[Avodah] Starbucks coffee and nosein ta'am

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 11:48:20AM -0400, Zev Sero via Avodah wrote:
:> I'm curious about your use of the word "seems". Is there any evidence
:> that halacha might take the position that taam DOES have physical
:> substance?

: I'm not aware of any, but it's a very strange position and hard for
: a modern person to wrap ones head around.

I agree, but I also agree with Lisa (Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 6:54pm CDT)
about RAM's reason for reaching this conclusion:
: On 9/28/2017 4:20 AM, Akiva Miller via Avodah wrote:
:> I have always understood that taam does NOT have substance, and I got
:> that from the halacha of kashering a keli with hagalah. Hagalah is
:> effective only in removing taam, and the keli must be totally clean
:> beforehand. Now, if taam has substance, and I have cleaned all the
:> substance from the keli, then what remains to kasher? ...

: If taam is something absorbed into the kli, you wouldn't be able to get
: it out by washing.  That's why we use terms like "polet" (expel).  I
: always assumed that there was some sort of barely detectable substance
: absorbed into the kli.  Hence things like glass and stainless steel
: possibly not being mekabel taam, because they aren't porous.

In the past I've promoted a third possibility as part of my general
argument that halakhah's metzi'us is defined experientially, and more
than that -- how we respond viscerally carries more weight than how we
understand an experience intellectually.

This puts the question of ta'am alongside the use of Aristotilian
trajectories in defining hota'ah on Shabbos, ignoring microscopic bugs,
etc... Halakhah would end up closer to classical Natural Philosophy than
to the world revealed to us by Science. Natural Philosophy starts with
common sense. So, its errors in describing the objective world are off
in ways that being them closer to our visceral experience.

My justification is that halakhah's function has more to do with its
impact on middos and deveiqus, and thus on the impact on the performer,
than on the physics of the objects being utilized.

Which allows for a notion of ta'am that has no physical substance
(like Zev) rather than being "some sort of barely detectable substance"
(as per Lisa). And yet, my non-physical ta'am isn't one Zev has in the
past agreed with.

If I were to treat my own theories as though they were certainties, I
wouldn't have asked my earlier question. I asked:
> The one bit of kashrus I don't "get" is how grossly we overestimate
> the size of a taam of something. We require bitul beshishim of the
> volume, because this is the only way to guarantee bitul beshishim of the
> ta'am? Are we saying that a pot that gained so little taam basar so as
> to show the same weight on a food scale may have picked up so much meat
> that we should use the volume of the pot to guarantee bitul?

But if ta'am is about how we experience the pot, or how we should be
experiencing the pot if our yir'as hacheit were up to snuff, then the
whole pot is indeed tainted.

I asked the quesion so as to check that theory (which I was originally
intending to avoid re-re-re-re...-rehashing) against other suggestions.

GCT!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The same boiling water
micha at aishdas.org        that softens the potato, hardens the egg.
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