We accepted upon ourselves to learn one halakha (Jewish law) of Borer (taking good from bad) every night in the Hilchot Shabbat (Laws of Shabbat), and we do this in the Refuah Shelemah (complete recovery) of Sarah, Chaya Sarah bat Simcha. So we're learning about Borer: a lot of cases, a lot of complications. These are laws that you have to review over and over again because there are a lot of details and a lot of rules. Tonight we introduce a new facet to Borer, and that is Borer Bekelim (sorting among utensils).
Till now, we talked about Borer in the context of food, taking good from bad and all that stuff. But what about when you have a bunch of clothes that are all mixed up? It happens a lot of times that your clothes are not all set up in the closet, but they're in the laundry bin. And now Shabbat comes, and you want to go into the laundry bin and get your shirt, or you want to get a pair of socks or something like that. But you have to sift it out from all the other socks and all the other clothes that are in there.
So first of all, you have to know there is Borer with clothes, with kelim (vessels). Borer is not only a food item; it's about selecting any items. The simple explanation is that when you're going into the laundry bin or the place where the clothes are, you're only allowed to take what you need right before you need it. One of the rules of Borer we learned is that you're only able to make a selection miyad (right before you need it).
So therefore, let's say you have a guy who likes to take out his clothes the night before because his mother used to do that for him when he was a kid, so he has that minhag (custom). Then he likes to take his pants out, and his shirt, and his sneakers, whatever it is. So therefore, he wants to take out his shirt for the next morning, so he goes into the bin and takes out his pants. He finds his pants and puts them over there. No good: he took the good from the bad, you're right, but he took it for later. He cannot do that. He can do it in the morning before he gets dressed to start taking out his clothes, but he cannot.
Again, the clothes were mixed up. He has to select them when they're not in piles. If they're in piles, of course you can take the pants and put them on your bed. You're not selecting; you're not selecting it for a minute. But here we're talking about when they're all mixed up. Furthermore, with the clothes that he wants to wear, you have to take out what you want to wear and not what you don't want to wear. That's what the guy says. He throws that one out: “No, not that one. No, not that one. No, not that one. That's the one I want to take.” We want you to throw the psolet (waste) out. We learned you can only take good from bad, but you cannot take bad from good. So therefore, there's a science in how you get out of bed.
You have to separate the clothes, but the poskim (halachic authorities), right: You can move things to the side to get to what you have to get to. That's not considered being Borer. Let's say they're all on top of each other, so I need to move some of the other clothes over. As long as you don't remove them, that's not going to be considered a problem of Borer, and therefore it's permissible to do that as well.
Furthermore, let's say you have clothes hanging in the closet, so you have to separate. The halakha writes that when you're trying to find the clothes that you need, you can move one at a time in order to find them, because really they're hanging separately. It's really not, it's really not mixed in that case, so therefore you wouldn't have a problem. You could move them until you find exactly the clothes that you need. Okay, so that would be an issue of Borer when it comes to clothes. Okay, we'll stop there. We'll move on to the other...