Question

This question was apparently deleted (probably because it came up many times). I’m bringing it back:

has asked a question "Half a Measure.":
The Mishnah in Yoma writes that only eating and drinking incur karet on Yom Kippur, but not the other afflictions. Some of the medieval authorities write that this is because the other afflictions are rabbinic, but the Yere'im writes that these afflictions too are Torah-level, except that they are a positive commandment. And the Yere'im asks: after all, we see that a king and a bride are permitted to anoint their hands. That works well if the prohibition is rabbinic, but if the prohibition is Torah-level, by what authority do the Sages permit it? He answers that the prohibition applies to anointing the whole body, and what was permitted is anointing only part of it. But in Or Gadol it was asked: after all, the halakhah was decided in accordance with Rabbi Yohanan’s view that half a measure is prohibited by the Torah, so there should still be a Torah prohibition here. And the later authorities answer that anointing the whole body is a different type of pleasure from anointing part of it. I did not understand why the later authorities did not give a simpler answer: the whole idea of a measure given by the Torah is merely the quantity by which one must violate the prohibition in order to be punished, but in our case quantity has no significance at all. The proof is that if one washes his little finger a hundred times, it is obvious that this would still not be more than half a measure, even though quantitatively the washing is equivalent to anointing the whole body. From this we see that washing the whole body is the definition of the prohibition, and discussing anointing part of it as half a measure would be comparable to discussing someone who eats meat alone as violating half a measure of meat cooked with milk. Or perhaps what the later authorities meant is this: the rule is that one who eats forbidden food in an amount less than an olive-bulk is exempt, unless the food was a whole creature, in which case he is flogged even without that, and we see that the idea of a measure is not quantity but a “unit” — meaning that one must perform the prohibited act in a complete unit in order to be punished. Ordinarily, what defines a unit is the quantity of an olive-bulk, except in cases where what is eaten is a whole creature. Now it becomes clear that in our case, the reason one is not flogged when he anoints the same quantity but not on a whole body is that there are several partial units here that did not combine into one unit. And the reason that in anointing what defines a unit is only an entire organism may be because the anointing is on a part within a complete body; and by the same token, one who nibbles a drumstick directly off the chicken itself would be exempt. Or perhaps it is due to the conceptual definitions of anointing as opposed to eating. Can the Rabbi explain the distinction between anointing and eating, and more generally, does the Rabbi think this is correct?