Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Rosh Hashana 2009, 5770

by Harold M. Schulweis

Today is different. Today we do not greet each other today with “Chag Sameach,” as we do on Passover or Sukkot or Shavuot. Those holidays celebrate Jewish history — the Exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert, the Revelation at Mt. Sinai. On those days our study, our prayer, our thoughts are all focused on the God of history. 

But during the Days of Awe, we celebrate not the God of history but the God of nature. “Hayom harat olam.” This is the birth of the cosmos, the creation of life. So on this day we pray differently, we think differently, we see differently, we imagine differently. Even the Kaddish we recite on these Holy days is different. We add, “L’eila, ul’eila – “Above and beyond.” We are elevated. We lift up our eyes to see the cosmic world as if through the eyes of God. 

“Bereshit bara elohim” – “In the beginning there was nothing.” The earth was unformed, void, chaotic. Darkness was upon the face of the earth. God said, “Let there be life, sun, moon, stars, waters swarming with living creatures, fish and foul, and beasts and cattle, and human beings.” We celebrate the birth of the world of nature. “Nature” in Hebrew, hateva, four letters which numerically add up to eighty-six. The letters of Elohim, the name of God, add up to eighty-six. Nature is God’s creation. 

And when the world was corrupted and filled with violence, God gave humanity a second chance. And God vowed, “Lo yihyeh od” – “Never again.” Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood. Never again shall I, God, destroy the earth. 

But you human beings can destroy the world. You have the power to destroy the planet. Before you lies an open book with our signature on it. You decide who and what will live, and who and what will die. Who and what will perish by pollution and who and what will be strangled by intoxication. Who and what will drown by flood, and who and what will be desiccated by drought. 

We are the custodians of the world. “Behold, the heavens are the heavens of the Lord, but the earth has been given to the children of men.” 

One majestic theme, beginning with Genesis — reverberates throughout the ecological conscience of the Jewish bible and Jewish law: “Lo tashchit” – “You shall not destroy.” You shall not plunder or ravage or despoil the land. Control your rage and control your temper. As the Talmud elaborates: “Whoever tears his clothing in anger or breaks his vessel to pieces or scatters his money irresponsibly disgraces creation and the creator.” 

Sanctify nature, respect the earth, protect the land, and every seven years, let the land lie fallow. As the Torah states, “The land shall observe the Sabbath.” On the Sabbath, don’t squeeze the land, don’t plow it, don’t pummel it, don’t exhaust it. Let the land rest. Land is the ground of your life. Sabbath is the reverence for the life of the land. “Ha motzi lechem min ha-aretz.” This is the land out of which your bread is brought forth. 

The vitality of Judaism is captured in three words: Life is holy. Every living thing is holy. Therefore, it is our obligation to protect every sentient creature from teasing, from torture, from taunting, from terrorizing. 

(Deuteronomy 22) “You shall not muzzle an ox during the threshing period to prevent it from eating anything of the grain.” 

Do not place a sheaf of grain above an animal’s head beyond his reach so that the animal cannot eat from the grain he works. To muzzle any animal so to prevent it from eating of the food to frustrate the working, seeing, smelling, hungering animal is an act of cruelty, and a disdain of life. 

Now … what in God’s world does the Almighty God have to do with the muzzling of an ox? What’s an ox to God? Or a donkey? 

(Deuteronomy 25) “You shall not plow with an ox and donkey harnessed together, for they are of unequal size and unequal strength, and the weaker one will stumble and suffer.” 

“And if you see an ox of your enemy fallen on the road, do not ignore it. Help raise him up.” 

An ox, a donkey? Is this the concern of the sacred scriptures, the revealed word of holiness? Wouldn’t you expect the divine Torah to tell us the secrets of astrology, the alignment of the stars, the mystery of the Zodiac signs, the conversations of the angels? Wouldn’t you expect that the Torah would tell us “Look up to the heavens, look up to celestial beings” ? But our Torah tells us “Look down, cast your eyes down at the dumb, helpless, beasts of burden.” 

And birds? Does God care about birds? Deuteronomy: “If you come across a birds’ nest with fledglings or eggs and the mother bird sitting on them, do not take the mother together with the young.” 

A bird? A bird has no cognitive reason, it can’t think. Why should the majesty of the Torah be concentrated on a bird? 

Listen to Moses Maimonides, the great philosopher of reason, in his Guide of the Perplexed, explain the biblical laws: 

“There is no difference in the pain of humans and the pain of the animals. The love of mother and the compassion for her child does not depend upon the intellect but upon the emotions which are formed with most animals just as they are formed with human beings.” 

Maimonides seizes hold of the Jewish ecological conscience in the Hebrew phrase, “Tsaar baalei chayim” – pity for the pain of living creatures. 

For Judaism, ecology is not a new discovery. The world is our home. The ecological conscience of Judaism begins at the kitchen table. Thus we read in the Talmud Berachot 40: You are forbidden to eat before you have fed your animal. Before consuming your corn flakes, the animal must have its oats. According to Jewish law, you are forbidden to buy an animal before your stable has enough food in it to feed the animal. And, the rabbis add, this holds for Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur, you fast – but your animal is not required to fast. You feed him, and you fast. 

Why are there are more laws in the Torah about the treatment of animals than there are laws about the observance of the Sabbath? Because the purpose of Jewish ethics is to cultivate rachmones, pity, feeling, compassion, empathy, respect for living creatures whom we can easily dominate, the helpless. Pity! Without pity, all ethics crumble. Without pity, civilization disintegrates. 

So, what ethical philosophy lies behind the laws concerning kashrut? The laws about slaughter, the quality of the knife used, laws about soaking and salting the meat, prohibition of the mixing of meat and dairy, the separation of pots and pans. The Jewish theology of kashrut is not pots and pantheism. 

Our sages dared to ask: “Who cares how you kill an animal?” Listen to the rabbi quoted in the 4th Century, Midrash Tanhuma 15b: 

“What difference does it make to God whether you kill the animal by the throat or by the nape of the neck? Is God hurt or helped one way or the other? What does God care whether a person eats trayf or eats Kosher?“ 

The true rationale of kashrut is to refine and to purify the human being—l’tsaref et ha-briot. The goal of Kashrut is mentschlichkeit. How do we treat the “other” ? Especially, the other whom we can easily dominate. 

Judaism is an evolving religious civilization, and we have to understand the struggle to create its unique culture against a universe of paganism. Kashrut is part of that special culture. You and I, we Jews were not born yesterday. Our culture, Judaism, is 40 centuries old. All cultures contain rules regulating eating. Jewish civilization was born among pagan cultures that built ziggurats and pyramids and sepulchers and palaces. Yet in pagan custom or law there was no pity upon sentient creatures and no laws prohibiting cruelty to animals. The struggle of our Jewish ancestors from its beginning was to harness primordial human instincts, to keep men from tearing sentient animals apart. Keep in mind that not until the 19th Century were there any laws in states or nations to prevent or prohibit cruelty to animals. 

Judaism’s lifelong struggle was to civilize the human passions. What’s the first law of Kashrut? Genesis declares you shall not cut off the flesh of a living animal. You shall not eat “aver min hachai” – not cut a limb from a living animal (Genesis 9:4). In an age when there was no preservation of meat or refrigeration, and you wanted a slice of steak, you would simply take a knife, carve a limb from a living animal and not waste the whole animal. The mutilated animal would escape, eventually heal itself — if possible — and form scars, and then could be used again. For pagan society, better to carve a limb from a living animal than to waste the remaining meat of a live animal. 

In ancient times, when none of the Israelite neighbors expressed in law this revulsion against eating flesh with the life thereof, our people said “No.” You cannot inflict a blemish on an animal. Lo tashcit. 

Judaism alone possessed an absolute, binding prohibition on the eating of blood. In Torah, blood is the life. Blood is not to be spilled. That is the underlying moral rationale behind the Kashrut laws of soaking and salting meat. Soaking and salting meat is not some strange culinary aesthetic or proclivity for sodium seasoning. The ethic of Kashrut is based upon the horror of shedding blood —“Ki ha-dam hu ha-nefesh” — for “the life is in its blood.” Life must be revered. 

The draining of the blood, salting and soaking, is a ritual reminding us that the original ideal of kashrut in the Bible is vegetarianism. Allowing the eating of meat was at best a concession to man’s carnivorous appetite. But the biblical ideal diet as found in Genesis is vegetarian. Consider that no vegetable or fruit is un-kosher. In the Prophet’s Messianic dream the lion will live with the lamb because in an ideal universe, the animal could be herbivorous. The ritual of draining blood is a reminder that taking life is a desecration of the name of God and an insult to creation. Kashrut is part of Judaism’s long, painful process of building character, of taming the instinct of human violence, of refining the moral sensibility of humanity. 

In her A Natural History of the Senses, Dr. Diane Ackerman reports that during the 18th Century in England the popular notion arose that torturing an animal makes its meat healthier and better tasting. 

In the 21st Century, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled, in August 2003, that the force fed geese making of foie gras — the bloated, swollen livers of geese — is outlawed on the grounds that it violates Israel’s cruelty-to-animals law. Why? The justices of the Israeli Supreme Court cited the Jewish laws of tsar ba’li chayim as the basis of their decisions. 

Yes, it tastes good. That’s not the question. The Jewish ecological conscience of Kashrut asks today, “How is this animal raised? How is it treated?” Most of the animals we consume are, while alive, immobilized in crates too small to turn around in, and with diets kept deliberately low in iron so that the color of the meat is a nice pink. Deprivation of iron makes the animal anemic. But pink veal sells better. The animals we eat are given no space to roam. This is a Jewish concern for meaningful kashrut. 

The ethics of Kashrut must be understood and must be protected from abuse. This year brought to our attention the scandal implicating the egregious behavior in Potville of the largest Kosher slaughterhouse in our country. As you have read, how the U.S. government authorities raided the plant and found that immigrant workers were exploited, paid beneath minimum wage, unprotected by health or security safety, maltreated. Health insurance, collective bargaining. What’s that got to do with keeping kosher? Was it slaughtered ritually correct? That’s the only question? 

That response is a betrayal of the moral foundation of Jewish ethics and faith. To be Kosher is not simply a matter of avoiding certain foods, or a passive purchase of products with a hechsher. Everything connected with keeping Kosher means to treat animals and the workers with compassion, concern and dignity. 

In Judaism, you can’t split Jewish law from Jewish morality. They are all interrelated: ritual and ethics, the human and the animal. Humans are not machines and animals are not machines. Animal muscles twitch under pain just as human muscles do. 

The ethical master Rabbi Israel Salanter once said, “If it is prohibited to swallow a live insect, all the more so to consume a human being out of callousness and greed.” 

“Tzar baale chayim!” Pity for the weakest among us. Pity for the voiceless. Pity for the stranger in our midst. 

So, what can we do? All praise to the Conservative rabbis who are in the process of instituting “magen tzedek,” a certificate that testifies that this Kosher product we take into our home has not been manufactured by intimidation or denial of working health, safety, and economic exploitation. Nothing is more “traif” than a morally tainted product. Nothing adds more to the importance of kashrut than the assurance that that what we consume has not been processed by the selfish exploitation of immigrant laborers. There is an authority higher than Hebrew National hot dogs! It’s Jewish morality. Kosher conscience. 

Can Valley Beth Shalom pioneer a community of conscience and kashrut? If we would, we will restore the motivation to the observance of Jewish dietary laws. 

What of the prohibition of mixing meat and milk? Do Jews have some prejudice against cheeseburgers (which I have been told on the highest lay authority is a tasty dish)? But there is a moral rationale for milchig and flayshig separation. In ancient pagan ritual, the mother animal and her child were slaughtered on the same day, either for pagan ritual reasons or for convenience reasons. This horrified our ancestors. Therefore, we read in three separate places in the Torah, “You shall not boil an animal in its mother’s milk.” Jewish moral sensibility was outraged by the practiced slaughter of a young animal in front of its mother. Rabbinic law was therefore raised as a legal fence to avoid ever coming close to that cruelty. The laws of dairy milchig and meat flayshig — cooking or eating meat and milk together — were extended as precautionary measures by the rabbis to protect us against the heartlessness of slaying a child before its mother’s eyes. 

“But it’s only an animal” ? The compassionate treatment of animals is no trivial matter. It is one of the ways Judaism, as an ethical monotheism, sought to defang and to declaw the primitive in the human being. 

Rituals are symbols reminding us of our humanity. We are not predators. 

By way of transparency—a confession. I never had a hunting gun in my home – neither I nor my father nor my grandfather. Because they could not understand how a human being can find hunting animals a sport. The Jewish statesman Walter Rathenau said, “When a Jew says he’s going hunting to amuse himself, he’s lying.” Hunting for sport? The poet Walter de La Mare wrote,

Hi – handsome hunting men
Fire your little gun
Bang! Now the animal is dead and done
Never to peep again
Eat or sleep again
Oh what fun…

Hunting is no game. Hunting is no sport. The thrill of the deer hunter is a desecration. It is a violation of the moral injunction, “Lo tashchit.” You shall not destroy. You can tell it to the N.R.A. I’m not running for office. 

Life is holy, Kadosh. On Kol Nidre, 1848, a cholera epidemic broke out in Vilna, and the doctors feared that if Jews were to fast on Yom Kippur, their resistance would be weakened. Therefore, physician’s warned that they must eat on Yom Kippur. 

Rabbi Israel Salanter, hearing the doctors’ warning, posted a notice in the city’s synagogue: “Jews are not to fast on this holy and awesome day.” But Rabbi Salanter feared that out of devotion, his congregation would nevertheless fast and risk their health and their life. He understood that his words would not help and that notices written on the synagogue walls would not be followed. On Kol Nidre, 1848, Rabbi Salanter ascended the bimah, ordered the shamash, the beadle, to bring out wine and bread. On Kol Nidre, Rabbi Salanter recited the Kiddush and the Motzi, drank and ate before the congregation. Why did he act in this fashion, Salanter was asked? He replied “Not because I care so little about the laws, but because I care so much more about the life of my people.” 

Life is holy. L’chayim.

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