[Avodah] Fish and milk

[Zev Sero]

Richard Wolpoe wrote:

>    1. what in the context of the Darchei Moshe forces you to say his
>       statement is NOT a reference to scribal or printer error?

The original din in the Tur is that fish that was cooked in milk is
mutar, i.e. that the issur of basar bechalav does not apply to fish.

The BY comments that the Tur here means there's no issur of basar
bechalav, but not that it's actually permitted lemaaseh, because
there's another unrelated issur: that of sakanah.  So in practise
fish and milk is in fact forbidden, but for a completely different
reason, and thus the Tur's point is valid.

The DM comments "nitchalef lo basar bechalav".

Now it is absolutely impossible that the BY originally wrote, or
even meant to write, "fish and meat", because if so what's his point?
The Tur is talking about fish and milk, not fish and meat.  The issur
(mipnei sakana) on fish and meat doesn't in any way contradict the Tur.
The BY must have written "milk", and meant "milk".  No later copyist
introduced this error, if error it is, and nor did the BY's hand slip
and write a different word than his brain was telling it to write.
And the DM cannot mean that.  Rather, the DM means that the BY, when
he wrote this, had actually confused meat and milk, and thought at
that moment that the issur sakana was on fish and milk, rather than
fish and meat.


>  2. There is no mention in any of the Rishonim AFAIK re: davening
>  arbis late for Shavuos?nevertheless  the Taz mentions it. Why
>  can't the BY be adding/manufacturing  a new halacah/humra/minhag?

Indeed, those who defend this BY say exactly that.  That the BY was
referring to a different sakana, besides the one from mixing fish
and meat.  The Pachad Yitzchak cites medical evidence that there is
indeed such a sakana, and says this was what the BY had in mind.

There's a slight difficulty with this, because the BY explicitly
references the siman in OC where he mentions the sakana from mixing
fish and meat.  In that siman there is no mention of milk.  That's
why the DM says what he says.  But one could answer that the BY
didn't mean that the issur is explicitly mentioned in that siman,
but that a *similar* issur is mentioned there, and *just as* one
may not mix fish with meat, as said in that siman, so *also* one
may not mix it with milk.  In modern footnoting convention, one
might say, the BY would have written "cf" or "re'eh" before the
siman number, rather than "km"sh".

One may also say that Occam's razor tends toward the DM's answer,
to ascribe the BY to a mistake rather than invent a new sakana that
we've never heard of elsewhere.

In practise, most Sefardim seem to follow this BY, at least to some
extent, while among Ashkenazim AFAIK only some Chasidim do so.  I
speculate that the Chasidim copied this practise from Sefardim,
along with many other practises.

-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas