Water and bugs

Question

Your opinion on this article would be appreciated. On The Prohibition Of Water:An Appeal to Poskim Posted 10/20/2004 By DAVID BERGER A halachic ruling prohibiting New York City water was recently formulated by Rav Dovid Feinstein shlita and signed by Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv shlita and Rav Pinchas Sheinberg shlita. It affirms that once copepods can be seen as moving entities in the city`s reservoirs, they remain prohibited even when they are not discernible in tap water. Since water is so basic a substance, it is hardly necessary to point out the seriousness of this ruling. Even in an urban setting, it is easy to envision realistic scenarios involving jeopardy to the health of especially vulnerable observant Jews, not to speak of lesser but nonetheless deeply troubling consequences. There are rabbinic decisors of stature who disagree with this stringent stance, relying on an attested and respected opinion recorded by earlier authorities that the water is permissible if the organisms in question are not discernible. (This is apart from the ruling by at least one distinguished rabbi that the copepods are permissible because of the halachic status of reservoirs.) I make no pretenses to any standing in a debate among poskim on such a question, but I believe it is important to underscore certain considerations with the hope they will help encourage the latter authorities — while maintaining the highest reverence for the great rabbis who hold a stringent view — to keep the halachic discourse on this matter alive. There is strong reason to believe that the presence of these crustaceans in the city water supply is not a new phenomenon — and that the almost universal, instinctive reaction that water imbibed over the years by a host of tzaddikim and talmidei chachamim must be permissible does not deserve to be dismissed as irrelevant. Under analysis, this instinct has two separate though related dimensions. The first, less rigorous one, is a reflection of the celebrated Talmudic assertion that God does not cause a stumbling block through the agency of the righteous. Though this is arguably an aggadic comment that cannot in itself drive a halachic decision, the Talmud applies it in legal contexts, and Tosafot (Hullin 5b s.v. tzaddikim), after subjecting it to questioning, concludes that it applies specifically to the consumption of forbidden food, which would be especially unbecoming for a tzaddik. The second point emerging from the fact that this water was consumed by generations of distinguished rabbis carries greater — perhaps even compelling — weight. There is a well-known principle that the Torah was not given to the ministering angels (lo nittenah Torah le-mal`akhei ha-sharet). The recent psak alludes to permissive rulings issued in the past regarding truly microscopic organisms on the grounds that it is impossible to avoid them (I efshar lehizzaher). Strictly speaking, this is only partially true. One can filter very many microscopic entities, so that if the criterion were simply what can or cannot be avoided, the argument could be made that those permissive rulings should be limited to organisms that cannot be removed by any feasible method of filtration. Why, then, do we react to such a proposal with the unequivocal rejection that it deserves? The real point, I think, is that from the time of mattan Torah until the invention of the microscope it was impossible to know that these organisms existed, and the notion that God would have forbidden something that no one could know about for thousands of years, thus causing wholesale, unavoidable violation of the Torah, offends our deepest instincts about the character of the both the Law and its Author. The situation here is not identical, but it is very close. The proposition before us is that the Torah prohibits drinking a glass of perfectly clear water in which no one has ever observed a forbidden substance. Even if, as some have reported, a trained observer can sometimes see a copepod in a glass of water, it is hard to imagine that such a phenomenon, which virtually no one noticed for generations, constitutes a reasonably common minority of cases (a mi`ut ha`matzuy). Moreover, copepods are present in many lakes throughout the world and surely have been for centuries. It may well be that the percentage of these creatures in New York City tap water is higher than the percentage in a bucket of water drawn from the upper level of a lake. While such a distinction can have halachic consequences, it does not change the fact that innumerable glasses of water containing copepods have been consumed by pious and learned Jews through the ages. The paucity of halachic literature on this issue underscores the obvious: in almost all cases, these Jews drank the water in question without noticing anything amiss. To return, then, to New York City, we are being told that the Torah forbids what Rav Aharon Kotler, Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, Rav Avraham Pam, Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky, and a galaxy of chassidic rebbes from Satmar to Bobov to Lubavitch to Skver, drank without the slightest hesitation as a result of their failure to investigate the content of this perfectly clear glass of water. Shall we describe them as anusim, i.e., people with no meaningful recourse to information about these entities, which are nonetheless biblically forbidden? Or shall we describe them as shogegim, i.e., inadvertent sinners who should have been more diligent in investigating the content of the water that they regularly drank? It is difficult to contemplate either of these alternatives without a sense of the most profound unease. ◙ (Rabbi) David Berger is Broeklundian Professor of History, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © Copyright 2001, The Jewish Press Inc. (ISSN 0021-6674)