| Sivan 2, 5772 · May 23, 2012 Egg Numbers
"Why are all these eggs on the table?" David asked, as he walked in breathless from school one day. "Because I'm baking a cake," his sister Sara answered. "Look," David said to his brother as he grabbed an egg. "Do you know how to check to see whether an egg is hard boiled or not?" "Well you could crack it," Ben said thinking very practically. "Do you see?" David said as he spun the egg like a dreidel. "You see it can't really spin. It's wobbling, which means that it's not boiled. If it was a hardboiled egg, it would spin quickly and smoothly." "Did you know," Ben said, "that if this would be a non kosher egg, like an owl's egg, and it would fall into a pot of food, then the whole pot-full of food would become non-kosher?" "Really?" David said, furrowing his brow in thought. "But I thought that if you had kosher food which was sixty times the amount of non-kosher, then the little bit of non-kosher food is neutralized and the whole thing is kosher. So if an owl's egg fell into a pot of food, very likely the pot would have sixty times as much as the egg, and then it should all be kosher!" "Very good," Ben said smiling. "You will make a good mathematician and a good rabbi. But the thing is that an egg is considered a special food and therefore the neutralization rule does not apply". "Why is that?" asked Sara. "You see," Ben said "Jewish law says that anything that is counted is considered special. For example, eggs are sold by the number, like a dozen eggs or half a dozen, therefore an egg is considered special and cannot be neutralized by the rule of sixty." "Hmm," David said with a grin. "I haven't got any owl's eggs, but I guess we should be really careful with the ostrich egg we have at the lab at school and make sure it doesn't get into the kitchen, else we might all be eating non-kosher food!" "Yes," Sara said. "And another thing is, we see how special the Jewish people are because of the amount of times they get counted in the Torah. Something that is counted is important." "That's true," Ben said. "We learn about the counting of the Jews in this week's Torah reading." "And if we are so special," Sara added, "we had better make sure we live up to being special, in all kinds of ways, including you two boys not breaking any of the eggs that are supposed to go in this cake!"
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