Masechet Bechorot, Perek (chapter) Tet (nine), Mishnah Zayin (seven): here we’ll talk about how the ma’aser (tithe) was separated from animals. The Mishnah says, “How does a person separate ma’aser from the newborn animals?” He gathers them all into a pen. He makes a small opening for them in the pen to make sure that two animals don’t leave at the same time, so they go out one by one. He then counts them as they leave the pen, one by one, with the stick he is holding over them. The Pasuk (verse) specifically tells us that there is a procedure for all of this. It says, “All the tithes of the herds and the flocks. Any of all of them that pass under the staff of the shepherd. The tenth one should be holy to Hashem.” So he counts them with a shevet (staff), with a stick held over them. He says, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.” He marks the tenth animal that comes out of the pen with red paint, which he got by dipping the stick he was holding into red paint. He says, “This one is ma’aser.”
If the owner counts ten and then the next ten, he continues doing that until there are fewer than ten animals left. The remaining animals, fewer than ten, are pushed off to the next goren (threshing floor) of that year and added to the calculation for that next goren, because we need at least ten to give ma’aser.
If he didn’t mark the tenth animal with red paint, or didn’t count them with the stick—he counted them out, but not with an actual stick that he was holding—or if he counted them while they were bent down or standing in the pen instead of counting them as they came out of the pen, we consider them to have been tithed. Every tenth one that he separated or counted off is ma’aser. The fact that he counted and separated the tenth one in a different manner does not separate the ma’aser. We say that the fact that the Pasuk says, “The tenth one should be holy to Hashem,” is enough to tell us that, as long as he had a procedure and was counting them out, that’s enough to consider it ma’aser, even though he deviated from the way that it’s...
The Mishnah teaches that the actual counting of nine animals and then separating the tenth is necessary for the ma’aser to be valid. If he had a hundred animals in his flock and then just took ten of them as ma’aser, without actually counting them out and marking every tenth one as ma’aser, or if he had ten animals and took one of them as ma’aser without counting each one from one to ten, it is not considered to be ma’aser. The animals that he separated are not ma’aser, and the rest of the animals are not considered to have been tithed. The Torah does not say that one tenth of a person’s animals should be holy. Rather, it says every tenth one, which teaches us that you have to actually count them out, the first nine till you get to a tenth one. If you just take a percentage off the top, that would not be okay because you never counted it out.
Rebbe Yosef and Rebbe Yehuda say that this is ma’aser. Rebbe Yosef and Rebbe Yehuda disagree, and he says that even if a person did not count out nine, one is considered to be ma’aser. According to him, counting the animals is not an essential part of the ma’aser procedure. According to him, just as when it comes to ma’aser with produce, approximation or thinking alone about which part of the grain, or which part of the pile, you want to be ma’aser is considered enough. So too, over here with animals, you could approximate. You could also just think alone about what the ma’aser is going to be. Therefore, he learns that counting the first nine animals is not essential to the validity of the ma’aser.
The next part of this Mishnah and the one after it are going to talk about different things that went wrong in the ma’aser procedure and how we play how it plays out. If a person was separating the ma’aser, counting out the animals one by one as they came out of the pen, like we’ve been describing, and one of the animals that had already been counted and left the pen jumped back over the gate and joined the ones still in the pen, and we don’t know which is which, all the animals remaining in the pen are now exempt from ma’aser. We can’t be sure that the next ten to come out of the pen are all going to be from those that are untithed, and therefore all of them are exempted. So the ma’aser of animals requires that the tenth one be definitely ma’aser, not questionably ma’aser. The Torah tells us that the tenth one is going to be holy, so we learn that the definite one that is the tenth is going to be holy, not a possible tenth. Therefore, an animal that could possibly become ma’aser is not ma’aser at all.
In our case, where one of the animals that was already counted jumped back into the pen, we don’t know if the next tenth one is definitely ma’aser. Maybe the tenth one we’re counting now is actually the one that was already tithed, that was already part of the original counting earlier on, and now it jumped back in. Therefore, it cannot become ma’aser because it was already considered to be tithed. Even if it’s not the tenth one, maybe it would be one of the first nine to go, and therefore it’s being counted twice. The one that we actually say is number ten is not going to be the genuine tenth, because it didn’t follow nine untithed animals. Therefore, in this situation, we say that all of them are exempt.
The last case of the Mishnah spoke about where one of the first nine counted animals jumped back into the pen. Now we’ll talk about where the ma’aser animal itself, the tenth one, jumped back in. One of the ma’aser animals jumped back into the pen. We don’t know which one it is. We say all of them—all the ones in the pen—have to be left to graze until they all develop a blemish, and then they’re slaughtered and eaten by the owner with their blemishes. There’s nothing else that could be done with these animals. An animal that is already designated as ma’aser is a korban (offering) and cannot be slaughtered outside the Beit HaMikdash, but it also cannot be slaughtered here in the Beit HaMikdash because the animals we have in the pen may not be the original ma’aser animal. So we’re a little bit stuck in a quandary. What we do is let each animal graze. We allow it to develop a blemish, and that would invalidate it if it was the one that had to be brought as a korban in the Beit HaMikdash. So now, whether or not it was ma’aser, it’s allowed to be slaughtered and eaten in a regular manner, because a blemished ma’aser animal could be slaughtered and eaten as regular meat. Even though it could be one out of a hundred, we don’t want to take a chance. Therefore, the one that’s really ma’aser in there—we let all of them graze. We let them all develop blemishes, and then we’re allowed to eat them naturally, without bringing them as a korban.