He'oros In Yoreh Deia:Ta'am K'ikkar and Chanan

I am currently learning Chulin/Yoreh Deiah with my chavrusa. I will try and occasionally post some of our more interesting he'oros.

Ta'am K'ikkar
There is an important klal in Yoreh Deiah called ta'am k'ikkar. Simply put this means that food which is treife can transfer it's "ta'am" or taste into another food and make the second food assur. I simple example would be where a piece of neveila falls onto a piece of kosher meat. The tatse of the neveila gets absorbed into the kosher meat and makes the kosher meat treife. There is a machlokes Rishonim how exactly ta'am k'ikkar works and whether it is assur m'd'oreisa or only m'd'rabbanan. (There are also a couple pieces in R'Chaim on this but ain kan mokom l'ha'arich).

Shittas Rabbeinu Tam

One approach given is that of Rabbeinu Tam (R"T). (R"T is found in the Rosh in Chulin Perek 7). R"T holds that ta'am k'ikkar is m'd'oreisa and that it works thru a concept called "hetter nehepach l'issur", the kosher piece of meat which absorbs the issur turns into a treife piece of meat. For clarification, another way to understand ta'am k'ikkar would be to say that the kosher piece doesn't turn into a treife piece of meat but rather the treife piece has been absorbed by the kosher piece and when you eat the kosher piece you are eating part of the treife piece as well.
A nafka mina could possibly be whether you can ever remove the issur from the kosher piece of meat. If you hold like R"T that "hetter nehepach l'issur", so then we view the entire kosher piece as being a new entity of triefe (cheftzah shel tarfus). Just like I can't turn a piece of neveilah into kosher meat, so too I can't turn this piece of meat into kosher meat. However, if you hold that the kosher piece isn't a cheftzah of tarfus but rather just has tarfus absorbed in it, so maybe I can argue that if I remove the tarfus then the meat becomes kosher again. (This concept is called "efsher l'sochto"-is it possible to remove issur absorbed in kosher and is the subject of it's own discussion).

This leads us into another concept in Yoreh Deia called Chaticha Na'aseh Neveilah.

Stay tuned...