Q&A: Immersion of Utensils Manufactured by a Company Overseas
Immersion of Utensils Manufactured by a Company Overseas
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Is it necessary to immerse with a blessing utensils that were manufactured by a company overseas? On the one hand, one could say that whatever separates from the majority is presumed to come from the majority. On the other hand, nowadays companies are generally traded on stock exchanges, and it is common for there to be at least one shareholder who is Jewish in any given company. If so, seemingly we have a partnership between a Jew and a non-Jew here. The question is whether it makes sense to say here that the majority counts as the whole with respect to ownership of the company (that a majority of non-Jews amounts to full non-Jewish ownership). This also has practical implications regarding taking a loan from a bank overseas.
Answer
This is a question to which I do not have a clear answer, but based on reasoning it seems that there is no need to immerse them.
In the current conception, a company is an independent entity and not a partnership (a corporation), and certainly not a partnership among the shareholders, and all the more so not among those who are not controlling shareholders. Therefore, from the outset, I have serious doubt whether the law of immersion of utensils applies to it at all (such an entity is neither non-Jewish nor Jewish). Therefore as well, the majority and minority of Jewish or non-Jewish shareholders, and the majority or minority of companies, are not relevant.
Of course, there is also no concern here regarding absorption of prohibited food from non-Jews, since this is a new utensil (unless in the manufacturing process there is concern that they used non-kosher fat or the like).
I would not recite a blessing over this immersion.
Discussion on Answer
Now the question comes up: what would the law be regarding a craftsman that is a machine/robot? Maybe the one who pressed the button would be considered the craftsman (like preparing machine-made matzah for the sake of the commandment), or perhaps the one who created the machine itself would be considered the craftsman (in the end, the root has to be manual, even though there are many stages of a machine making a machine until you get to the person behind them). Or perhaps the company itself would be considered the craftsman, and that seems to me how most of the world relates to products nowadays. Craftsmanship is an act of skilled design composed of many processes and stages, where the casting is usually the last and least complex stage (something like the final hammer blow—the completion of the work). Before that, someone had to think and plan the design, the materials that would make up the utensil, the optimal weight of the utensil, recruit the appropriate workers for the process, pay them salaries, etc. Whoever is responsible for this “craftsmanship” is the company as a whole (engineers, designers, managers, office staff, etc.). The company is a kind of abstract entity with legal rights (like a state). To relate only to the worker who physically makes the utensil seems to me like cutting off the finger of a person who murdered his fellow by using his finger on the trigger of the gun.
At first I wrote: the one who made the utensil is the factory.
Afterward I saw that Oren had already beaten me to it. Nicely said.
Seemingly, it does not depend on who the owners are, but on who the craftsman was who actually made the utensil, and he was presumably the non-Jew. I seem to recall that there is a lengthy discussion among the halakhic decisors about this, regarding silver owned by a Jew that a non-Jew melts down and makes into a utensil from it—if I remember correctly, a dispute between the Ritzba and Tosafot, and likewise the Taz and the Shakh.