[Avodah] Kitniyot

[Kenneth Miller]

I suggested:
> To be the sort of life form that may not be killed on
> Shabbos, what you really need are *parents*.

R' Zev Sero asked:
> Would it have been chilul Shabbos to kill Adam or Chavah, or
> any of the animals created on the 5th and 6th days (such as
> the "shor par makrin mafris")?

Great question as far as Adam and the animals. But Chava certainly had a biological parent (Adam), at least as much as a transplanted branch does, or a regenerated starfish arm.

I do realize that these ideas of mine are a hijack of the thread, which is really about mitzvos in general and whether they are reality-based or experience-based. But this idea of the lice got stuck in my brain, and I can't shake it. Whenever the point of the lice eggs comes up, our reflex is to contrast the reality as Chazal understood it, with the reality as we understand it. My point is to go deeper into Chazal's reality, and wonder what it is about spontaneously-generated life that makes it inferior even to plants, and unworthy of the protection that Hilchos Shabbos given to biologically-generated life forms. Did this question never come up? Did they merely take it as a given that such life *is* inferior? I hope to look into it over Yom Tov.

Akiva Miller
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