[Avodah] experiments in hag'alah

Micha Berger micha at aishdas.org
Fri Jan 4 10:53:37 PST 2013


On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 10:36:47AM -0800, saul newman wrote:
: http://www.shaalvim.co.il/torah/maayan-article.asp?id=672
: 
: reactions to the  kashrut  hag'alah experiments
: http://www.shaalvim.co.il/torah/maayan-article.asp?id=699

This experiment suffers from a common problem with scientific checking
of halachic claims. It presumes a particular mapping from realia to
halachic chalos.

It's not that different than the discussion over brain death. The
question isn't the biology of human beings, but how deciding which
biological states are called chayim and which are considered maves. Or
even if they do map 1:1 to biological states; it could be that two bodies
are medically identical, but because each one has a different history,
one is connected to a soul in the way the other is not.

Similarly, we got used to associating the kashrus of a utensil to
miniscule levels of absorbtion. It doesn't work 100%, eg when you assume
the volume of the keli rather than the negligable volume of the absorbed
food. But nu. And what if we scientifically find this correlation happens
not to exist. Does that lay into question the pesaq, or only our theories
about which physical states are relevant?

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The greatest discovery of all time is that
micha at aishdas.org        a person can change their future
http://www.aishdas.org   by merely changing their attitude.
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