For the source text click/tap here: Chullin 34
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As we learned on yesterday’s daf, the Mishna teaches that ritual slaughter is valid even if there is no blood that flows from the animal at the time of slaughter. The Mishna continued with another law regarding ritual defilement:
If a man slaughtered cattle or a wild beast or a bird and no blood came forth, the slaughtering is valid and it may be eaten by him whose hands have not been washed, for it has not been rendered susceptible to uncleanness by blood. Rabbi Simon says, it has been rendered susceptible to uncleanness by the slaughtering.
The issue at hand is the law that limits ritual defilement of food only to that which has become wet by means of one of seven liquids – wine, blood, oil, milk, dew, honey or water (see Vayikra 11:38) – which “prepares” the item for possible defilement.
Our daf describes the debate between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua concerning the status of a person who eats food that has itself contracted defilement. At the heart of that dispute lies a counterintuitive question — how, and to what degree, contamination passes from an eaten substance into the body of the one who eats it, and whether the impurity of food behaves as a quantity that can be transmitted, attenuated, and exhausted.
We attempt to reconstructs the conceptual architecture of the rabbinic system of tumah as it is articulated on our daf, with particular attention to the category of the shelishi, the third-degree derivative, which marks the threshold at which ordinary food can no longer carry defilement forward and yet sanctified food still can.