[Avodah] timtum halev

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Eli Turkel wrote:
> Mamzerut is a spiritual disease and life is not always fair.
> Good intentions does not save someone from diseases or punishments

R' Micha Berger related that concept to the legal system:
> does keeping shemittah derabbanan cause the berakhah of having
> enough, or not? If you feel that de'oraisos are dangerous or
> powerful but derabbanans are merely law, then that explains why
> one is safeiq lechumera, but the other not.

> However, let's go back to timtum haleiv... Why would the RBSO and
> then Chazal matir something that is damaging? Where is the sekhar
> va'onesh aspect of things if every mitzvah has power other than
> lefum tza'arah?

This is an important point: Not everything which is mutar is free of
timtum halev.

We *do* accept the concept of necessary evil. Sometimes the ends *do*
justify the means. Sometimes the greater good outweighs the lesser evil.

We all grieve at Esther's violation of arayos with Achashveirosh. But
it had to be done. Ka'asher avad'ti, avad'ti. It had to be done, but
let no one think there wasn't any price to pay for it. Of course there
was a timtum there, but for the greater good, the RBSO indeed mattired it.

And this concept goes down all the way to the lowest levels of our daily
decisions. Should I learn for my own Mitzvas Talmud Torah, or should I
help my kid with his?

Back to the original question, where some real treif got batel in kosher
food, such that the entire result is mutar to eat -- I'd like to suggest
that (at least according to some poskim, and at least in some cases,
but not necessarily all cases) the timtum halev is indeed present in
a diluted form, and the poskim who allow eating it are saying that
discarding the food would cause *more* timtum (via Bal Tashchis) than
eating it would. The tipping point of the scale is that if there had
been enough treif that it would not be batel, that's where there's more
timtum in eating and less in discarding.

As evidence for this, consider the situations where, because the issur
is chashuv (example: a beriyah), Chazal said that it is never batel, even
though by all normal halachos of taaruvos, it should indeed be batel. In
such cases, I suggest, when Chazal said "it's too chashuv to be batel",
what they meant was "it's so chashuv that the timtum of eating it is
even worse than the timtum of discarding it."

Akiva Miller