[Avodah] Infestation in figs

[Akiva Miller]

.
R' Elozor Reich asked:

> All halachic sources stress the severity of consuming insects
> found in figs. Many recent works deal with exhausting requirement
> of examination before consumption.
>
> Yet....
>
> Yet we find many talmudical references to large pressed cakes of
> Grogrois, which were sawn apart before consumption. Detailed
> examination of such fig for insects is virtually impossible. Did
> the consumers rely on the pressers to check each fig added to the
> cake?

My presumption is that the ancients knew what to look for, and so they had
a simpler task of discerning a problematic fig from a problem-free fig. It
is "exhausting" for us because we are less familiar with what we are doing,
so we go to extremes to ensure that we've resolved all doubts.

It is comparable to making matzah. Back in the day, they knew what they
were doing, so they could make a loaf up to a tefach thick, and still be
confident that it was chometz-free. They knew how to keep kneading the
dough, so that even with the passage of hours, it would still not become
chometz. They could even mix flour into a pot of boiling water, and it
would cook so fast that it couldn't become chometz.

But we have forgotten the details, and we're woefully out of practice. So
most of us go crazy making the matza as thin as we can, and bake it as fast
as we can. And just to be extra-sure, many go for the well-done matzos,
disdaining the merely baked ones.

So too with the figs, I suspect. If you know what you're doing, you can
take a glance and know whether it has any bugs or not. But if you've lost
the mimetics of how to do that, a surgical inspection is the only way to
know for sure.

Akiva Miller
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20210211/e9dc88fd/attachment-0003.htm>