Bais HaVaad on the Parsha, Parshas Tazria-Metzora

Half and Half

April 17, 2026

Excerpted and adapted from a shiur by  HaRav Yechiel Biberfeld  

On the eighth day, the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.

Vayikra 12:3

Sometimes the father of a newborn boy wishes to perform his son’s milah himself but wants to leave the priah (pulling back of the foreskin) to the mohel. If milah and priah are done by different people, has each fulfilled part of the mitzvah or no mitzvah at all? The same question arises in other contexts, like if one person does bedikas chametz in one half of the house and another—not appointed by the first as his shliach—searches the other half.

The Shulchan Aruch (Y.D. 266:14) rules that on Shabbos, milah and priah must be done by the same mohel, but the Rama allows one mohel do the milah and another the priah. Although the Rama concludes that one should ideally avoid this division of labor on Shabbos, many Acharonim allow it lechat’chilah. (The Mishnah Brurah (331:36) says it was customary in Poland to always have two mohalim perform a bris together, one doing milah and the other priah.) It seems that our question is the subject of the dispute: The Shulchan Aruch holds that if milah and priah are done by different people, neither mohel fulfills a mitzvah, so there is no mitzvah of bris milah here to override Shabbos. But the Rama initially held, as other Acharonim do, that one who performs half of a mitzvah has indeed fulfilled something, so the division is allowed on Shabbos.

R’ Chaim Kaufman (Mishchas Shemen, Mas’ei) offers support for the latter view from the Sforno (Devarim 4:41), who writes that Moshe designated three arei miklat in Eiver HaYardein even though they would not be operational until the arei miklat in Eretz Yisrael were established later by Yehoshua, because this was a valid partial mitzvah.