Author Topic: nat bar nat  (Read 3678 times)

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Offline rabbicummings

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nat bar nat
« on: January 29, 2014, 08:39:35 PM »
You cook a piece of meat in a meat cooking device. Then afterwards you remove the meat from the pot and wash it out until it is sparkling clean, and then you cook in the same pot a neutral food, let's say string beans for example, in this "meaty pot," this pot that was used just before for meat but is now clean. I ask -- Does the "neutral" food remain neutral? May the beans be eaten with milk?
This resulting food, the string beans, is called in the codes a "nat bar nat." Nat is an abbreviation for the words, in the expression of the Talmud, "that which gives (or transfers) taste." Bar means in the same language "the son of," therefore nat bar nat becomes "that which transfers taste which is the offspring of that which transfers taste." I explain: The meat didn't transfer its taste directly into the beans as if they would be in the scenario if they were cooked one with the other all together. Rather, the taste of the meat was absorbed into the walls of the pot, and then afterwards, in a second cooking, transferred the taste into the beans. This second level taste is obviously weaker. How does the the Jewish Bible and the Jewish codes relate to that weaker taste?
Rabbi Franklin Cummings (Elkana Ben Avraham)