Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Vegetarianism and Keeping Kosher

by Harold M. Schulweis

The lady next to whom I sat at the non-Kosher Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, before giving a keynote address, ordered roast beef and I, a veteran "fishertarian" ordered fish. A soulless filet of sole, a desiccated creature of the sea, appeared on the plate. Looking at this pathetic sight I quickly smothered it with ketchup. Ketchup has saved me from many a culinary disaster.

As the lady was eating her succulent roast, she observed me toying listlessly with my food. She was moved by my martyrdom and sought to console me. "You know rabbi, I really like fish better than meat." I asked her whether she wished to exchange plates. "No," she said and fell into a silence. A little later she volunteered, "Do you know, Rabbi, my mother kept kosher?" I added, "Mine too." We struck up an immediate kinship of maternal kashruth. Then she added, "You know, Rabbi, fish is healthier than meat." I countered, "Except for the mercury count."

She made me think. What do Jews think about keeping Kosher? Keeping Kosher is widely publicized. The first Hebrew letters I ever saw in the market place were basar kasher. The first public institutions that bore Hebrew words were on the panes of the butcher shop and the restaurant. Kashruth is a world of its own and has endowed us with a considerable vocabulary. Kosher, treif, glatt kosher, milchig, fleishig, pareve, shochet, chalif, treibern. The Torah itself has a full chapter devoted to kashruth. The 11th chapter of the book of Leviticus, a part of the chapter of Deuteronomy 14, is elaborated in the Talmud in a large treatise called Hulin and it is discussed in post-Talmudic literature in every code. The Shulchan Aruch devotes an entire book of 4, the Yoreh Deah, to the codification of Kashruth. But despite its widespread popularity there is something trivializing about keeping kosher in the mind of most Jews. Ludwig Feuerbach, the philosopher, ridiculed Judaism and its emphasis upon the gastric as alimentary. Some Jewish philosophers referred to Kashruth as kitchen theology, a kind of "pots and pantheism.”

What was and is missing is the failure to communicate the philosophy, the morality, the poetry of kashruth itself. In the 3rd century, Rav said, "What difference does it make to God whether one eats unclean or clean substance? What difference does it make to the Holy One whether one slaughters from the throat or the nape?" And he answered – the purpose and reason for keeping kosher is to refine people.

But I don't think my dinner companion thought of kashruth as a matter of refinement. Do those zealously examining the ingredients on the labels of cans have any notion of the philosophy of kashruth?

Kashruth has to do with the way we understand nature and human nature, the way we understand the world around us, the way we understand life. Kashruth reflects our ecological conscience. It begins with the book of Genesis. God is the author of everything that lives. God is the life of the universe and Life is sacred. Nature is not God but God formed it, shaped it, created it – the grass, the herb yielding seed, fruit trees, the waters swimming with swarms of living creatures, fowl flying above the earth in the open firmament of the heaven, sea monsters and living creatures that creep on earth, cattle, and beasts and human nature.

I am part of nature, and more than that I am a custodian of nature. Multiply and be fruitful, fill the earth and rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and all the living things that creep on earth. Look at nature through the eyes of Genesis, and I caught up by Thoreau's sentiment, "I see all being in myself and myself in all being.” –

I am part of nature. The Bible called me "nefesh," which some biblical scholars translate as throat – that through which food and drink and air passes and gives me life. I am part of nature and I must live. I must eat and drink. God said, "I give you every seed bearing plant that is upon all the earth and every tree that has seed bearing fruit they shall be yours for food. And to every breath of the earth and to every fowl of the air and to everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is a living soul I have given every green herb for food."

There you have the ideal of creation, the original intention for human nature and nature itself. It was to be a world of herbivorous animals, a vegetarian universe. That ideal was not forgotten. It reappears in the vision of the prophet who imagines the world at the end of history to include a world transformed from carnivorous to herbivorous living. As Isaiah (11:6) puts it, "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, the calf and the beast of prey together and a little child will herd them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together, and the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw." That the ideal vision of creation is reflected in the dietary laws where all fruits and vegetables are kosher.

But the Torah is not a book of ideals. The Torah reflects the constant struggle between the ideal and the real, between the vision and facticity. Within the Bible itself we find that God discovers that the human being has powerful, instinctive drives, lusts, and appetites. Man has an appetite for blood, for nature raw in tooth and claw. Man loves his meat rare or well done, he loves his pâté de foie gras, he loves his chopped liver, his veal, and his mutton. And even in the desert when he is freed from slavery, he is bored with the coriander seed, the vegetarian manna which falls from heaven. He craves the fleshpots of Egypt. "Give us flesh." And in an outburst of anger for this carnivorous obsession, God declared "Ye shall no eat [flesh] one day nor two days, nor five days, neither ten days, nor twenty days but a whole month, until it comes out at your nostrils and it be loathsome unto you" (Numbers 11:19-20).

Nevertheless, God makes concessions to human nature. God bends the ideal to the real. God lives with imperfection. And so God re-parents with human beings and enters into a second covenant, not as He did with Adam and Eve, but as He did with Noah after the flood brought upon the world because of violence and voraciousness. This time God says, "Every moving thing that lives shall be for food for you as the green herb have I given you all. Only flesh with the life thereof which is the blood thereof shall ye not eat.”

It is a divine condescension to the carnivorous character of the human being. If you must eat meat do so with awareness that you are taking the life of another. If you must take the life of another, see to it that it is done with compassion. The first primordial law of kashruth is ever min ha-chai, you shall not cut a limb from a live animal. A revolutionary notion in an age of scarcity without refrigeration, without the technology to preserve meat. It makes economical sense to rip a limb off an animal, to cut it out of its hide and let the animal run off to form its own scars and to preserve its flesh for another time. Against the pragmatics of pagan culture, the Torah taught pity for the sentient creature.

The Biblical revulsion toward blood is evident throughout the Biblical and rabbinic tradition. To spill blood is to bring death as to inject blood is often to save life. Life is in the blood. Life is holy. When the beasts or the birds are slaughtered, the blood that flows from the cut must be poured upon a bed of dust and covered with dust. Cover the blood. Hide your shame. Remember that you are not dealing with an inanimate being, you are dealing with a living being. Israel alone prohibited blood for Jew and non-Jew.

Life is holy. Life is inviolable. To torture life, to give pain to life, to humiliate life is to desecrate God, the Life of the Universe. Out of this profound sentiment arise laws and traditions meant to reduce the grief caused to animals, to the dumb beasts under our control. Master the animal world and do it with kindness for sentient creatures. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.” Do not muzzle the animal when he is plowing and in hunger seeks to graze, to which the Shulchan Aruch IV, 186, adds "It is forbidden to muzzle a beast by shouting at it to prevent it from eating. You must not frighten the ox. It is prohibited to stand on the side of the road with a lion to frighten the animal to work hard and not to graze in the field."

An ox and a donkey are not to be yoked together (Deuteronomy 22). A divine injunction to warn against harnessing together the strong ox and the weaker donkey. Why chase away mother bird so that it doesn't see the plunder of eggs? They are dumb animals and they have no intellect, no souls such as are given us. Maimonides, the epitome of Jewish intellectualism, replies, "The love and tenderness of the mother for her young ones is not produced by reasoning, but by imagination, and animals feel grief, feel love, and attachment to their young. If the law provides that grief should not be caused to cattle and birds, how much more careful must we be that we should not cause grief to our fellow man." Life feels. Living beings tremble with fear, suffer and hurt and grieve.

There is something wrong with killing a living creature. That moral intuition is woven into the customs of our people. Before reciting Grace after Meals, remove the knife from the table. No blessings for leather shoes or leather garments because this garment and these shoes were acquired by killing a living being. No bracha for a fur coat. Shall you pray for life and then ask for forgiveness of sins while wearing articles made from the skins of slaughtered animals? Remove leather from your body on Yom Kippur. In the days of the temple, the priest removed his shoes when they pronounced benediction upon the altar.

Milchik and fleishik. Did anyone explain to my dinner companion the insights of the Jewish philosopher Philo or those of the Jewish scholars Rashi and Ibn Ezra and Rashbam? They conjectured that the reason the Torah thrice forbids "seething the kid in its mother's milk" was in protest to the moral anti-pagan principle. (The seething practice of paganism was confirmed by the discovery of the practice described in a Ugarite text - Israel's northern neighbor.) How can you possibly take the milk of the mother and boil a child in that milk? It has Jewish conscience against it. So the rabbis extended of the law, elaborated it to separate all dairy and meat products. The essence of the law is humanitarian, and the separation of meat products from milk products is based upon this element of compassion. Leviticus 22 forbids killing a mother and her young on the same day at the altar.

A refined humanitarian notion underlies the basic laws of shechitah slaughtering. For if one must destroy the life of an animal, let it be done as painlessly as possible. The Shochet must to learn to avoid shehiya the delay in wielding the knife that severs the jugular vein. It must be handled quickly without delay, without halting, without prolonging the act. It must be done without drash, excessive pressure. It must be done without chaladah, obstacles to the slaughterers vision. It must be done without ikkur, without tearing, which is painful. The Shochet must keep his knife razor sharp, smooth and free from any notches.

A rabbinic anecdote tells of an old Shochet who died and a new one was to be tested. After they tested the new Shochet, someone asked "How did he do?" And the man who watched replied with a sigh. "What's the matter? Didn't he recite the prayers?" "He did." "Didn't he sharpen the knife?" "He did." "Didn't he moisten the blade?" "He did." "What was wrong then?" "Well" said the man, "our old Shochet used to moisten the blade with his tears."

There are ways in which I subtly avoid the entire issue. There are ways to semantically compartmentalize my thinking. I use euphemisms and speak of roast beef and mutton and veal and poultry to disguise the fact that I refer to cows and lambs and calves and chickens and geese and ducks. I can give it French names.

Pâté de foie gras is an acknowledged delicacy. On the label of the pate can a heksher may appear but to my mind it is glatt treif. Pâté de foie is produced by force feeding ducks and geese, by forcing 60 - 80 pounds of corn into their gullets. The farmer holds the neck of the goose between his legs and pours corn in one hand and massages it down the neck with the other. And when that's not effective, a wooden plunger is used. There is pain here. But the liver of the goose grows to enormous size as the sclerosis of the liver develops. It is a delicacy.

I can order veal, and I can appreciate its light color and its tenderness. How did it get its pale color and its delicate softness? You can research John Webster's book Calf Husbandry, Health and Welfare. There are also illustrated brochures about factory farming which can be acquired from the Humane Farming Association in San Francisco. More information is available in a book called Judaism and Vegetarianism by Dr. Richard Schwartz. Baby calves are separated from their mothers within hours after their birth, sometimes one or two days, and they are chained by their necks for the rest of their lives in wooden crates twenty-two inches wide. These animals never leave their stall, never stand freely on their legs, never have enough room to turn around never see the sunlight. They endure darkness twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The stall is kept warm. The calf is given a liquid diet with no iron content and kept that way for fourteen to eighteen weeks. They are then taken to slaughter. The calves are filled with antibiotics and drugs to keep them from becoming ill. No exercise, no iron. To insure the pale color and tenderness of veal the calf must be kept purposely anemic and free from any iron. The craving for iron is so great that the calves lick the iron fittings on the stall and its own urine. The calf leaves its pen for slaughter and sometimes drops dead in the way from the exhaustion of going to slaughter. This is an element of the system of "Factory Farming.”

There is a relationship between kashruth and morality and health itself. The rabbis insisted sakanta chamira missura, that danger to one's being is of greater concern than the violation of some ritual law. How then can I read the literature and not see how it affects my health? Back in 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association pointed out that 97% of heart disease can be prevented by a vegetarian diet. And so, in 1982, a doctor representing the National Cancer Institute pointed out that "changing the way we eat could offer some protection against cancer.”

I have nostalgic memories of gedempte fleish, chopped liver, kreplach, chulent full of saturated fat, but there's no point in blaming Bubbe or mother for their culinary wizardry. We are modern people and we have to apply Jewish ethics to the wisdom we have acquired. We think we are carnivorous, but we are not natural carnivores. Dr. William Clifford Roberts writes, "When we kill animals to eat them they end up killing us because their flesh which contains cholesterol and saturated fat was never intended for human beings who are naturally herbivorous." (American Journal of Cardiology, Vol. 66, No. 10, Oct. 1990, p. 896.) It is nature's revenge. Animals are kept alive and fattened by continuous administration of tranquilizers, hormones, antibiotics and thousands of other drugs. The law does not require that these drugs be listed on the packages. 20,000 to 30,000 animal drugs are in current use. As many as 90% have not been approved by FDA. "Culinary embalming" masks the natural decay of flesh by adding nitrites and nitrates and sodium sulphate for cosmetic purposes so that we enjoy the healthy red look on dead meat. And I ingest it all.

A conscientious appreciation of the meaning of kashruth tends toward an increased vegetarian diet. The time has come for serious Jews to consider the moral thrust of Kashruth as well as its health significance. Gradually one can introduce dietary laws that are responsive to the moral and hygienic aspects of kashruth. It can begin minimally with excluding veal and pâté de foie from the kosher menu. It is not kosher to feast on the tortured.

I visualize the Shabbat as a vegetarian day, especially since the Sabbath is the day of tranquility and harmony with nature, a day in which one of the ten commandments instructs that animals are not to be worked. Sabbath, the day celebrating the harmony between the environment and the self, ought to be the occasion for vegetarian meals. I visualize the Passover Seder as a vegetarian meal. After the destruction of the Temple roasted meat was prohibited at the Seder meal for it would appear as if one could substitute the home table for the Temple. Why not a vegetarian meal in anticipation of the Passover of the future? Consider the new meaning assigned to the song of the one kid: "Then a slaughterer came and slaughtered the ox that drank the water that put out the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the kid that father bought for 2 zuzim. Then the angel of death came and slew the slaughterer that slaughtered the ox....Then the Holy One blessed be He, came and smote the angel of death that slew the slaughterer that slaughtered the ox."

Can we help the Holy One, blessed be He, stay the hand of the angel of death?

* This document, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced without the written permission of the author.