Chullin 112a asks what happens when sharpness encounters absorbed flavor. A radish cut with a meat knife absorbs enough flavor that it may not be eaten with dairy food; a cucumber is treated more leniently. Tosafot extends the question to garlic, leeks and onions. Because they are especially sharp, Tosafot asks whether their sharpness can turn an old absorbed taste into a favorable one: אי חורפא דידהו מחליא לשבח.

The Rebbe cites that phrase only in a footnote. In the 5712 sicha he invokes Isaiah’s warning about those who call darkness light and bitterness sweet. Footnote 77 hears an echo in Tosafot’s word מחליא: language that can sound like illness while describing a taste improved for the better.

The daf is not offered as proof of the sicha’s historical judgment. Tosafot is discussing absorbed flavor, not exile or redemption. The reference is a compact linguistic allusion, and it must remain one.

The Rebbe is addressing the danger of declaring exile already redeemed. He acknowledges that great miracles and partial rescue occurred. His objection is to using them to erase the unfinished state of exile or to weaken expectation of complete redemption.

He writes that miracles brought “some measure of rescue,” but that they were used in a way contrary to truth. He then invokes Isaiah: “They make darkness into light.” On the darkness of exile, he says, people place the name “light of redemption.” The new label can cause the hope for complete redemption to be forgotten.

Footnote 77 adds the second half of Isaiah’s image: “And similarly, ‘bitter into sweet’: regarding ‘illness’—plainly, something undesirable—they say that it is sweetness, from the expression ‘it improves it favorably’ in Tosafot, Chullin 112a; see also Avodah Zarah 39a.”

The distinction is exacting. Rescue may be real while redemption remains incomplete. The error begins when the name of the partial event is expanded until it conceals what is still missing. Darkness is not corrected by calling it light. Bitterness is not healed by changing the label on the cup.

The Rebbe’s footnote sends us back to a subtle question in Tosafot. When a sharp vegetable meets absorbed flavor in a knife, what has actually happened to that flavor? The ordinary rule treats stale absorbed taste as detrimental. Sharpness may change the result. Tosafot asks whether it can make the absorbed taste favorable again.

This is not wordplay inside the halachah. It is a question about a real change in the food. If sharpness has genuinely improved the taste, the legal classification follows the transformed reality.

That gives Isaiah’s warning a precise edge. “Making bitter sweet” can describe two opposite acts. One is transformation: something bitter is actually worked upon until it becomes sweet. The other is relabeling: the bitterness remains, but speech is used to suppress its name. Tosafot investigates the first. The prophet condemns the second.

The larger page works through the same discipline of concrete effects. A radish differs from a cucumber because sharpness changes absorption. Salt beside a dairy dip may present a risk that vinegar does not because the prohibited substance remains discernible in one and disappears in the other. A raw bird that falls into kutach differs from a roasted or spiced one because cracks, cooking and seasoning change how flavor enters.

The page keeps refusing verbal generalities. “Hot,” “salty,” “sharp” and “absorbed” each point to a mechanism whose presence must be established. Call the thing by what it has become, not by what it would be convenient for it to be.

The footnote also resists the opposite error. Refusing false sweetness does not require denying every good taste. The sicha acknowledges miracles and partial rescue. Accuracy is not cynicism. It can say that something good happened without declaring that every bitterness has ended.

Truth needs enough precision to hold mixed states. A flavor can be old yet improved by sharpness. A historical moment can contain rescue yet remain inside exile. The task is not to flatten the mixture into one triumphant or despairing word.

There are forms of darkness we preserve by naming them too gently. A habit becomes “just how I work.” Avoidance becomes “protecting my peace.” Cruelty becomes “honesty.” Exhaustion becomes “commitment.” The new name reduces friction, but it may also prevent change.

We can make the reverse mistake as well. Something has genuinely improved, but we refuse to acknowledge it because the old category feels safer. A person apologizes and changes; we continue to call them by the injury. A difficult practice becomes life-giving; we insist it is only bitter.

The question Chullin 112a offers is concrete: what did the sharpness actually do?

In avodah, sharpness can be the pressure of an honest conversation, the discipline of a boundary, the clarity of learning or the discomfort of being corrected. Such encounters may expose what was absorbed long ago. Sometimes they only make an old taste louder. Sometimes they genuinely transform it.

We should not announce sweetness before tasting the result. Has the pattern changed? Is the hidden cost still being paid? Does the new language make responsibility clearer, or does it help us avoid it?

Hope does not require pretending that darkness is already light. It means refusing to let darkness become final. One may give thanks for a partial rescue and still ask for completion. One may recognize a beginning without calling it the end.

Choose one word you use often about your life: healed, impossible, fine, broken, successful, stuck. Look beneath the word. What has actually changed? What remains? What would genuine transformation require?

Do not call bitterness sweet merely to avoid tasting it. But if patient work has truly changed the flavor, do not remain loyal to bitterness either. The service is to name the world accurately—and then help it become worthy of a better name.