[Avodah] Is Turkey Kosher?

[Zev Sero]

On 22/11/2010 10:51 AM, Micha Berger wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 04:25:06AM -0500, david guttmann wrote:
> : RZS wrote:
> :>  Back to Moshe Rabbeinu.  That is the premise of the whole business of
> :>  requiring a mesorah for birds.
>
> To reply to RZS's point... The Torah lists treif birds. What one would
> need a mesorah for back to MRAH would be which birds are treif. See SA YD
> 82:1 "... ela manah minim temei'im bilvad, ushe'ar minei ha'of mutarim".
> Continuing in the next siman, bediqa is needed because of a lack of
> expertise in knowing what those 24 minim temei'im include.

Which would itself be a mesorah dating back to Moshe.  That comprehensive
mesorah, of being able to recognise all 24 birds *and all their subspecies*
*and varieties*, would have been impossible to transmit, unless one lived
in an area where all of these hundreds or thousands of birds were to be
found.  If emus are tamei, as they surely are, then nobody has had this
mesorah since Dor Hamidbar died out.   The alternative is a negative
mesorah; one of the dor hamidbar taught his son that when Moshe showed us
all the tamei birds, a chicken wasn't one of them.  We may not know
exactly what the duchifas was, but it wasn't a chicken.  And that mesorah
got passed down through the ages.   (The Karaites, who deny that there is
any such thing as a mesorah to Moshe, nevertheless claimed that duchifas
means chicken; how they could know this without a mesorah to Moshe is a
mystery.)


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Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                      - Margaret Thatcher