This past Pesach, we had a bright new star in the kitchen -
The Betty Crocker Pizza Maker.
It is the perfect size for hand shmura or machine matza, you dip the matza into water, put it on the hot pan, cover with tomato sauce and cheese and vegetables, close it for a few minutes, and voila! It really produces very good pizza, even without factoring in a Pesach handicap. We made dozens of them, and not a bit was left.
The problem is, how to be tovel this thing. As with all electronics, there are those that are mattir without tevilla for various reasons. There are those that avoid the issue either by being mafkir or by being makneh to a Gentile.
But if you are worried about the issue of tevilas keilim, and you don't want to rely on the mattirim, nor do you want to be mevatel a mitzva deoraysa with a ha'arama, and you're afraid that immersion will cause risk of danger, can you use it with parchment paper interposed between the metal and the food, top and bottom? None of the food will touch the kli. I am told that it works perfectly with parchment paper.
No. Sorry. First of all, I have a mesora from Reb Moshe that what matters is the sheim kli, and using it with paper doesn't change the reality that it is a kli matteches. Besides my mesora, there is the teshuva from Reb Shlomo Zalman.
Minchas Shlomo II Yoreh Deiah 66.
נראה דבלי שדרך תשמישו הוא ע"י שקית שיש בו כמו כד שמחזיקים בו חלב בשקית של ניילון, או אפי' שקיות של נייר אם רגילים להוציא ולהכניס ע"י השקית, נראה דחשיב הפסק אם כך הוא עיקר תשמישו, אבל אם הדרך להשתמש רק ע"י פריסת מפה וכ"ש נייר וניילון, אף שיש דוגמא לספק זה במגילה כ"ו ע"ב דכורסיא תשיב תשמיש דתשמיש בגלל המפה שפרוסה עליה, ולענין מוקצה של בסיס לדבר האסור בנר דולק על השלחן חשיבי תרווייהו כבסיס כמבואר בסי' ש"ט, אפי"ה נראה דנד"ד שאני דחציצת הנייר לאו כלום הוא. ונלענ"ד דטעון טבילה עם ברכה ותמיתני בעניי על הבן איש חי (ש"ב פר' מטות) שכת"ר כתב שמסתפק בכך.
(I personally was tovel them in snow, not because I was chalila going against rov haposkim, but relying in part on the meikilim by such appliances in general, and doing it where the snow originally fell and in a fashion that the chshashos of tevilla in snow did not pertain. Although Rabbi Abadi of Lakewood also holds like this, please do not rely on me. See https://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=54963&st=&pgnum=204
A Tevilla alternative, without the guilt of haarama or snow kulos, is to take the appliance apart and put it back together such that you have a פנים חדשות, a keli that was made by a Jew. Rabbi Moish Pollack told me that such a service is available in Lakewood. I am not an expert in hilchos tumas keilim to know what comprises broken and re-created, so I have never taken that option. Obviously, it would called useless, but I don't know if the ease of fixing the cut wire means it's still the old keli, and whether an external problem makes it "broken." It could still hold food, it's just not useful for its original purpose. But just this morning, Rabbi Dr. Nachum Stone, of Maaleh Adumim, told me that Harav Nachum Rabinowitz said that cutting off the plug and putting it back together definitely is called panim chadashos and there would be no chiyuv tevilla! Wonderful. Bli neder, I'm taking out my wire cutter.)
I find Reb Shlomo Zalman's teshuva a little difficult to understand, but I think that he would say that a candy dish in which you put wrapped candy is not chayav tevilla; it is more like a pitcher for bags of milk than paper on top of a dish.
I'm curious: how exactly did you do the tevilla in snow?
ReplyDeleteI took out my Chazon Ish and stood it up in the back yard, and then I
Delete1. Filled the pan with packed snow, ensuring contact with every bit of the surface
2. I turned it upside down into snow that had not been moved from its place.
By doing so, I avoided the issue of air spaces between the kli and the snow, of she'uvim, and of Kippah. Kippah is the problem that the snow atop the kli would remain where it is if the kli disappeared. In my case, I only put the kli in upside down into the snow up to the end of the metal part of the dish. Reb Moshe says that the inside of the metal is not like a beis hastarim, it just does not need to be in the mikvah. All that needs to be immersed is the metal surface.
If the pan were a flat metal sheet atop a plastic bottom, I would have just put it down flat into the snow up to just past the metal surface. In this case, the pan has a slight lip, but that didn't make any difference. Yes, the snow I packed in might have a din she'uvin, but when I turned it over, the snow on the inside was attached to the rest.
And there was no issue of mem sa'ah. It was deep enough that I called my roofer friend to get the snow shoveled off a flat roof building I take care of to make sure it did not collapse. Other owners were not as smart as me, and there were plenty of collapses in Chicago. So there was mem sa'ah. Probably mem ribo sa'ah.