Kashrut Then and Now

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, April 14, 2007

It was a week before Passover and Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev was inspecting the matzah factory in his town. I imagine that the owner of the factory and perhaps some of the leaders of the community were standing by, anxiously. Would he find anything amiss? Rabbi Levi Yizhak walked through the factory, looking here and there, occasionally chatting with one of the young woman who was kneading the dough. At the end of his inspection, he announced to the community, the matzah from this factory is not kosher.

The owner of the factory was shocked as were the leaders of the community. Had the rabbi found chametz, found leavened bread in the factory? Were the young women not working fast enough? Were they allowing the matzah to rise before baking it? Martin Buber in his book Tales of the Hasidim provides the rabbi’s explanation: The women in this factory work from early morning until late at night. They are laboring too long and too hard. They are not being paid fairly for their labors. And I quote: “Those who hate Israel accuse us of baking the unleavened bread with the blood of Christians. But, no we bake it with the blood of Jews. This matzah is treif . It is not kosher because it was produced through oshek, oppression of the workers and exploitation.”

In her Torah introduction this morning Evan talked about the laws of kashrut and about how, even to this day, the reasons for these laws remain something of a mystery.

The laws of kashrut are complex and developed over many centuries. Some scholars believe that they originated in the desire to create a separation between life and death. That is their understanding of the Bible’s prohibition of cooking a calf in its mother’s milk. This also relates to another of the earliest prohibitions, the prohibition on eating neveilot vetraifot, meat from carcasses that were already dead or had been torn apart by wild beasts- doesn’t that sound appetizing. Already in the story of Noah and in the seven mitzvoth for all humanity, we are commanded not to eat, ever min hachai, a limb from a living animal. Though it seems beyond our comprehension that anyone would want to do this, I was given to understand from the film “Fast Food Nation”, that today some food manufacturers being in such a hurry, do tear meat from animals before they are fully dead, something that violates the laws of kashrut, these more universal laws of Noah, and for many of us, our own sense of respect for animals and their pain.

As we heard this morning, the book of Leviticus provides long lists of forbidden and permitted animals. The best known of these is the pig. Interestingly on my recent sabbatical I learned about some archeological discoveries that may shed light on this prohibition. We think of the restriction on eating pork as something that separated Jews from the people’s around them and thereby reinforced Israelite distinctiveness. That was certainly true in Greek and Roman times and remained true when Jews lived in Christian Europe. However archeologists have found that the other peoples among whom the Israelites lived in most ancient times, the Ammonites and the Moabites, even the cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt did not eat pork. Who were the pork eaters then from whom this prohibition provided distinctiveness? They were none other than the Philistines, the sea people who began to enter Canaan about the time the Israelites were building their unified monarchy, the arch enemies of the Israelites in the books of Judges and Samuel.

The Rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud and later generations of meforshim expanded on the rules of kashrut and extended them in various ways. Today there are those who argue that these rules need to continue to develop. Rabbi Art Waskow argues that if Rabbi Levi Yizhak could declare matzah unkosher because of the labor conditions of his times, doesn’t that obligate us to similarly take these issues into consideration in our times. When strawberries are being picked by workers who do not have decent working conditions, for example, can those berries be kosher? Further if the ethics of kashrut is based on respect for all living things, must we not now investigate the conditions of the animals who provide our food? Finally, if kashrut is part of the ethical system of baal tashchit, “Thou Shalt not Wantonly Destroy”, shouldn’t we be thinking more about the ecological impact of our current methods of food production with its dependence on insecticides, antibiotics and hormones, and on the use of vast resources in producing proteins high up the food chain? Various rabbis of our own day, even Orthodox rabbis like current Chief Rabbi of Great Britain Jonathan Sacks, and the well know Israeli Defense Forces Rabbi Shlomo Goren and of course the great Rabbi and mystic of the founding of the state of Israel, Rabbi Israel Abraham Kook have all argued for a return to the Bible’s original vision, found in Genesis Chapter One, of human vegetarianism. For reasons of personal health and to decrease our footprint on the globe, I find many Jews interested in learning more about these aspects of kashrut and looking to incorporate these teachings in some way into their own lifestyles.

When I was in junior high school and a member of a Conservative congregation, it seemed to me that our rabbi was always talking about keeping kosher. At that time, other things that were going on in the world, like the Civil Rights Movement and the War in Vietnam, seemed so much more important and I was frustrated coming to shul and hearing arguments about the kashrut of jello or cheese. This morning in talking about Kashrut, I hope I have left you with the impression that Kashrut is not irrelevant to the great issues of our times, rather what we eat in our daily lives, is an important expression of our ethics and values.