Making Tea on Shabbos

A cup of tea is one of the more discussed items in a Shabbos kitchen, and the reasons are more interesting than the usual "it might cook".

The vessel levels

Cooking on Shabbos depends on where the heat is. A kli rishon is the vessel the water was heated in. A kli sheini is what you pour into from it. A kli shlishi is the next step again — and each is progressively cooler and treated progressively more leniently.

Some foods are kalei habishul — easily cooked — and are treated strictly even at levels where ordinary foods are not.

Why tea is strict

The ruling given is that one should not place tea bags into hot water even in a kli shlishi.

The reasoning behind the stringency is worth knowing, because it is not what most people assume. The main concern is not really that tea leaves are easily cooked. It is that water in a kli sheini is still hot enough to scald — and there is a stringent view that cooking can occur in a kli sheini at that temperature. In a kli shlishi the water would generally no longer be that hot.

A separate concern is sechitah — squeezing — since many people squeeze the tea bag at the end.

Three ways to prepare in advance

• Tea essence. Before Shabbos, pour a little boiling water over tea bags, let them sit a few minutes, and agitate them so all the leaves are cooked. On Shabbos the essence may be poured into a kli sheini of hot water — even though the essence itself is cold — to make a fresh cup.
• Pre-cooked, dried bags. Cook the bags as above, remove them from the water and let them dry completely. They may then be used in a kli sheini.
• Instant tea — which is simply tea leaves already cooked and dried into a powder, and so the modern version of the second method. Used in a kli sheini.

A dispute worth seeing

There is a genuine disagreement recorded here about how far to go, and it is instructive.

One position holds that a caterer relying on essence or pre-cooked bags may run out mid-Shabbos and be tempted to prepare more — a situation difficult to monitor — and should therefore use instant tea only.

Rav Schachter disagreed, holding that the practice was never that stringent about tea. He also made the analytical point above: since the real basis of the stringency is the scalding temperature of a kli sheini rather than tea being easily cooked, it does not make sense to draw the line between a kli sheini and a kli shlishi in the usual way.

What your household does is a question for your rav — and this is one where the range of accepted practice is genuinely wide.