We continue with the halachot (Jewish laws) of Ikar (winner) and Tafel (loser).
Really, the way to look at Ikar and Tafel is that you have several things on your plate. You have rice and beans. You have to find a winner. There’s one winner and one loser. Who’s the winner? The rice. Who’s the loser? You say, on the rice and you include that.
Now, not every situation is so simple that there’s a winner and a loser. We’re going to see if...
The reason I’m giving this mashal (parable) is very important. Don’t think I’m joking. One of the more complicated pesakim (halachic rulings) in halakha (Jewish law) concerns a very typical case. You go for ice cream, and you’re going to eat it with a cone. What Beracha (blessing) or Berachot (blessings) do you say? You would say two Berachot: one Shehakol (by whose word all things exist) and one Mezonot (foods from the five grains). You have to start with Shehakol, according to you. But you’re wrong.
Like everything, you have to find one winner and one loser. When you go for ice cream, even if you know you’re going to have a cone, do you tell your wife, “Oh, let’s go have a cone. Come on, I’m craving this cone, but the ice cream is coming to make my cone experience fresher”? Or do you say, “No, let’s go have ice cream, and I hope they have a cone”? You know, sometimes they don't have, you have the little thing, but you still go for ice cream. So clearly, the winner here is the ice cream.
The question is, “But if you say Mezonot, Mezonot is never batel (nullified).” We know there’s a sugya (Talmudic discussion) that says anything from the five grains is always going to be the winner. But clearly, you go for ice cream; you don’t go for the cone. Although I must say, there’s a place in Israel—I forget the name—where they make your cone in front of you. They make a fresh cone from scratch. They put it—I don’t remember where it is or what—but you go for the cone. I mean, or you go for the whole thing together because clearly you don’t want to eat, but they make a fresh cone. They fold it and dry it, and then they put the ice cream on it. So maybe you have a little thing. We’ll come back to this place in a minute. We’re not going there, but we’re going to talk about it.
And not that my opinion matters, but it makes a lot of sense. Whoever disagrees, I don’t know how they learned this sugya because the difference sugya, they say, you say Shehakol and you don’t say Mezonot. You don’t say Mezonot on the cone. It’s batel because the winner is the ice cream. What do you do with the other sugya? In two words, the other sugya is when there’s no winner. When there’s no clear winner, then you go by the Mezonot. It’s never batel. But when there’s a winner, there’s no sugya; it doesn’t start.
We talked about porridge, where there are a lot of ingredients together and there’s also barley, let’s say. There’s Mezonot in there. So then you say Mezonot, like with the cholent (slow-cooked stew). You say Mezonot, that’s it. You don’t say any other Beracha, because it’s all together; it’s one thing. But here, when you eat schnitzel, like we said the other day, you’re eating chicken. The winner is the chicken; the breadcrumb is coming to make your chicken experience better. That’s Shehakol. Not even a question.
Here, it’s the same thing. You’re coming to eat the ice cream; the cone is coming to make your ice cream experience better. It’s Shehakol; you don’t say Beracha on the ice cream. Hacham Ovadia goes—he goes chozer bo (retracts his position). He started saying that if, at the end, you have a piece of cone, that last piece of cone is, you know, the best: that little piece of cone with a little bit of ice cream in there. Now, clearly, we’re talking: the rav is the ice cream. You should say Mezonot.
In Yabia Omer, Chelek Zayin (Part Seven), Siman Lamed Bet (Section thirty-two), Lamed Gimel (thirty-three), he’s chozer bo, and he says that even on the last piece, you don’t say any Beracha. The Shehakol of the ice cream at the beginning is poter (exempts) the Mezonot at the bottom. It’s like yesterday, when we said the Beracha of the cone became Shehakol. You can’t say Mezonot on that. It’s poter to the end, when the winner is the ice cream.
If you go to that place in Israel, where the two are together, and you don’t know who the winner is because you really want both, you can’t say, “I’m eating ice cream.” You can’t say, “I’m eating cone.” You say, “I’m eating this.” It’s called ice cream cholent. That’s what you’re eating. It’s a mix of two things. Then you say Mezonot, because there’s no winner. Whenever there’s no winner, then you go to that halakha that the Mezonot goes first. But if there’s a winner, the winner wins. There’s no question here.
The Beracha is Shehakol unless you’re hungry and you say, “Oh, I’m starving. You know what? The cone is big enough that it’s going to calm my hunger.” Now it’s different. Again, you’re going back now to giving some Ikar to the... You want to eat, but there’s nothing kosher in this place. The only thing kosher is this. So you’re going to go to Häagen-Dazs. You eat that thing, and you’re very happy that there is—again, you have both on a similar level. Now the winner is going to be the Mezonot. The winner is always the Mezonot when there’s a safek (when you don't know who the winner is), or when you don’t know who is the winner. If you know there’s a clear winner, the Mezonot is batel to the ice cream. In this case, you say Shehakol, including the last little piece. You don’t say Mezonot on the cone.