You know how they say some mitzvos are very hard to do, I’m not talking about hard in terms of conquering our yetzer harah’s that don’t allow us to do such mitzvos. I’m talking about mitzvos like shiluach hakan – sending the mother bird away – how often can we even have such a chance? Or others like dying rather than being forced to have sex with our parents, that’s also hard to do. The point of this all is that I’ve been trying desperately to find a way to do a certain averah and I just can’t seem to figure it out. Ever min hachai, eating the limbs from a live animal is just too hard – even for those heretical off the derech folks I talk about on this blog quite often.
One would think that Lobster is ever min hachai, but it’s not, because once it’s boiled it dies and so you eat the dead lobster and not a writhing one. Normal people won’t touch live worms or insects and besides people who do eat insects while they are still alive usually pop them in their mouths like popcorn and that nullifies the sin of eating a “limb” from a live animal because you ate all the limbs.
What about approaching a live horse, cow or chicken and just tearing the limb off? Well, this poses multiple issues, the chicken will most likely die and the cows and horses are too bug to just tear a limb off. If you “cut” the limb off, do you still get the aveirah? We are trying to fulfill the aveirah here and it’s proving to be quite tough. What if you tear the limb off, but cook it instead of just eating it raw?
This is just the tip of the iceberg, if only the shulchan aruch had a guide to sinning, then we could avoid sin by not following the guide properly.
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