Kashrut - Some Contemporary Observations

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, April 18, 2009

When Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first Astronaut, who died tragically in the space shuttle Columbia explosion, went into space, he requested that NASA provide him with kosher food.

Ramon was not an observant Jew and described himself as secular, yet he felt that there was something symbolic about his making this request. As the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, his Jewish identify was very important to him. In an interview before the Columbia flight he said; "I feel I am representing all Jews and all Israelis."

The rules of kashrut derive from texts in the Torah, particularly our Torah portion this week Parashat Shemini, and a section of the book of Deuteronomy that repeats many, though not all of these laws. But the practice of kashrut has evolved through time with many additional restrictions having been added to those of the Torah.

Within the Bible itself we don’t find too many stories about people keeping kosher. In fact we have a few stories in which Biblical characters eat things that today would be traif, most famously Abraham serving meat and milk to the visiting angels. Only in the book of Daniel, which dates from the Persian period, is Daniel’s observing kashrut an important part of the story. We know that by the time of the Maccabees observing kashrut had become so important that it was considered worth risking one’s life rather than violating these commandments.

The rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud developed and extended the laws of kashrut but they also reigned in the passion of the Maccabees. Living in the dangerous times of the Roman Empire their focus was on preserving life. Only if the eating of non-kosher food was part of a public ceremony of renouncing Judaism, was one required to risk one’s life. More generally, their teaching was that to preserve life in extreme circumstances one could eat foods that were not kosher. The Talmud reasoned that the Torah said these laws were given- vechay bahem, that you should live by them, live, they reasoned, and not die.

Many modern Jews resent the multiplication of restrictions developed over the past 2,000 years, many straying far from the original words of the Torah. Some Jews have adopted what they refer to as Biblical kashrut, that is abstaining from pork and shellfish and not eating milk with meat, but not following all the restrictions on dishes and the number of hours between eating one kind of food and another. Actually the source of some of these rules concerning dishes come from our Torah portion this week with its discussion of ritual impurity being passed from the ritually impure object itself onto earthen vessels and wood utensils. Ceramic stoves were also considered liable to this type of impurity but metal and glass which could be purified in fire were not.

This week’s Torah portion is always read right around Passover, the holiday which makes us most aware of all of our traditions restrictions. I know my childhood associations with Passover including carrying boxes up and down the stairs in my parents and grandparents home, and then seeing the special plates that would appear only this once a year. They were part of what set the mood of the holiday and the work of bringing them up and down was a reminder of how important all of this was to my family.

As Miriam mentioned there are many explanations for kashrut. Was it originally health issues or hygiene that motivated these practices? Was it the development of self-restraint and discipline? Was there something about the animals and birds that we were not to eat, that was repugnant, and therefore not to be incorporated into ourselves?

Recently I read two different ways of explaining these laws. The first explanation relates to our relations with those we love. Sometimes they ask us to do things that don’t seem sensible to us- often like kashrut, these are small things but frequent in our everyday lives. Maybe our husband likes the toothpaste left with the cap off and we think it should be put back one, maybe our wife likes coats hung up, even though we are going to wear them again tomorrow anyway. Even when these requests don’t make sense to us, we do them because of the relationship. Maybe that’s what Kashrut is about, “do it because I said so”, not in the angry voice of a demanding parent, but in the loving voice of a beloved partner.

The other explanation, offered by Rabbi Joel Oseran, attempts to answer the question of why these laws of kashrut are in this particular Torah portion. He notes that at the beginning of the portion, after the deaths of Nadab and Abihu, the priests are admonished not to drink alcohol before serving in the Temple because their job is to make distinctions between the holy and the profane, the ritually pure and the impure. Kashrut, he argues, is also about making these distinctions, and since effective teaching involves regular repetition and frequent exposure, these rules are vested in eating, something we do very regularly.

3,000 years after these laws of kashrut were written, there is much about them that remains mysterious. Yet many have found meaning in this practice because of their relationship to God, to Jewish tradition or to the Jewish people.