? There you go. The whole thing has become milky.

33:36 Speaker 3 Not in the base, in the base.

33:37 Speaker 2 It doesn’t matter; it colors the whole thing. That means the milk has a perceptible presence.

33:41 Speaker 3 In your base.

33:42 Speaker 2 So when is it nullified? When you can’t detect its presence. Take an example: you have a liter of coffee and pour in one drop of milk. Can you see the drop? No. It’s dispersed, mixed in; you can’t see anything there. But you pour a little touch of milk into a small cup like this, and the whole thing changes color. The milk has a perceptible presence; it changes the color.

34:10 Speaker 14 In the taste.

34:12 Speaker 2 In the taste too. That means there’s both taste and a perceptible presence.

34:15 Speaker 3 In how it looks.

34:17 Speaker 2 In how it looks. So when you can see it, you can’t say it’s nullified.

34:21 Speaker 14 Its appearance, its color.

34:22 Speaker 2 Not just appearance—its visible quality.

34:25 Speaker 14 The color. Its visible quality is the color.

34:26 Speaker 3 How it looks.

34:27 Speaker 2 Right, how it looks.

34:28 Speaker 3 If it reaches that color, there’s obviously something in there.

34:31 Speaker 2 Maris ayin—how something appears to others. The whole idea is that people shouldn’t see something permissible and think it’s forbidden, or get confused about what is and isn’t allowed. That’s what maris ayin means. Just to explain with an example: soy sausages. My son likes soy sausages with a glass of milk. He can eat them and drink it.

34:47 Speaker 14 But I—sorry to say this—

34:50 Speaker 2 I forgive you for saying it.

34:51 Speaker 14 I’ve seen—

34:52 Speaker 2 Yes.

34:52 Speaker 14 That if you take a small amount of black paint and white paint and mix them together, it turns gray. In other words, you don’t see the white at all. There’s no white.

35:02 Speaker 2 But the milk is still there. Forget the science; I’m talking about my coffee.

35:07 Speaker 14 But it isn’t white.

35:09 Speaker 2 It is there.

35:09 Speaker 14 It isn’t milk.

35:10 Speaker 2 It doesn’t have to be white. It’s lighter than that black because of the milk. There’s a taste of milk, even if there’s only a little. It’s there, you understand? How can you tell? You get up in the morning and make yourself coffee. You want to add milk, and then you discover you’ve only got a little left. The carton, how do you say, doesn’t have much in it. Just a tiny bit. So what do you do?

35:37 Speaker 14 Very dominant.

35:39 Speaker 2 What do you do? Like a typical Israeli, you say, “Well, less milk.” How do you put it? It won’t be as light as I like it, but at least it’ll be nice; there’ll be a little taste. You taste it, and although it’s dark, dark brown, it has a taste of milk.

35:54 Speaker 14 White is the one color that makes all kinds of other colors. If you mix red with white, for instance, it turns pink. It’s fairly similar.

36:02 Speaker 2 Because white is [unclear]. Pale—you know what pale means.

36:07 Speaker 14 It really is something.

36:08 Speaker 2 Yes.

36:09 Speaker 3 What about the soy sausages?

36:10 Speaker 2 Soy sausages. In short, my son—I very much hope he doesn’t like this, but just as an example—wants to eat soy sausages with a glass of milk. Is he allowed to or not?

36:21 Speaker 14 He is.

36:22 Speaker 2 He is. But someone comes along and looks: “Hey, what’s this? Rabbi Pinchas’s son is eating meat and milk here! What’s going on? These are today’s rabbis? All they care about is money. They rail against this and that, against the government, and on top of it all they don’t serve in the army…”

36:34 Speaker 3 Nowadays they even 3D-print meat, and all sorts of things like that.

36:37 Speaker 2 There’s cultured meat too; there are all kinds of things. There’s also soy milk, soy milk.

36:44 Speaker 3 Soy milk.

36:45 Speaker 2 Oh.

36:45 Speaker 3 The word “milk” there is misleading. It isn’t milk.

36:48 Speaker 2 Right. Why would—

36:50 Speaker 3 I could have called it a soy mix. They only call it milk for marketing.

36:53 Speaker 2 Exactly.

36:53 Speaker 3 It’s not that—

36:55 Speaker 2 It’s like almond milk. That isn’t milk either. Coconut milk.

36:59 Speaker 3 Lentil juice.

37:00 Speaker 2 They call it milk because the product is white.

37:03 Speaker 3 Exactly. But its only connection to milk is the color.

37:06 Speaker 2 Only the color.

37:07 Speaker 3 Let me tell you: your product is the color of milk, but there isn’t any milk in the whole carton.

37:12 Speaker 2 A white wall. Right.

37:13 Speaker 14 There’s also “milk” from dates and figs. It isn’t white, either.

37:17 Speaker 2 Date milk and fig milk.

37:19 Speaker 3 Off-white.

37:20 Speaker 2 “Milk” of the vineyard, and grapes and wine—fine, that’s written too. But at the end of the day, he’s having cow’s milk, cow’s milk with soy sausages.

37:31 Speaker 14 There’s no cow in them.

37:32 Speaker 2 He’s eating sausages and drinking cow’s milk.

37:35 Speaker 3 Is the sausage meat? It isn’t meat.

37:36 Speaker 2 The sausage is pareve. But someone who looks—by the letter of the law, it’s permitted. The Sages came and said: “Wait, we’re concerned people will say, ‘See? Sausages! The Torah forbade… What did I hear in the class? Steak is forbidden. I don’t eat steak; it’s hard on my teeth, with my dentures. Sausages are chicken. Everything in them is ground up anyway, so you can eat them with dairy.’” They’ll think that’s fine, and eventually someone will make meat sausages and have them with a glass of cow’s milk, violating the prohibition of meat and milk. But in principle, these soy sausages are permitted. What can I do? So what did they say? If you want to eat them—even though today you can sometimes tell, the meat and pareve sausages themselves look very, very similar. That’s useful too: the children think I’m making them meat sausages, and I serve them pareve ones. That’s—that’s [unclear]. The yetzer hara, yes, not the taste, G-d forbid. So what did they say? If you want to eat soy sausages and drink a glass of milk, put the label or the package on the table. Then it’s clear: “Hello, you can see what kind of sausages these are.”

38:46 Speaker 14 On the table. Stick it on the product here.

38:48 Speaker 2 No, no, no. Usually you need a billboard on the Ayalon Highway. We’re lenient: just putting it on the table is enough. That’s enough. Or take the opposite case: meat sausages with soy milk—we’ll call it soy milk, since that’s its commercial name.

39:04 Speaker 3 Right.

39:04 Speaker 2 Here too, put the Alpro—Alpro, what’s it called?—on the table, and people will say, “Ah, he isn’t drinking real milk. He’s drinking plant-based milk.” That’s perfectly fine.

39:16 Speaker 3 Do you have to do that even if you’re at home with your children?

39:19 Speaker 2 You need something to make it clear then too, certainly. I don’t want my child to grow up and say, “Dad, I remember when we were little, my father used to make us meat sausages with a glass of milk. One of the best things I ever tasted.”

39:31 Speaker 14 Even if you explain it to him afterward and show him it was soy milk, it doesn’t matter.

39:34 Speaker 2 That won’t help. In his memory, he drank a glass of milk and ate a sausage.

39:37 Speaker 14 If you can tell from the sausage—

39:39 Speaker 2 Huh?

39:40 Speaker 14 If you can tell from the sausage, you still need to put it there. Make it clear for yourself; it isn’t—

39:41 Speaker 2 Make it clear for yourself. Unless you have cameras at home.

39:46 Speaker 3 Not me, but Big Brother has soy milk.

39:49 Speaker 2 Soy sausages and milk.

39:50 Speaker 14 Here, too, we should say, perhaps someone—

39:53 Speaker 2 And here as well. If it’s recognizable, if you can see what kind of sausages they are… Actually, even then I would say to put the package out. I think they wrote that even with a pareve product, because its appearance resembles a meat product. Corn schnitzel, for example—you know it isn’t meat. So even if I take a glass of milk and drink it with that, someone will say, “Listen, I know it’s pareve.” But sausages look very, very similar. What do I mean? They’re ninety percent identical. Maybe the color isn’t the same, and the taste certainly isn’t the same.

40:23 Speaker 14 There’s Beyond Meat and all those things.

40:25 Speaker 2 There’s cultured meat. That’s a separate question altogether.

40:28 Speaker 14 Rabbi, I have a question: are a cow’s udders considered meat?

40:33 Speaker 2 Say that again, again.

40:34 Speaker 14 The cow’s udders, where the milk comes from.

40:36 Speaker 2 Yes.

40:38 Speaker 14 “Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” In other words, where does the mother’s milk come from? Her udders.

40:45 Speaker 2 Good.

40:45 Speaker 14 Are the udders—

40:46 Speaker 4 Dairy or meat?

40:48 Speaker 14 No. Are the udders meat, or—I don’t know. It depends on who’s carrying them.

40:53 Speaker 2 Good question. There’s an entire section about this in the Shulchan Aruch. Section 90 of Yoreh De’ah deals with kachal, the udder of an animal. After all, milk comes out of it, but it’s part of the cow, so it’s meat. Say a person slaughters a cow after it has been milked, for example, and now has the udder. In a sense, in quotation marks, that udder contains “meat and milk,” yet it may be eaten. It’s a sort of riddle: if someone asks you what meat and milk you’re allowed to eat, the answer is kachal. But it isn’t really accurate to say you’re eating meat and milk. The milk was contained in it; a little may have been absorbed into the fibers of the meat. So what do you do? As Maran writes, you cut it lengthwise and crosswise and press it against a wall. In other words, you need to put some pressure on it, squeeze it, to get out what’s absorbed inside.

41:56 Speaker 4 Which side?

41:58 Speaker 2 From the inside and the outside. Then, once you’ve squeezed out all the milk contained in it, it’s entirely meat. Or take stomach linings, for example. In the past, people would use them to ferment milk and make yogurt or sahlab. That’s it.

42:17 Speaker 14 And fat.

42:18 Speaker 2 No. Maybe.

42:20 Speaker 4 In a horse’s stomach, once—

42:22 Speaker 2 That too. We had something about that.

42:25 Speaker 4 They pour water into it, hang it up, and it stays frozen.

42:27 Speaker 2 Yes.

42:28 Speaker 14 Is sheep fat considered meat?

42:30 Speaker 2 Meat.

42:31 Speaker 4 We’re not sure.

42:32 Speaker 2 Certainly.

42:33 Speaker 14 Dairy too.

42:33 Speaker 2 Obviously. A cow’s udders are meat.

42:36 Speaker 14 Arabs make something from it.

42:38 Speaker 4 You too. You too.

42:41 Speaker 2 From the fat.

42:41 Speaker 14 The fat from that part. I saw them eating it; it was awful.

42:45 Speaker 2 That part is very fatty. Sheep fat in general. So, as we were saying about kachal: nowadays people hardly ever eat it. First, it’s from the hindquarters. Second, people simply don’t eat it anymore. There are many other things people don’t eat anymore, such as the rectum and various other things mentioned in the Shulchan Aruch.

43:03 Speaker 4 There’s no problem with the sheep.

43:04 Speaker 2 Something like that, yes.

43:05 Speaker 14 They take those udders and put milk in them, make what’s called [unclear], close them up, and make cheese from it.

43:14 Speaker 2 Yes, in the past they generally used this in the stomach. Maran mentions it in the siman, in se’if 11 of chapter 7, that they would make it in a stomach, and this too.

43:23 Speaker 4 Let me remind you of two.

43:24 Speaker 2 It’s not simple.

43:25 Speaker 14 No, I would have liked—

43:29 Speaker 2 Yes. Or to put it inside that, and it absorbs flavor from the meat. So that can also complicate things for us.

43:35 Speaker 4 Cheese.

43:35 Speaker 2 Huh?

43:36 Speaker 4 They eat it too.

43:37 Speaker 2 It doesn’t eat meat, but it’s meaty. [unclear] meat. Wait, let’s get to yellow cheeses. I had a question about this today, about yellow cheese.

43:46 Speaker 14 Not just yellow cheese—cheeses like Parmesan, [unclear], too.

43:50 Speaker 2 So earlier we mentioned that there are cheeses after which you wait six hours.

43:54 Speaker 14 Right.

43:55 Speaker 2 There are cheeses after which you wait six hours, like Parmesan, cheddar, Camembert, and the like. Why? Because they have a very strong flavor. And why does that matter? Because the two reasons we mentioned regarding meat and milk apply to them as well, including the flavor. Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen.

44:09 Speaker 14 Why do we—

44:11 Speaker 2 What happened? Wait, wait, one second.

44:13 Speaker 4 They curdle it inside a cow’s stomach—not a horse’s, a cow’s. That’s permitted; the cheese is permitted.

44:22 Speaker 2 That’s how they used to do it. How does that work? That’s a whole subject of its own.

44:26 Speaker 4 It’s permitted, then.

44:28 Speaker 2 They used to do it with a hat and a visor. Wait, hold on, that’s a subject of its own. Hold on, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Anyway, we said there are cheeses like that. So after hard cheeses, you wait six hours. Why? Because the two reasons we gave for waiting between meat and milk apply to them: either because they have a very pronounced, strong flavor that lingers in the teeth, so I wait about six hours, or because they don’t digest readily—they’re very sharp, very strong, very hard. It takes six hours for them to digest. In many places—in Israel, these are only the supposedly fancy cheeses. Abroad, though, I was in Italy once, about seventeen years ago, and they’re commonplace. It’s like eating cottage cheese and the like here. For them, it’s nothing special. They have little cubes of this and that. Today there are also processed cheeses, but those aren’t included among hard cheeses. All the processed cheeses, New York cheeses and the like, aren’t included. Now we come to yellow cheese. The big blocks of yellow cheese, or, for example, the rounds of cheese they used to bring from abroad and other places. The process for them, basically, for the original yellow cheeses, was that they preserved them by drying them out very thoroughly. And then that preser—rather, that drying—how did they preserve them? They dried them. After all, how does any cheese spoil? Because it has some moisture in it, and the same goes for meat. Once there’s moisture in it, that moisture, or the juices in the meat, bring in lots and lots of bugs, and that causes mold. As a result, it starts to smell bad. In the past, the halachic works would say—it was written in the Shulchan Aruch—that they would salt meat for a traveler. A person wanted to take meat along for the road,

46:13 Speaker 2 so he would dry it out, make it like sausages. Like salami, then or now: dry it out and put it in salt. Like kabanos, kabanos. Dry it out completely. There’s no moisture in it at all. It’s as dry as pottery, as dry as wood. Nothing. It has no flavor, no moisture, and it would keep for a long time. He would snack on it along the way.

46:34 Speaker 4 Did it still have the taste of meat?

46:35 Speaker 2 The taste remained, but it was completely dry and very hard. But, you know, it was tasty. That’s how they used to do it. Salami and all the various kinds of pastrami are dried too.

46:45 Speaker 4 They still do that.

46:46 Speaker 2 Huh? Basically, they do. Wait. And yellow cheese is the same thing. They add something that dries out the milk in it, and then the cheese hardens. And because it hardens and has no moisture—touch a dry cheese. Touch it. It may feel a little greasy, but that’s not moisture. It’s not really wet. It’s not wet at all. It’s dry.

47:18 Speaker 4 Nine-percent cheese, five-percent cheese.

47:21 Speaker 2 Wait, I’m talking about yellow cheese.

47:23 Speaker 4 I’m talking.

47:24 Speaker 2 Wait, I haven’t gotten to percentages yet. Percentages have nothing to do with us. That’s for someone who studied arithmetic. Hold on. So they would dry it out, and that way it would keep for a long time. The drying process—and the aging of the cheese—would take about six months, or even longer. Because it aged, it developed flavor. This isn’t something that appears in the halachic authorities of the last fifty or hundred years; it appears in works from four hundred years ago. The Alter Rebbe mentions it, as do many other authorities: that’s how they used to make it. And, incidentally, those were the cheeses they had back then. There was no Tera or Tnuva or any of that crowd; they didn’t know such a thing. They had dry cheeses, hard or soft, but dried, and they would age those cheeses for about six months. Because of that, they developed a lingering flavor, so people wait about six hours afterward. Then came the 2000s, or even earlier, the nineteen-hundreds and so on. Various dairies came along and discovered that they could dry the cheeses in a much faster process. Not that they could simply speed up the process of making yellow cheese—the fermentation, the protein and whatever else is in there. That too involves a kind of fermentation, of the yolks, the proteins, whatever is there. But through various technological-slash-chemical methods, they managed to produce yellow cheese within a month or two. That’s why you see tons of yellow cheese here: Gush Chalav, Emek, all the different kinds, in Jerusalem, in Tirat Carmel, I don’t know where. There’s lots and lots of yellow cheese. Some is imported too, but even with the imported cheese, you see there are huge quantities. How can there be such quantities? If it were something that took—

49:09 Speaker 2 If it were something that took about six months, you wouldn’t see it on the shelves in astronomical quantities like that. Before Shavuos, maybe only before Shavuos, they would bring all the Israeli yellow cheeses to market for us. Why? Because it would have taken six months from Chanukah. But once you can make it within a month or two, you have a production line, and you can produce much greater quantities. That’s why today you suddenly see tons of it. I’m not speaking only about the kosher certifications, but about the dairies themselves. You see Tera, you see Tnuva—you see, Tnuva already had it. Quantities and quantities of yellow cheese, along with imports and all sorts of things like that. Then the halachic authorities came along and said, “Wait, wait. First of all, its shelf life is longer than that of ordinary cheese.” How long does ordinary cheese last? A week or two, more or less; cottage cheese, less. But this yellow cheese lasts much longer because it’s dry. There’s nothing there that would, so to speak, spoil it. That’s why, once you open the package of yellow cheese even a little, it’s always in the refrigerator, and the refrigerator dries it out completely. It becomes completely like wood—dry.

50:17 Speaker 5 Nothing. It was like a board.

50:19 Speaker 2 Kosher to the highest standard. But once you store it properly, it keeps for a long time. It has a shelf life. So they said, wait a minute, this isn’t quite the same thing. It has flavor, but it hasn’t aged for six months, and its flavor isn’t especially sharp or strong. Do you wait six hours after this supposedly engineered yellow cheese, or not? Some poskim of the previous generation, Rabbi Elyashiv and Rabbi Wosner, said to be stringent, because of the process. It’s nice that you’re speeding it up so it takes two months, but ultimately the process itself takes a long time. In principle, you’re accelerating it to two months, but ordinarily it’s supposed to take six months. Even though it takes two months, they’re stringent. If this is the product you would get after six months without your chemicals, then even if you speed it up, it makes no difference to me. You wait six months—six months? Wait six hours. Wait an hour. You know, the Arizal would eat—not the Arizal. It’s already mentioned in the Gemara, but they would mention it particularly about the Arizal: on a day when he ate meat, he wouldn’t eat dairy until the next day. And on a day when he ate dairy, he wouldn’t eat meat. In short, it was a sort of alternating arrangement: a meat day, a dairy day, a meat day, a dairy day. What a pleasure. My children have meat for lunch every afternoon until it comes out of their noses. “I know, Dad, but we want an omelet with cheese in the evening.” All right, so we’re lenient with them according to Maran’s view, once or twice a week. But ultimately, regarding this yellow cheese, those poskim hold that you wait six hours. On the other hand, there are many rabbis, foremost among them many rabbis

51:59 Speaker 2 today, and there are differences of opinion about this among Chabad rabbis too. Rabbi Ze’ev Witman—Weitman? I don’t know how to pronounce his name—the rabbi of Tnuva. He wrote a long article. He’s Tnuva’s rabbi; he provides the kosher certification for everything there. So he says, since Witman—Boruch Hashem.

52:15 Speaker 5 Witman is one of the wealthy ones.

52:17 Speaker 2 That too; he has businesses on the side. So since it takes about two months, that’s what matters. What do you mean, six months? It takes two months, so it’s two months. And it doesn’t leave a lingering taste. It doesn’t take six months to age, even if it then sits on a refrigerator shelf for four months. There you go: two months at the factory and four months on the shelf, and you have six-month-old cheese. It makes no difference. It took two months for this cheese to form, and you don’t have to wait six hours; one hour is enough. So many poskim today—most of the Jewish people wait six hours—wait one hour, not six hours. Among Chabad rabbis, there are opinions on both sides. Some rabbis involved in kashrus, such as Rabbi Landau of Bnei Brak, may he live, and Rabbi Nachman Tzan[?] in Rechovot, and I think another two or three rabbis, also hold that one should be stringent and wait six hours. And other Chabad rabbis hold—

53:13 Speaker 5 Yellow cheese.

53:14 Speaker 2 Regular yellow cheese, Emek yellow cheese. It doesn’t matter whether it’s nine percent or twenty-eight percent; there’s no difference. Wait six hours. On the other hand, other Chabad rabbis have a different view. One of them, whom I checked with today, is Rabbi Boruchovsky in Rechovot. He says no, one hour is enough. Why? Because if the rabbi who provides the kosher certification tells you, “Listen, the process takes two months and there’s no need to wait six hours,” there’s no reason to be stringent. I think that’s his reasoning. I didn’t ask him directly. I can check, but broadly speaking, that’s their reasoning: it doesn’t leave a lingering taste, and it doesn’t take six months to age. Afterward, you wait just one hour. Or, according to the Sephardic view, you rinse your mouth, and that’s enough; say a final blessing, and that’s enough. End of the matter. Sorry about that. Excellent.

53:55 Speaker 5 What you’re saying.

53:56 Speaker 2 Even for yellow cheese.

53:57 Speaker 5 Even soft cheese that enters the human body becomes something hard inside the body, through the digestive system.

54:09 Speaker 2 What do you mean, harder? No, no, I’m not familiar with that. Interesting to know.

54:13 Speaker 5 No, it hardens. It hardens inside because of the heat that develops.

54:17 Speaker 2 It breaks down, gets digested, and it’s no longer cheese.

54:20 Speaker 5 Yes, but it hardens.

54:23 Speaker 2 So I’ve got a lump of cheese in my stomach.

54:25 Speaker 6 Hard cheese requires six hours. That’s not—the thing that hardens from it is no longer cheese; it’s something else.

54:30 Speaker 2 It’s already digested.

54:31 Speaker 5 No.

54:32 Speaker 2 Even steaks I ate are still hard after six hours, but they’re no longer considered meat.

54:36 Speaker 5 According to medical science, I mean, according to—

54:38 Speaker 2 It doesn’t exist.

54:39 Speaker 6 We don’t get this from science.

54:39 Speaker 2 We—

54:40 Speaker 6 We don’t get this from science.

54:41 Speaker 2 Torah and halachah.

54:42 Speaker 5 That’s the Torah on which they’ll base their ruling. How do they know?

54:45 Speaker 2 Of course. What, who taught them at night? Of course.

54:49 Speaker 5 Everything that enters the human body is digested by the body’s heat, by the heat inside a person. I can’t put cheese—

54:56 Speaker 6 You know, sometimes undigested things even come out in the bathroom if someone has a digestive problem, so you don’t know what might come out. I mean, you have to—you understand?

55:05 Speaker 2 For example, I’ll give you an example, my brother, it’s—

55:07 Speaker 6 You can’t rely on that. Maybe I have diarrhea; maybe it hasn’t been digested in his body.

55:10 Speaker 5 Not cheese.

55:11 Speaker 2 That can happen too.

55:13 Speaker 5 I once ate meat and became—

55:14 Speaker 2 Only corn. Corn comes out the way it went in.

55:18 Speaker 6 Meat, actually. You’re more responsible for what comes out.

55:21 Speaker 5 It could be a lump, a different lump from what you ate.

55:25 Speaker 6 All right, come on, let’s bring the focus back.

55:28 Speaker 5 Spoiled now?

55:29 Speaker 6 A problem with... There isn’t much of that here.

55:34 Speaker 5 In the human body.

55:36 Speaker 2 It harms my health.

55:37 Speaker 6 And then digestion doesn’t work properly.

55:38 Speaker 2 Ah.

55:39 Speaker 6 You have something that separates... for meat, when you eat them together.

55:46 Speaker 2 Exactly, it creates something like that. Ah, that’s interesting. The reason—since you’ve already brought it up, and we’re nearing the end—one of the things is: why, really? Someone here mentioned it. What’s your name, sir?

55:58 Speaker 6 Erez.

55:58 Speaker 2 Erez, nice to meet you. So Erez mentioned it. He asks, what’s really the issue with meat and milk? You said “science”—you’ve got the fellow going. So he says that, scientifically, eating meat and milk together harms the stomach, the stomach acids, and so on. There’s another reason stated explicitly. I think the holy Ohr Hachaim writes it: meat warms the body and milk cools the body, and when you eat them together, it can cause a fever, cholera, or a fever. Medicine too.

56:24 Speaker 6 The wisdom of the nations.

56:26 Speaker 2 That too. I think they mentioned this regarding meat and fish as well, since fish also cools the body. By the way, since we’ve mentioned fish, there’s also fish.

56:35 Speaker 6 Salmon.

56:36 Speaker 2 Or let’s talk about fish and milk. We’ve discussed meat and milk—meat from an animal and milk, poultry and milk. But what about fish and milk? Say I have a sandwich with cheese in it, and I want to add pieces of smoked salmon, or smoked tuna, or anything else, even herring. Can I eat it with—or even tuna, canned tuna, I think. Can I eat it with shibuta, or shibuta, or mituta? It doesn’t matter. Are fish and milk together permitted or forbidden?

57:13 Speaker 6 Permitted.

57:14 Speaker 2 What did the Torah say? Meat. “Do not cook a kid.” A kid isn’t—tuna isn’t a kid. What did the Sages say? A kid and anything similar to it, the whole meat category, which includes poultry. Fish are no problem at all. Locusts too. Where are the locusts? Locusts with milk are no problem either. But when it comes to fish and milk, there’s something interesting here. We’re always looking at the certificates, and you’ll see, especially on certificates from Sephardic batei din, that it says: “For those who permit it, following the view of the Rema.” For those who permit fish with dairy. Who are these people who permit it? If I don’t have a license... So what is this issue of fish and milk? After all, the Torah didn’t forbid fish with milk. The thing is, the Shulchan Aruch says that it’s forbidden to eat fish—and forbidden to eat meat with fish. Sorry. Let’s start before that. It says that fish with milk is permitted. Why? Because all the Torah forbade was meat, not fish with milk. Then the Beis Yosef comes along and writes that it’s forbidden too.

58:19 Speaker 6 In the Shulchan Aruch itself.

58:20 Speaker 2 Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah 87:4: fish in milk. Fish in milk is permitted.

58:26 Speaker 6 The Beis Yosef wrote on—

58:27 Speaker 2 The Beis Yosef wrote about it in Orach Chaim, section 173.

58:31 Speaker 6 On the Tur, the holy Tur.

58:32 Speaker 2 On the Tur.

58:32 Speaker 6 That it’s permitted.

58:33 Speaker 2 And he wrote—when he wrote about fish with milk, he wrote that fish with milk is permitted. Then the Beis Yosef came along and said no: fish with meat is forbidden. And then he added something here as well—he wrote this in his commentary on the Tur, in Orach Chayim. I think he wrote it in the Beis Yosef in chapter 87 too. Then the halachic authorities came along and said, wait, there are two versions. Did the Beis Yosef write that it is forbidden to eat fish with meat, or that it is forbidden to eat fish with milk? There was apparently some error in the text there, and they did not know exactly what it was. So many authorities, including the Shach and the Taz, write: No, the version before the Beis Yosef probably said that it is forbidden to eat fish with meat. That was his version: fish with meat is indeed forbidden, but fish with milk is permitted. On the other hand, many say no, the Beis Yosef meant that fish with milk is also forbidden. Because while it is true that the Torah spoke only about meat, fish is not eaten together with dairy either. That is what came out of it—and I am greatly shortening this whole weighty discussion. In the end, the practice among Sephardim, the communities of the East, is not to eat fish with dairy at all. No tuna with cream, no salmon with cream, cream cheese or yellow cheese, and no milk or coffee together with a tuna sandwich.

59:50 Speaker 6 Fish with meat.

59:50 Speaker 2 They do not eat it.

59:51 Speaker 6 I mean, why did they think fish with meat was forbidden?

59:53 Speaker 2 Meat is harmful in terms of tzaraas, right? It is harmful in terms of tzaraas. Right. That is what the Gemara in Horayos says. But with fish and milk, the position in Sephardic halachic practice is that the Beis Yosef meant fish with milk as well. The Ashkenazim, on the other hand, came along—the Shach and the Taz—and said no. The version the Beis Yosef had before him was about fish with meat. That is the prohibition, because it is in the Gemara; nobody made it up. So fish with milk is permitted, and Ashkenazic halachic rulings consistently say that fish with milk is permitted. In other words, you can put tuna and cream cheese together in one sandwich, and enjoy. You can take salmon, put Napoleon cream cheese on it, and eat them together.

1:00:39 Speaker 7 Not in school either.

1:00:42 Speaker 2 I was not talking about yeshivos, but in many hotels you see an area with salted fish, tuna and all sorts of things like that. And for someone who does not want dairy, or is allergic to dairy, and so on, there is that too. As they say, do not mix the two up. If that is your practice, go right ahead—get a license. But people do follow that practice.

1:00:59 Speaker 7 They were lenient about it for those who follow the Rema. Were there Sephardim who were lenient?

1:01:03 Speaker 2 Sephardim who were lenient?

1:01:05 Speaker 7 There are.

1:01:05 Speaker 2 There are? Who?

1:01:06 Speaker 7 No.

1:01:07 Speaker 2 Moshe, if I am not mistaken.

1:01:10 Speaker 7 Yemenites are lenient about it.

1:01:12 Speaker 2 But they tell me it causes a rash, no?

1:01:14 Speaker 7 Yes.

1:01:16 Speaker 2 So what does being lenient mean—does it cause one or not?

1:01:17 Speaker 7 That is what people say. I do not know. It is an allergy.

1:01:20 Speaker 2 No. The Kaf Hachayim is strict. Rabbeinu Bachya too, and the Shulchan Aruch too. They forbid it.

1:01:28 Speaker 7 And there?

1:01:29 Speaker 2 I think Rabbeinu Bachya is strict too. No, I do not have it written here, but I think so. Maybe I have it in the other book. We will look at it later. So they are strict about it as well. The Ashkenazim, by contrast, are lenient, which is why you see Ashkenazim eating fish with dairy freely, as much as they like. The Tzemach Tzedek writes that the custom is to eat fish with smetene—meaning something creamy, something with fat in it. What does that mean? Something with a fat content may be eaten; there is no prohibition against it. But the point is that you can eat fish—salmon, tuna, whatever it may be—with something fatty, something that has a fat content. Now, how much fat? Twenty-one percent, twenty-eight, forty, ninety, three, five? The Tzemach Tzedek of Lubavitch wrote in his book that anything with a fat content qualifies; he did not specify how much. Many learned from this, especially in Chabad writings and among Chabad rabbis, that any fat content qualifies. Even soft cheese with three percent fat can be eaten with salmon; there is no problem. In America, for example, soft cheeses are not especially common. They do not know what those are; they know rich, high-fat cheeses.

1:02:38 Speaker 7 Especially in France.

1:02:39 Speaker 2 There too. The cheeses are twenty-eight percent fat, cream cheese is twenty-eight percent, the creamy cheeses we have today and all those kinds. Processed cheese has a fat content too, but it is still ten, eleven or twelve percent. There it is twenty-eight percent. That is a lot—an enormous amount of fat and cholesterol too. So, as they say, there is certainly no problem with that. Milk has three percent fat, but it is not a food in that sense. It is liquid. Milk with tuna is something we avoid. It is not forbidden; in Chabad we avoid it.

1:03:17 Speaker 7 Avoid what?

1:03:17 Speaker 2 That.

1:03:18 Speaker 7 Fat. Milk, milk.

1:03:20 Speaker 2 Because it is not like a food. After all, what is the idea? Why specifically something with a fat content? What is the purpose? And if I have zero-fat, low-fat cheese, why would that be forbidden? Because it has no fat. Why? What is the logic? This is cheese and that is cheese. Because when there is fat, the fat in the combination of fish and milk, so to speak, breaks the effect of the fish itself—its potency, whatever it contains. Since it breaks that effect, even three, five, nine, twelve, eleven or one percent fat—it does not matter—weakens it. But when there is no fat, or when it is very liquid and its fat content is not perceptible, so that it is not really that kind of food, it does not help; it does not break that effect.

1:04:02 Speaker 7 Is that restriction from the Tzemach Tzedek himself?

1:04:04 Speaker 2 From the Tzemach Tzedek himself. It is not a prohibition; we avoid it. Because ultimately there is no prohibition. Fish with milk is freely permitted. Here he qualified that.

1:04:12 Speaker 7 Is there anyone else who qualified it in terms of fat?

1:04:14 Speaker 2 I think there are other halachic authorities like that, but in Chabad sources, as far as Chabad custom is concerned, it is what the Tzemach Tzedek writes on the subject. Because in Chabad too, we do not exactly go wild with this. It is only with something fatty, as the Tzemach Tzedek wrote. That is how it stands. For example, not just cheese—there is butter too, which is very fatty. That is also permitted in this regard. Now, regarding all the distinctions between fish and... We said that fish with meat poses a danger of tzaraas. That is certain; there is no question about it. So there is an interesting halachah, and with this we are nearly finished. There is a Gemara, which is later brought in the Shulchan Aruch too, about fish placed in a dairy bowl. A person took a fish and cooked it in a meat pot. May he eat that fish with dairy? We will talk next week about all the mixing involving pots and utensils. But as for fish cooked in a meat pot—wait, we said fish with meat is forbidden because of the danger of tzaraas. How can you cook fish in a meat pot? Here an interesting distinction comes in. What is forbidden is actual fish and meat together: a piece of fish with a piece of meat. Say I have a pot of fish, and I lift one piece to take it out of the pot, and it falls into the soup—a whole fish falls into the soup. Sir, that soup is forbidden to eat. What are we going to have today—fish? Meat? It is a whole issue. Here, danger is treated more strictly than a prohibition. This tzaraas is not some mystical matter; you could get tzaraas. It is a kind of illness, not just a mental illness but a physical one too. So danger is treated more strictly than a prohibition. The Sages said: Sir, all of it is forbidden. To such an extent

1:05:59 Speaker 2 that there are even opinions—the Taz cites this in Yoreh Deah 116—that say even if there is sixty times as much food against it, so that you cannot taste it, you still should not eat it. A piece, some cilantro from the fish, fell into the soup pot; it all got mixed into the Yemenite soup, everything seems fine. He says that even if there is sixty times as much, you should not eat it.

1:06:14 Speaker 7 That is also why people separate the utensils.

1:06:15 Speaker 2 Because of the danger too. So some are particular to have a set for fish. I have a ladle for fish and a low sauté pot for fish. Fish, fish, and that is it. Do we have forks for fish? No. We use regular meat forks, for example, and other utensils.

1:06:33 Speaker 7 But I am bringing this up because—

1:06:34 Speaker 2 So why do they say perhaps it is a secondary vessel? Then what makes it lenient? But also...

1:06:37 Speaker 7 Used within the past day.

1:06:38 Speaker 2 Right. So what did they say? Even if we take fish and cook it in a meat pot that was used within the past day, that too is permitted, provided it is clean, of course. Why? Because ultimately—

1:06:49 Speaker 7 To eat it with dairy?

1:06:51 Speaker 2 Eating the fish with dairy is a separate question. I’m talking about this situation: I don’t have a pot for fish, so I take a meat pot and cook fish in it. You may eat that fish. There’s no issue here of fish and meat together. Why? Because the meat flavor absorbed in the pot isn’t actual meat. What you have is an imparted flavor: the meat gave flavor to the pot, and the pot releases that meat flavor into the fish. There’s no actual meat there. This is permitted. The prohibition against fish and meat together does not apply to flavor absorbed in a pot, only to actual fish and meat together. That’s what’s problematic; absorbed flavor is not a problem. But those who are particular do designate a pot just for fish. Ultimately, though, we don’t do that with forks, spoons, and the like—we don’t have separate fish forks, meat forks, pareve forks, and so on.