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Comments on Dishwashers

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     The following is an editor's comment on last week's halakhic shiur by Rav Baruch Gigi on "Kashering Electric Appliances."

 

     Regarding Dishwashers: There are two important points that are not dealt with in the shiur: (when I brought them to Rav Gigi's attention, he agreed.)

 

1. The presence of a filter, which retains solids until manually cleaned.  Even the most meticulous people may regularly forget to bend down, remove the bottom rack and remove and clean this filter between milk and meat.  The result is not just ta'am being mixed but actual milk and meat solids.  The use of detergent to mar the mere TA'AM (taste) is not universally accepted by all poskim.  In our case, be'en, actual food solids are involved; relying on the detergent to mar the entire food solid is problematic.

 

2.  The heating element: In many dishwashers there is a cold rinse cycle, which drains immediately, followed by a hot soap wash cycle.  During this cycle the machine fills with cold water which gets heated by a HEATING ELEMENT situated in the collection basin. Rav Moshe Feinstein zt"l in his responsa on dishwashers dealt with dishwashing machines of 20 years ago.  They had a separate hot water inlet with NO element rendering them to be kli sheini.  The well-known siman 95:3 in the Shulchan Arukh Yoreh De'a and the Rama, which allows washing DIRTY meat dishes and (according to the Rama) AFTERWARDS dirty milk dishes, pertains only to a kli sheini. The presence of the heating element changes the halakhic picture entirely.

 

     This point can be clearly illustrated: A new dishwasher is first used for dirty milk dishes.  The rinse cycle washes most of the particles off, but the filter catches all solids (hard cheese etc.).  The machine refills and starts spraying water while the heating element which is immersed in this mixture of water and cheese particles heats the water to 55-65 degrees Celsius (131-149 degrees Fahrenheit) (45 degrees Celsius, 113 degrees Fahrenheit being yad soledet for bishul).  Assuming (for now) there is not 60 times more water, the catch basin becomes absorbed with ta'am of milk - a milchig kli.  Now, the same machine is used for meat.  We reach a status of cooking pieces of meat in water in a milchig kli.

 

     The halakha here is that this kli is saturated with basar ve-chalav ('nat bar nat' is NOT an issue here).  Any water boiled from now on in this pot is considered non-kosher (chaticha na'aseh neveila).

 

     The machine will now spray the dishes with this non-kosher water.  (It is irui kli rishon - which is nivla kedei klipa).

 

     It is my opinion that, even if a person meticulously cleaned the filter, because of the above-mentioned heating element, the dishwasher would require kashering before every milk-meat switch.  This switch-over is in and of itself problematic according to Ashkenazi minhag.

 

On the Actual Possibility of Kashering:

 

Plastic:  Other than extenuating circumstances, the accepted practice is to regard plastics as non-kasherable.  This is due to Rav Moshe Feinstein's psak that we cannot halakhically assume that hag'ala can kasher materials unknown to "our predecessors."  I know of no posek (other than Rav Moshe's disciples) who agrees to this point.  (Please write to me if you know of any.)  There are MANY who allow it.  Those who allow it are:  Seridei Esh II ch. 106; Chelkat Yaakov ch. 163; Tzitz Eliezer IV ch. 6; Chazon Ovadia Hilkhot Hag'ala paragraph 7; Yesodei Yeshurun VI ch. 171.  There are poskim who do not allow it under normal circumstances due to the concern that a person will be afraid to boil them, lest they melt.  I feel that we must differentiate between the vast array of various plastics.  Some absorb tastes and colors that, from my experience, do NOT come out with boiling.

 

Enamel Coating: is widely accepted to share the category of cheres = porcelain.

 

     Add to the plastic and enamel question the fact that even those poskim who permit their kashering - when seams or cracks are present, like any pot to be kashered, these pieces must be taken away and cleaned.  The immense amount of seams between the various parts of a dishwasher makes proper kashering a job so difficult, frustrating and time-consuming that it borders on the futile - at least for the 7 days of Pesach.

 

     Wishing all our readers a chag kasher AND sameach (two wishes not necessarily mutually exclusive!),

 

                         Mordechai Friedman

                         Halakha Editor

 

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