Chullin 120

Many American laws hinge on apparently arbitrary definitions that carry profound consequences. Pills defined as medicine, for example, cannot be released to market without undergoing FDA regulation at all steps of the manufacturing process. By contrast, pills defined as nutritional supplements are treated as food and do not require FDA testing or oversight. How we define what we put in our bodies really matters.

The Torah, as we know, prohibits eating certain things. Today’s daf asks a definitional question: What do we mean by “eating”? Does it include all consumption, including drinking? Or is it limited to sustenance that requires chewing?

To explore this question, the Talmud brings a number of cases of liquifying solids in order to drink them and coagulating liquids in order to eat them. Let’s look at the least gross example:

If one dissolved bread in water, and swallowed it (on Passover): If it is leavened bread, that person is punished with karet; if it is unleavened bread, then a person does not fulfill his obligation on Passover with it.

This case, like most on today’s daf, is weird: Someone soaked bread in water until it became a liquid mush, and then drank it on Passover. If it was leavened bread, then the rabbis hold that she is liable for eating hametz, even though no chewing was involved. If it was unleavened bread, she is clearly not liable for eating hametz. However, she has not, by means of this smoothie, fulfilled her obligation to eat matzah on Passover. The prohibition against eating hametz precludes drinking it (alas, no beer!), but the obligation to eat matzah requires chewing. 

But why? 

Granted, if it is matzah, a person does not fulfill his obligation on Passover with it, as the Merciful One states: “You shall eat no leavened bread with it; seven days you shall eat unleavened bread with it, even the bread of affliction” (Deuteronomy 16:3), but this is not the bread of affliction. 

The Talmud views the obligation to eat matzah on Passover as connected to matzah being the “bread of affliction.” The anonymous voice of the Talmud reads this descriptor as requiring that the matzah be solid when consumed. Apparently, drinking is not adequately afflicting.

But if the bread is leavened bread, why is he punished with karet? Eating is written with regard to it as well! Reish Lakish said: The verse states: “For all who eat leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel” (Exodus 12:15). “Soul” is written to include one who drinks it.

If drinking matzah does not count for the obligation to eat matzah, then why does drinking hametz count as a violation? Reish Lakish reads Exodus 12:15 as insisting that we are prohibited from even drinking leaven during Passover, because the mitzvah is about both the action (“eating bread”) and also the person consuming hametz — in any form. It’s not just about the technical form of the hametz; it’s about being the kind of person who doesn’t consume hametz in any form.

Definitions matter, but so does the religious experience of observing God’s commandments, which is why, for the rabbis, “eating” does not always mean the same thing.

Read all of Chullin 120 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on August 28, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.