Chullin 103-109: How Long to Wait Between Meat and Milk

by R. Gidon Rothstein

How long to wait between meat and milk has been discussed many times, such as in an article by my friend R. Dr. Ari Zivotofsky. Casual discussants speak mostly of wishing they were Dutch, and allowed to wait only one hour. Perhaps it’s overkill to bring it up again, but it does arise in this coming week’s Daf, and seems worth a quick review.

Cleaning Out the Mouth and Hands

A Mishnah on Chullin 104b presents a dispute between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel about how separate we must keep bird meat from dairy products, leading to a discussion of eating one after the other. In a baraita and follow up on 105a, Beit Shammai seems to say it is good enough to wipe out one’s mouth—R. Zeira says by eating a food that remains solid in the mouth, doesn’t get stuck in the teeth or gums—where Beit Hillel allow just washing.

The continuation of the passage shows these were requirements for how to transition from eating cheese to meat. Rambam, Laws of Forbidden Foods 9;26 requires washing one’s hands (he seems to have understood Beit Hillel’s idea as being about the hands, reasonable given the Gemara’s discussion of this being a need at night, when the hands aren’t readily visible), and wiping out the mouth with bread, fruit, or anything else that to which oral residue will stick and be removed.

Hagahot Maimoniyot notes that Rashi and others thought one had to also wash out one’s mouth (they took Beit Hillel to be another way to clean the mouth, not about the hands at all).

Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah 89;2, follows Rambam, during the day, checking one’s hands carefully is enough, at night the person must wash them, and then also chew some other food carefully, for it to pick up remnant pieces of cheese on the teeth or gums.

To eat bird meat [which has to be separated from milk as a din de-rabbanan, a rabbinic rule, and they did not institute this care], nothing is needed, rules Shulchan Aruch. Rema knows of those who are stringent in this latter case as well, and the custom certainly goes that way for hard cheese. He does not dismiss those who rule leniently, recommends not protesting their view, but advocates following the strict view.

Variants and Their Efficacy

Aruch HaShulchan, paragraph nine, adds the possibility of washing and wiping one’s mouth at the same time, such as by soaking bread in water and then chewing it. At the same time, he cites the Zohar, which said not to have meat and milk at the same meal, to always have an after-blessing between the two, even to wait an hour after dairy products before eating meat products.

Hard cheese, aged for six months or more, stays in one’s mouth for a long time, leading later authorities to hold it to be correct to wait the same six hours as after meat (as we’ll see). Many are not careful about this, he adds, I think a way of accepting this relaxed view (especially since even the stringent Zohar only spoke of an hour), despite our generally preferring care.

Last explicit point in Aruch HaShulchan, actual cheese in one’s teeth must of course be removed before eating meat. In his view, the verse “the meat was still between their teeth,” about the slav, teaches us food remains food as long as it is in one’s teeth. To eat meat with cheese in one’s teeth is like eating them together.

Meat Lasts

R. Chisda taught us the rule, in response to a question by R. Acha bar Yosef, about meat left in one’s teeth. The verse is Bamidbar 11;33, when the Jews demanded meat, the Torah speaks of the consequences hitting them while “the meat was still between their teeth,” showing that meat, too, counts as meat.

We do not yet know how long we would have to wait after meat. Mar Ukva gives the answer by decrying his laxity compared to his father, calls himself vinegar the son of wine. His father would wait twenty-four hours after eating meat, where he waits only from one meal to the next.

There are two ways to understand the key phrase, as Tosafot pointed out. He might have meant the usual pattern of eating, in their days a mid-morning meal and a late afternoon one, around six hours apart. Before we discuss those who do take it that way, let’s remember Tosafot here fully accepted the idea of formally ending one meal (clearing the table and reciting the after-blessing), because of the general principle lo pelug rabbanan, when Chazal made rules, they made them in blanket form. If the rule here is one meal to the next, it’s whenever one meal ends and another starts.

Around Six Hours

Rambam, Laws of Forbidden Foods 9;28, speaks of one meal to the next, except is sure that’s a way of saying around six hours. His further explanation slightly blurs the issue, because he attributes it to the possibility of leftover meat stuck between the teeth, inaccessible through kinuach, chewing bread. Kessef Mishneh reminds us Tur understood this view to think we can ignore actual meat between one’s teeth after six hours, since that’s the standard Rambam gave. Aruch HaShulchan 89;4 was sure Rambam would allow eating dairy if the person carefully cleaned one’s teeth, such as with dental floss.

Aruch HaShulchan also counts the six hours from the end of one meal to the beginning of the next, even if the meat wasn’t eaten at the end, or the dairy won’t be right at the beginning, because Mar Ukva spoke of meal to meal.

Keeping the Rule Even If The Reason Is Shaky

Rambam (and Rashba, Kessef Mishneh tells us) included fowl in this, presumably because Chazal’s rule not to cook fowl with milk meant to treat bird meat as if it is full-fledged meat for the purposes of these rules.

Rambam’s reason seems particle-based, but Kessef Mishneh knew of others who thought it taste-based, meat lingers (Aruch HaShulchan says it emits new taste periodically). Were someone to have only chewed meat (such as to help a young child eat it), there might be less need to wait. Nonetheless, the proper practice, he held, is to adopt both stringencies, to worry about particles even after six hours, and to wait for six hours even if there are no particles, as we see in Yoreh De’ah 89;1.

The Ashkenazic Practice

Rema reports the general custom in his time (the general Askenazic custom) was to wait one hour, with an after-blessing either before or after the wait, check one’s teeth, then eat dairy.

(A childhood memory. Rema says some opposed reciting the after-blessing in order to eat dairy, but people aren’t careful about that. Growing up, my father, a”h, objected to my eating anything too soon after Birkat Ha-Mazon, since we had just thanked God for giving us enough food to be full.)

The reason we don’t see Rema’s standard accepted today, I think, is that Rema himself speaks of medakdekin, careful ones, who wait six, and agrees it is the proper practice. His saying this made it so, everyone adopted his view, and it became the proper conduct.

Maintaining the Old Ways

Which seems to have come under some attack in Aruch HaShulchan’s time, since, in 89;7, when he recommends Rema’s idea, he adds “and chalilah to change this, and about such situations did Chazal apply Kohelet 10;8, one who breaches a fence should be bitten by a snake.” Breach of Jewish practice, especially one built on a relatively weak foundation—rabbinic legislation, common custom—threatens the system, and calls for a strong response.

Still, its’ being only one version of the law yields leniencies, AH notes. Someone in ill health, whom doctors have advised to drink milk regularly and frequently, can rely on the opinion Rema accepted as basic halachah, wait only an hour, wash out his/her mouth (and floss teeth, I think he would mean) then drink the milk, even if there is no threat to life. Ditto for children who need more milk to boost their growth (I had a relative once whose father insisted s/he have 3 glasses of milk a day for a while).

That’s the importance of rejected or avoided opinions: halachic pressure lets us follow those opinions, where need.

When It Wasn’t Really Meat

In se’if three, SA allows eating a tavshil of dairy, a dish cooked with dairy, but with no actual cheese or milk currently present, immediately after a tavshil of meat. SA doesn’t even require washing hands, but Rema does. To eat actual dairy after a meat dish (where there was no meat present; think of a soup strained so it is only the broth, I think), or actual meat after a dairy dish where no physical dairy is present, even SA obligates washing one’s hands.

Rema treats the fat of meat like the meat itself, says our practice is not to eat cheese immediately after such a tavshil, to treat even the cooked item as if it were the meat itself, and invokes poretz geder, the curse of boundary breakers we saw earlier.

What we call dairy or meat equipment are foods with no meat or dairy in them, cooked in a pot or pan in which we previously cooked dairy or meat. With such foods—such as, famously, Oreo cookies–we allow eating the other kind of food immediately after, with no custom to be stringent, other than to wash one’s hands.

Aruch HaShulchan adds to this leniency. The dairy or meat pot could even be ben yomo, have had the meat or dairy cooked in it that day (when we halachically think of the ta’am, the taste, as more alive than after one day), could even have meat dirt on the sides of the pot, without what was cooked in it having sixty times that to nullify it, and yet be allowed to eat meat or dairy after. If it doesn’t have actual meat or dairy in it, it’s not a meat or dairy dish in terms of waiting.

A small subset of the rules of meat and milk, when we have to separate the eating of them from each other, why, and how far it extends.