Tumah Entanglement

[rhu]

I'm catching up on Daf Yomi from while I was in New York. On Pesachim 9b, the Talmud presents the following case:

There are two roads between points A and B. One passes over a grave, so anyone taking that road becomes an av tumah (ritually impure and capable of transmitting tumah to certain items); the other road does not. Two people travel from A to B, each taking one of the two roads, but they don't know which one took the tumah road and which one took the tahor (pure) road.

The Talmud's conclusion is that individually, each person is presumed to be tahor, since there is not greater than 50% chance that each one is tamei. But if the two of them should happen to take hold of the same object at the same time, or enter the same building at the same time, the item or building becomes tamei because there is a 100% chance that of the two of them, one is tamei.

And I can't help but think of the double-slit experiment, wavefunction superposition, and quantum entanglement.

As introverte responded when I read the Talmud passage to her, "But is the cat dead?"

Comments

[sethg]

Somewhere, there is a PhD dissertation on "Sofek and the Epistemology of Halakha" begging to be written. (If it's already been written, I want a copy.)

One of my teachers in yeshiva pointed out that if you have three indistinguishable pieces of meat, two kosher and one treyf, and they get scrambled (the cat knocks all three pieces off the table, or whatever), then each piece of meat has a >50% chance of being kosher ... which means you can eat each piece ... which means that you can eat whichever piece was treyf before it got mixed with the others. (Has that piece of meat been transformed from treyf to kosher? Or is it merely treyf meat that you are permitted to eat? This is a deep philosophical question.)

[angwantibo.livejournal.com]

If this happened and you asked your rabbi, would he answer, of course you can cook all three w/o treifing your pots and oven, or would he tell you to throw out the 3 pieces of meat?

[sethg]

This might be one of those things where the rabbi would say "it's mutar, but don't do it."

I wouldn't be surprised if this principle were applied with some industrial kashrut questions. Remember the panic a few years back about the cows that had had one of their stomachs punctured as a veterinary procedure? Even though a punctured stomach automatically renders a cow treifah and therefore makes its milk assur, as long as we know that the majority of the cows in the field have not had that procedure....

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Don't quote my rabbi on this (because I may be misremembering) but in his kashrut class a few years back we were discussing this poinbt and I believe he said: the third piece of meat is 100% kosher now --- the rule about follownig the rov is as much a part of the Torah's conceptualization of kashrut as any of the other rules about heter v'assur and so if the Torah says that that piece of meat is now kosher, that means it's kosher. Period. No longer safek.