Why a "shehakol" on shesisa?
I having trouble putting all the pieces together here, and hoping someone can help:
The gemarah on 38a tells that a thick shisisa mixture (flour from toasted kernels, then mixed with honey) is mazonos, but a thin mixture is shehakol. Initially, Rav Chisda explains that a thin mixture is made for medicine, and that's why it's shehakol. The gemara than asks from a mishna in shabbos, which says it's ok to mix (and ingest) a shisisa, which *shows* it must be food, not medicine. The gemara concludes: "mah is l'cha l'maymar - gavra l'achila kamichavain, hacha nami gavra l'achila kamichavain". Sounds like the gemara accepts that a thin mixture IS food. Then the gemara says "v'zricha d'rav, ... hacha kayvan d'lichatchila l'refuah kamichavayn...". Does the gemara mean it *is* food, but he intends it to work as medicine? If so,
that shouldn't change the bracha, should it? And why would the bracha be shahakol rather than mazonos? Tosfos (d"h v'ha tnan) says that the bracha is shehakol because it's a drink not a food; but where is that expressed in the gemara?
posted by Anonymous @ 12:54 PM
3 Comments:
This gemara was definitely very hard to understand. The first thing that bothered me about the gemara is that is "tzricha" - the gemara assumes that Rav and Shmuel aren't teaching us anything?!? We need Rav and Shmuel to tell us what the bracha is otherwise how would we know that it's shehakol and not mezonos. I saw that the Tzlach addresses this but I don't have one here to look it up again.
To answer your other questions, I would advise looking in Rav Moshe's tshuva in the first cheilek of Orach Chayim siman 130. It's very long though. Someone overheard me learning this last night and told me to check it out. I started looking through it but wasn't able to finish and am not sure if I completely understood everything he said. It's a pretty long tshuva but it's just to understand pshat in this gemara. I think that if you read through that (and understand it) then you'll have the answer to all your questions. If you do that, please share with the rest of us. Someone else promised me that he'd do the same.
Rashi, too, seems to suggest that shtita is a liquid. His comment D"H she'bochashin is "magisin b'chaf l'arvo yafeh b'meimav" -- one stirs with a spoon to mix the shtut nicely (completely, perhaps better) in its water (or liquid). That the mishnah from Shabbat is dealing with a liquid may be confirmed by the other medicine mentioned -- "zaytom ha'mitzri," which the mishna specifically says is drunk.
Oops. I meant, of course, to say "shtita raca" is a liquid.
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