Do you have to wait after eating dairy before eating meat? And what changes with hard cheese like parmesan?
The Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh Deah 89:2) says after cheese a person can eat meat right away, just check the hands and clean and rinse the mouth, and for chicken not even that. The Rema adds the custom of not eating even chicken after hard cheese, like waiting after meat before cheese, brings the Zohar, and says it is good to be strict.
1. After regular dairy, milk, soft cheese, ice cream, is there any waiting at all before meat, or is cleaning the mouth really it? Where does the common half hour or hour wait come from?
2. What makes a cheese “hard” for this, and does parmesan count? Nobody seems to wait after parmesan on pasta.
3. Is waiting after hard cheese a flexible minhag like waiting after meat, or stricter because of the Rema and the Zohar?
4. Bottom line: after dairy, what does a person actually have to do before meat or chicken?
Basically, what is the source for waiting after dairy before meat, and where is the hard cheese line?
Thank you Rabbi, thank you very much.
The basic Halachah is actually very simple. Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah 89:2, says:
“אכל גבינה מותר לאכול אחריו בשר מיד”
After eating cheese, you may eat meat immediately. Before actual meat, you check that no cheese remains on your hands, clean the mouth with some food, and rinse it. If you are going to eat chicken, the Shulchan Aruch says you do not even need the קינוח and hand washing. There is no basic waiting period after ordinary milk, yogurt, ice cream, cream cheese, mozzarella, and similar dairy products.
The Rema adds a separate rule for גבינה קשה, genuinely hard cheese, saying that after such cheese one should not eat even chicken as one would after meat. But “hard” does not mean merely that you can pick the cheese up with your fingers. The Shach explains:
“אם היא ישנה ו’ חדשים חשיבה קשה”
If it has aged six months, it is considered hard cheese.
The Aruch HaShulchan says the same thing and gives examples of strong aged cheeses such as Swiss and Holland cheeses, describing them as cheeses with substantial fat whose taste remains for a long time:
“כל שהגבינה היא ששה חדשים מקרי קשה… שוויצער קעז, או האלאנדער קעז… והטעם נמשך הרבה זמן”
So this is basically what my father always said: the discussion is about the fancy, genuinely aged hard cheeses, not ordinary everyday dairy.
Real Parmesan is a good example. If it is genuine aged Parmesan, it normally has been aged well beyond six months, so it fits the classical definition of hard cheese. But the Yad Yehuda adds an important practical point: if the hard cheese has been melted into a cooked food so that it is no longer present as the same hard cheese, he does not retain the hard-cheese waiting requirement. That can be relevant to Parmesan melted into a dish, pizza, and similar foods. (Yad Yehuda, Y.D. 89, Peirush HaKatzar 26.)
So the bottom line is straightforward: after ordinary dairy, there is no waiting period. Clean the mouth and hands before meat; before chicken the Shulchan Aruch is even more lenient. The special waiting discussion is for genuinely aged hard cheese, classically around six months or more. And when that aged cheese has been melted and incorporated into another food, the Yad Yehuda gives additional room to be lenient.
Don’t turn every slice of cheese into “hard cheese.” That is not what the Poskim were talking about.
Hello Rabbi,
Sorry for the question, but nowadays with all the AI tools around I try to be careful. Why are the sources in this answer? Like ([Wikisource][3]), etc. Is just a typo of the tool used to give order to the answer?
Again, sorry, but there is a lot of fake information and hacking of websites, plus the controversy with the Ohel Torah website vs your website.
No need to apologize. Your question is completely fair.
Those references such as “[Wikisource][3]” were drafting artifacts that I mistakenly left in when posting the answer. I removed them. They were not something suspicious on the website.
And since you raised the larger question, let me explain exactly how I use AI.
I use ChatGPT extensively to help me research, type, organize, and edit my answers because my time is very limited. But ChatGPT is not paskening the Halachah for you. I am.
Usually someone sends me a question and I already know what I want to answer. I explain my position to ChatGPT and have it help organize the response and locate sources. Then I read what it produces, correct it, argue with it when necessary, and keep working on it until the answer says what I actually mean.
Believe me, ChatGPT does not simply agree with me. Quite often its initial information reflects the more conventional Yeshivish approach, and it tells me that what I am saying is wrong or unusual. That is actually useful because it keeps me on my toes. Then I have to go back into the sources, demonstrate why I understand the sugya differently, and either correct ChatGPT or, if I discover that I remembered something incorrectly, correct myself.
I see AI very much the way my father viewed the Bar-Ilan Responsa Project when computerized Torah databases first became available. I remember when Bar-Ilan came out and people were nervous that now a computer was going to “pasken Halachah.” My father had exactly the opposite reaction. He was excited and got the system right away because suddenly he could locate teshuvot and sources in seconds that previously could have taken hours of searching through shelves of sefarim.
The computer did not become the posek. It became a much better search tool.
AI can be an extraordinary extension of that idea. If I remember that there may be a Rishon or Acharon somewhere who discusses a particular concept, I can ask ChatGPT to help locate it instead of spending hours turning pages. Then I open the source, learn it, and decide whether it actually says what we thought it said.
There is an enormous benefit to using these tools properly.
There is also an enormous danger if someone stops doing the learning and lets the computer make the decisions. If a person asks AI, “What is the Halachah?” copies whatever comes back, and puts his name underneath it, he is fooling himself and everyone reading it.
That is not what I am doing.
The psak and the conclusions on this site are mine. AI helps me find material, challenge my reasoning, organize my thoughts, and turn what I dictate into cleaner written English.
Think of it as a very sophisticated research assistant and typist.
The Rabbi is still responsible for the answer.