Q&A: Defining Cooking as Softening — Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath 74b
Defining Cooking as Softening — Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath 74b
Question
In the Talmud it says, according to a large portion of the medieval authorities (Rishonim)—Nachmanides, Ritva, Ran—that one is liable for cooking because it softens the item.
And I don’t understand why the definition goes by way of softening and hardening, and thus by how the item is altered through the heat of the fire.
Why did they latch onto that point? The Biur Halakha at the beginning of section 318 wrote that everything softens, and that’s also how he explained Maimonides, who on the face of it doesn’t define it that way.
Do you have an understanding of this? I’d be glad to hear it, thanks.
Answer
It’s hard to give criteria that determine which characteristics are essential in each prohibited labor, and more generally, why something is essential in any concept at all. That is how the Sages understood it.
Discussion on Answer
I agree that in general it’s also hard to understand, as you explained in the lectures about Platonism. But usually there are explanations, at least at the intuitive level, for what the explanation is here. It could always have been otherwise, and these are foundational assumptions, but it’s understandable that this is how the mind grasps things. And they distinguished between the primary and the secondary according to their understanding.
But here there seems to be room to understand it as repair in the very change itself. And there are things like an egg, and baking, such as a cookie, where it doesn’t soften it, but it changes it and makes it fit for eating.
Just to note that there is a connection between the discovery of fire, which made it possible to soften food, and human evolution, which reduced the jaws and enlarged the brain. If we compare humans to chimpanzees and gorillas, the size and strength of human jaws is much smaller. A chimpanzee’s jaw can break a human arm. A human jaw cannot. The reason for this is the use of fire, which through cooking softens food and thus makes it possible to eat it. Fire, then, is part of human material existence, and the process of cooking really does serve to soften foods.