For the source text click/tap here: Chullin 23
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At the end of our daf we are introduced to a new Mishna. It tells us that what is fit in a red heifer is unfit in a heifer whose neck is broken. As well, what is fit in a heifer whose neck is broken is unfit in a red heifer.
The Gemara then juxtaposes the parah adumah and the eglah arufah, detouring into the Yom Kippur lottery, as a sustained meditation on the limits of human agency in the production of atonement. הַגּוֹרָל עוֹשֶׂה חַטָּאת, וְאֵין הַשֵּׁם עוֹשֶׂה חַטָּאת
The Tannaitic source insists that the lottery (goral)—not verbal designation (shem)—constitutes the goat as a sin-offering.
The Amoraic discussion refuses to permit kal va-chomer to extend ritual logic across categories, invoking chok and lexical exclusion to interrupt inferential continuity.
Taken together, these textual moves disclose a theology in which the decisive transformations of sacred status occur outside the psychic economy of the subject.