Menachot 69

Many years ago, I worked on a Holocaust education project that had me gather rabbinic responsa written in the ghettos. In these horrific moments of oppression, I learned, some Jews turned to their rabbis to ask about the minutiae of keeping kosher and observing the holidays. I remember being dismayed, and a little frustrated, as I read and translated these texts: Isn’t it obvious that if you are at risk of starving to death, you can — indeed should — eat whatever is available because of the principle of pikuach nefesh? In a life-or-death situation, this is what they were spending their time doing?

A wise friend and colleague pointed out that these responsa testify to a profound act of resistance. In a world that posed unimaginable danger, some Jews insisted that they continue to live as Jews, committed to the principles of Jewish law and tradition as much as possible. And in Jewish law and tradition, when you don’t know the answer to a question, you ask a rabbinic authority who does. (The rabbis did in fact permit their questioners to eat non-kosher food in this environment.) 

I kept thinking of this episode as I was preparing today’s daf. Menachot 69 offers us a series of legal questions about the status of various objects that have been eaten by an animal and then excreted. If an elephant eats an impure Egyptian wicker basket and then poops it out whole, is it still impure? (Yes.) How about if an elephant eats palm leaves and then excretes them, and someone makes a basket from the leaves — is the basket susceptible to ritual impurity, like a basket, or impervious to ritual purity, like vessels made of dung?

The Talmud turns to a potential parallel to answer this question: 

Resolve it from that which Ulla says in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yehotzadak: An incident where wolves swallowed two young children and excreted them on bank of the Jordan, and the incident came before the sages, and they deemed the flesh ritually pure.

These lines recount a devastating situation: Two children are eaten by a pack of wolves, and their community finding their remains among the wolf droppings. In this terrible moment, the community turns to the rabbis to determine whether the remains of these children should be treated like human remains, which have and spread corpse impurity, or like wolf dung, which doesn’t. 

Is this episode a productive parallel to answer the Talmud’s question about the palm leaves? It’s painful to even read, but I’ll go there:

Flesh is different, as it is soft.

But let us resolve it from the last clause of the account of that incident: The sages ruled that flesh was ritually pure, but they deemed the bones ritually impure. 

Bones are different, as they are harder. 

Ultimately, the Talmud concludes that we can’t extrapolate from the case of human remains to the earlier case of the basket, because palm leaves have a different density from both flesh and bones. In fact, the rabbis never come to an answer about the purity status of this basket. 

But I can’t stop thinking about those two children whose lives were taken in a senseless tragedy. A community is reminded that the world contains great pain and cannot be fully controlled or even understood by human beings. And in this devastating moment, what does the community do? They turn to the rabbis to help them make sense of their world, to affirm their commitment to living a Jewish life rooted in Jewish ritual, to find structure and meaning in the face of chaos. And this, too, is Torah. 

The largest surviving collection of Holocaust responsa can be found in Rav Ephraim Oshry’s Responsa from the Holocaust.

See you tomorrow!

Read all of Menachot 69 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on March 21, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.