The Rebbe cites Chullin 117b once, in the unreviewed maamar transcript from Shabbos Parshas Miketz, Shabbos Chanukah, the first day of Rosh Chodesh Teves, תשכ״ט — Tof-Shin-Chof-Tes (1968), printed in Toras Menachem, Volume 55, p. 90, footnote 606. ^{Vol. 55, p. 90 n. 606} The footnote points to the Mishnah, Rashi, and Tosafos on Chullin 117b, as well as Rambam’s laws of food impurity.

The maamar is explaining the Greek demand that the Jewish people write on the horn of an ox that they had no share in the G-d of Israel. The Rebbe reads the horn as the most external point of the ox: the nations receive from the ox-face of the divine chariot only through its horn, an outer residue removed from the creature’s inward life. Chullin 117b supplies the legal texture for that image. Horns and hooves belong to the animal, but their relationship to its essential flesh is more peripheral even than its hide. ^{Mishnah · Chullin 117b}

The citation opens a precise question: how can something be attached to a living whole, bear its name, and yet receive only from its outer edge? The maamar answers that Chanukah was not a struggle over whether Jewish life would continue to have a recognizable form. It was a struggle over whether that form would remain joined to its inward source.

The maamar connects this to the Greek demand: “Write for yourselves on the horn of an ox that you have no share in the G-d of Israel.” The ox is not accidental. In the prophetic vision of the divine chariot, the ox-face is one of the channels from which created powers ultimately derive. But the Rebbe distinguishes between receiving from the inward vitality represented by the ox and receiving only through its horn. The horn belongs to the ox while standing at its furthest exterior.

Then comes the reference to Chullin 117b. The Rebbe says that, in the laws of impurity, the relationship of horns and hooves to the main body of the ox is less even than that of the hide. ^{Vol. 55, pp. 90–91 n. 606} The daf gives halachic form to a spiritual claim: not every part that can be named with the whole participates in the whole in the same way.

The Mishnah lists hide, congealed gravy, sediment, meat residue, bones, sinews, horns, and hooves. These can join with flesh to complete the measure for food impurity, but they do not join to complete the measure for the impurity of an animal carcass. Rashi explains that the relevant hide serves as a protective covering for the flesh. The horn means its softer lower portion, where cutting draws blood; the hoof is also counted because of its protective relationship to the flesh. Tosafos further examines how much of these outer parts remains sufficiently needed by the flesh to join it.

The distinction matters. Horn and hoof are not unrelated foreign objects. Their ability to join the flesh for one law depends on a real connection. Yet that connection does not erase their distance from the animal’s essential flesh. They participate as appendage, covering, or protector—not as the primary substance of the body.

The maamar uses that hierarchy to explain the pressure of Greek culture. Greece did not necessarily need Israel to abandon every visible possession. It was enough to redirect Jewish identity toward the horn: toward the surface that still carries the name of the ox but no longer communicates its inward life. Torah might remain as intellect. Jewish distinctiveness might remain as ancestry. Practices might remain as aesthetics or memory. What had to disappear was the living share in G-dliness.

The victory of Chanukah therefore could not be only the survival of Jewish forms. The oil had to burn. The sanctuary had to become a place of service again. The same vessels and spaces had to be restored to the relationship that gave them their meaning.

Chullin 117b begins a chapter concerned with the boundary of the edible body. Its first Mishnah does not divide the animal into a simple pair of categories—food and non-food. Instead, it presents degrees of participation.

Flesh is the primary food. Around it are substances that emerge from it, cling to it, protect it, support it, or remain after it. Some are plainly not food on their own. Nevertheless, while attached in the relevant way, they can combine with the flesh to form the quantity required for food impurity. The law recognizes not only substance but relationship.

At the same time, the Mishnah refuses to turn relationship into identity. These peripheral materials do not join the flesh for the measure of carcass impurity. What counts together under one legal category may separate under another. Attachment is real without being absolute.

This is especially visible in the horns. The Mishnah cannot mean the hard tip as an independent food. The Gemara and its commentators locate the relevant area toward the living root, where cutting produces blood. “External” therefore does not mean unrelated or useless. The outside protects and gives form. The error is treating it as self-sufficient—as though the horn could explain the life of the ox from which it grows.

The phrase “no share in the G-d of Israel” attacks relationship. A share means that one’s life is not closed within itself. It receives, belongs, and is claimed. The horn-image proposes the opposite: retain the object while severing its inward participation. Keep Jewish wisdom, but detach it from revelation. Keep the lamp, but deny the flame its source.

Chullin 117b shows why that severance can be difficult to detect. The exterior may still join the flesh for a limited purpose. It can remain close enough to borrow status, language, and usefulness. From a distance, continuity appears intact. Only a more demanding question reveals the difference: What kind of belonging is this? Does the relationship reach the essential life, or only the outermost point that still carries its name?

The daf’s legal distinctions become a discipline of attention. They teach us not to confuse contact with identity, association with inward participation, or inherited form with living attachment.

Much of religious life must take form. A commitment becomes a schedule. Love becomes an action. Memory becomes a ritual. Learning becomes words on a page. Without an exterior, inward intention rarely survives for long.

But the exterior can continue after attention has withdrawn from it. A person may say the same words, keep the same calendar, and inhabit the same community while relating to all of it only through habit or self-image. Nothing visible has necessarily been discarded. The connection has migrated toward the horn.

This does not make the practice false. It may still protect something precious. Habit often carries us when feeling is absent. A form can shelter an inward point until we are ready to encounter it again. The daf’s language is helpful precisely because it recognizes degrees of relationship rather than forcing a verdict of alive or dead.

The question is gentler and more exact: What is this action joined to now?

A mitzvah may be joined to gratitude, obedience, longing, community, fear, distraction, or the wish to appear consistent. Usually several are present at once. Avodah does not require pretending that every action arises from perfect inwardness. It asks that we notice when the outer form has become the only relationship we are willing to maintain.

Chanukah offers a response that is small enough to be honest. The answer to an externalized life is not always to demolish the structure. Sometimes it is to place one measure of undefiled oil inside it and kindle it again.

Choose one practice that still matters to you but has become mostly automatic. Do not accuse yourself of hypocrisy. Begin by recognizing what the form has preserved. Perhaps it kept a promise on days when inspiration could not. Perhaps it held a place open.

Then ask what inward relationship the practice was meant to carry. Is there one sentence of intention you can restore before beginning? One moment of attention? One person you can remember? One act that would reconnect the form to its purpose?

The outside is not the enemy of the inside. It is meant to carry, protect, and reveal it.

A horn can show the strength of an animal. It cannot become the source of the animal’s life.