Question

A question for the great sage, may he live long: Maimonides wrote (Laws of Leaven and Matzah 1:9): “The Sages forbade eating leaven from the beginning of the sixth hour, etc. Therefore, one leaves terumah and the like of leaven that is sacred in suspense: one neither eats it nor burns it until the sixth hour arrives, and then one burns everything,” end quote. See the Maggid Mishneh, that Maimonides’ source is the Talmud in Pesachim (11b) in the Mishnah. Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik explains that the fifth hour involves only a personal prohibition—namely, the rabbinic prohibition on eating leaven—and one does not burn terumah because of “the safeguarding of My terumot.” Only in the sixth hour, when there is also an object-based prohibition on the leaven itself by rabbinic law, and “the safeguarding of My terumot” no longer applies, must one burn the leaven. This requires clarification in light of what Maimonides wrote there (3:4): “If the fourteenth fell on the Sabbath, one destroys it before the Sabbath. If he had many loaves of terumah, and he must burn them on Friday,” end quote. [His source is the Mishnah in tractate Pesachim (49a), from which it is clear that “the safeguarding of My terumot” does not apply on the eve of Passover, even when there is no personal prohibition on the leaven, since they already burn it on Friday, the thirteenth of Nisan.] Indeed, in the Talmud, Pesachim (13a), and in Tosafot there, it appears that this is a dispute between the two Mishnayot. If so, how does Maimonides rule in accordance with both of these Mishnayot, which seem to contradict one another?