rabbi, a chicken and milk question.
the torah says “do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk,” and the shulchan aruch (yoreh deah 87) says chicken with milk is only derabanan and fish is not forbidden at all. why did the rabbanim extend the issur to chicken? if the reason was that people would confuse it with meat, does the gezeira still hold today? and practically, is chicken with milk treated more leniently than beef with milk, like waiting less time after chicken?
bottom line, basically: is chicken with milk a fence that still does its job, or a gezeira whose reason has faded?
Thank you Rabbi, thank you very much.
Chicken with milk is not a Torah prohibition. The Torah prohibition of basar b’chalav applies to the meat of a kosher domestic animal with milk. Chicken was added by Chazal as a rabbinic prohibition, essentially because in the world in which they lived meat and poultry could easily be treated together, and allowing one with milk could create confusion about the other.
Personally, this gezeirah has always bothered me a little because today nobody confuses a chicken with a cow. But once Chazal established the prohibition, that is the Halachah. We do not simply cancel a gezeirah because its original circumstances are less common in our world.
But the waiting period after eating meat is a completely separate subject, and people often mix the two together.
Waiting six hours is not another rabbinic prohibition. The Gemara in Chullin 105a tells us that Mar Ukva would not eat cheese in the same meal after meat, but would wait until the next meal. His father was even stricter and waited until the next day. The Rambam later describes the interval between meals as approximately six hours, and the Shulchan Aruch follows that practice.
So I regard the waiting period as a very old and important minhag, a minhag kadmonim, but we should still call things by their proper names. Chicken with milk is derabbanan. Waiting afterward is a minhag. They are not the same category.
And I think people today sometimes become far too obsessed with the six-hour waiting rule. For many Orthodox Jews it has somehow become one of the most frequently discussed parts of kashrut, even though it is ultimately a minhag about the separation between meals.
That means there is room for flexibility when circumstances require it. And certainly when the food was chicken, where the underlying chicken-with-milk prohibition itself is only rabbinic, I am more comfortable being flexible with the waiting period than I would be after actual meat.
So the bottom line is simple: chicken with milk remains prohibited because Chazal made that gezeirah. The waiting period afterward is a separate ancient minhag, important and worthy of respect, but it should not be turned into something more severe than it actually is.