Today’s daf is riddled with thorny rabbinic arguments trying to determine the status of a priest who loses an immediate relative (parents, siblings, spouses and children) right before Passover. The central question concerns how long the mourner is considered an onen, a liminal status following the loss of an immediate relative. This matters because it affects the ability of the bereaved to partake in the paschal sacrifice.
An onen is exempt from performance of many positive mitzvot, including the mitzvah of the paschal sacrifice. The rabbis therefore are interested in whether or not someone is an onen only on the day their relative dies, or if the status extends to the following day as well. There is also a related question about whether an onen is obligated to bury immediate relatives. In general, priests cannot come into contact with the dead, lest they become ritually impure. But when it comes to burying kin, a priest is not merely permitted to contract impurity in order to fulfill this mitzvah; they are forced even if they don’t want to.
Such was the case in an incident related on today’s daf:
And an incident occurred involving Yosef the priest, where his wife died on Passover eve, and he did not want to become impure, and his brethren the priests voted and rendered him impure against his will.
Yosef did not want to become ritually impure by burying his wife because this would mean that he would miss out on offering the paschal sacrifice. In response, his priestly colleagues banded together and forced him. The reason this anecdote is related here is presumably that, no matter what, Yosef would not be able to eat the paschal sacrifice. As an onen, he is disqualified from partaking even if he hadn’t been ritually impure. The implied conclusion points to the primary concern of our daf regarding how long the period of being an onen lasts and its implications for participation in making offerings in the Temple.
Zooming out, however, the story raises some questions: How is it possible that a person could prioritize the consumption of a sacrifice over the proper burial of a beloved spouse? One way to understand this is that it underscores the extent to which the priests took seriously their obligation to take part in the paschal offering. Another way to read it is as a straw man example — in other words, of course Yosef’s actions make no sense since he couldn’t take part in the sacrifice anyway.
To help us understand what else might be at play here, we can turn to the Maharsha, Rabbi Shmuel Eidels, a renowned 16th-century Polish talmudist, who notes that while normally there might be plenty of people to help take care of a dead body, this might not be the case on the eve of Passover. While we can understand the priests’ concern about failing to offer the paschal sacrifice (the punishment for which was karet, or excision), if we hold up this concern alongside the very real possibility of a priest’s very own deceased kin being left unattended, the stakes shift. Our tradition prioritizes the proper care and timely, dignified burial of our dead as a mitzvah that can never be reciprocated. Unlike for all other people, it is actually a mitzvah from the Torah for a regular priest to become ritually impure to care for his immediate relatives’ burial.
While Zevachim 100 principally focuses on the onen period and its implications for a priest participating in the paschal sacrifice, taken as a whole the daf also reminds us of the liminal space between familial and communal responsibility.
Read all of Zevachim 100 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on December 23, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
