פירוש על כריתות 5:5

חטאה אחת – and they make a condition one with the other, as it is explained above (Mishnah 4).

Introduction Today’s mishnah is virtually the same as yesterday’s mishnah, except that in today’s mishnah a person is not sure whether he ate permitted unconsecrated fat, or helev, for which one brings a hatat. In other words, yesterday the question was whether one had to bring an asham, today the question is whether one needs to bring a hatat. Since the mishnah is so similar to yesterday’s mishnah, my comments below are quite brief.

ואין שנים מביאין חטאת אחת – but each one of them brings a suspensive guilt offering, because of the piece of [meat containing] forbidden fat, and that is equivalent to the first Tanna/teacher. But this comes to tell us, that the first Tanna is Rabbi Yossi, and the Halakha is according to him.

If there was a piece of forbidden fat and a piece of hullin [permitted fat], and a person ate one of them and does not know which, he is liable to an asham talui. Since he doesn’t know if he sinned, he brings an asham talui.

If he then ate the second piece, he is brings a hatat. Since he knows that he did sin, he brings a hatat, the sacrifice for accidentally eating helev, forbidden fat.

If he ate the one [piece] and another came and ate the other, each of them is liable to an asham talui. Rabbi Shimon says: they together bring one hatat. Rabbi Yose says: two people cannot bring one hatat. According to the first opinion, since we don’t know which of the two ate helev, they both bring an asham talui. This is not any different, at least from the perspective of the individual, from the first case. Rabbi Shimon says that the two people can bring a hatat jointly and stipulate that if the first one ate the helev, that it is his hatat, and if the second one did, it is his hatat. Rabbi Yose says that people cannot jointly bring a hatat.