Sunday, January 14, 2018

purim torah in jest - "Can't argue with that?" Says who?



There is a famous Jewish adage "על טעם ועל ריח אין להתווכח" - there are no argument when it comes to taste and smell.


However, amazingly, one can find a plethora of disagreements in the Talmud and Halachic works whether reicha lav milsa hi or if ta'am is k'ikar. How do these arguments square with this rule? How do we understand this adage in light of these arguments?







Answer



Certainly, you can have an argument about taste or smell. However, you can't argue about taste and smell. If you hold reicha lav milsa hi it's because you hold that the taste is so significant that the smell amounts to nothing. So you can either argue about taam k'ikar and hold that taste is significant and smell is, as a result, worthless, or you can argue about reicha lav milsa hi and, thereby, hold that taam lav k'ikar. But once you argue about one of them, you can't really argue about the other.


There are, of course, those who will argue with what I've said here.


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