Why Keep Kosher - Questions from a 6 Year Old

I had the following mail, from a parent of a bright 6 year old in the community,

[My six year old daughter] keeps asking me why Jews can’t eat ham. I don’t know how to explain it. Other than the “because it is not kosher and this is what it says in Torah/G-d says etc” 
We spoke after Cheder yesterday about how kosher things to eat have to have cloven hooves and chew their cud like cows. And pigs don’t chew their cud. So we cant eat them. We can eat cows because they chew their cud.
 And I said it was probably came originally from long ago when people wanted to avoid sickness. And animals like shellfish (which are bottom feeders, so can carry more disease), and pigs, which used to live in people’s houses and people would get a lot of diseases from them.
 Then she says , well why do Christians eat ham, if it could make them sick? And I get stumped what to say.
 I told her I would ask you.


Actually, I posted the question on Facebook and had a huge response


But this is my answer

So ...

There are usually three answers given to the question, “Why do anything Jewish?”

The first is the simplest and probably the oldest. God said, therefore do. God is our creator, God brought us out of the Land of Egypt, from slavery to freedom and brought us Sinai where we accepted a deal (or more precisely a covenant - the Hebrew word is Brit) - God would be in a special relationship with us, and we would accept the obligation to observe the things God commanded (the Hebrew word is Mitzvot). Whether any particular commandment (Mitzvah) makes sense to our own minds is not important. The important thing is, this is the deal, and we say, ‘yes.’

The second reason is that following the Mitzvot is a kind of training and reason for specific Mitzvot is just not important. One important Rabbi called Mordechai Kaplan (who was born 130 years ago) said we do Jewish things because we want other people who also do Jewish things to think we are good Jews. This reason has very little to do with God. It has very little to do with why we would eat chicken, but not bacon. It has a lot to do with the power of being part of a community. This is connected to a slightly different version of this reason - that doing Mitzvot trains us to behave well. To be a good person, I think, you need to be careful about what you say and how you act, and the food you eat. Again this reason doesn’t explain why we eat chicken, but not pig, it’s more about always paying attention to what you do. For example when men go into a Synagogue they cover their heads. But when Catholic men go into a Church they will take anything on their heads off. The important piece isn’t whether there is or there is not something on someone’s head, but whether we are training ourselves to show respect in a House of God. We sometimes call religious Jews observant. In part this means keeping Mitzvot, but also, I think, it means observing what we do and the impact of what we do on the world around us.’

The third reason is that there are reasons for doing Mitzvot.

Sometimes the Torah tells you the reason why doing a particular Mitzvah is good. For example the Torah says that you should always put a fence around the roof of your house so no-one can fall off.

Sometimes the Torah doesn’t tell you why a particular Mitzvah is good (for example the Torah says you should honour your parents. It doesn’t say you should honour your parents because your mother carried you for nine months in her womb, gave birth to you, and then - hopefully along with your father - took care of you as you become an adult.) But you can, pretty easily, work out a reason like that.

However there are a lot of Mitzvot that aren’t obvious. There are even moments when the Torah says to do something that might seem not good. For example the Torah seems to say it’s OK to kill someone who picked up sticks on Shabbat, or a child doesn’t always do what their parents tell them to. This is where it gets very complicated.

There have been some Jews who have been rational about the reasons behind Mitzvot. Being rational means explaining things in ways human minds can understand. The most famous of these Rabbis is Rambam (who died 800 years ago). Rambam went through every Mitzvah in the Torah explaining everything in rational ways (though he doesn’t think you should ever kill someone even if they don’t do what their parents tell them). Rambam is the most famous Rabbi to have said that the problem with eating pig is that it isn’t healthy. However Rambam’s approach made some other ancient Rabbis furious. They wanted to know how Rambam, a simply human being, felt he could truly understand what God - GOD - was thinking when God gave the Torah to Moses. They were also very worried that if times changed (for example pigs were no longer dangerous to eat) Jews might start eating pig - which they thought would break everything Judaism stood for. In fact, pigs are not as medically dangerous today as they were and some religious Jews do eat pig. These Jews are ‘Reform.’ Reform Judaism believes that if times change and old reasons no longer apply you shouldn’t keep following traditional Mitzvot. Reform Judaism started over 200 years ago and some Reform Rabbis don’t think it is important to keep Kosher. Others do - for some of the other reasons discussed here.

Some of the reasons Rabbis give for keeping specific Mitzvot are very thoughtful. Some are more playful. For example we can only eat animals which has a cloven hoof and chew the cud. The pig has a cloven hoof, so you might think it’s only half not-kosher. But eating pig has always been a huge no-no for Jews. In the greatest collection of Rabbis’ reasons - the talmud - there is a suggestion that the big problem with pigs is that they lie with their cloven hoofs point out towards us, as if to say, ‘look at me, I’m Kosher,’ when really what is inside reveals that they are not Kosher. So the pig is pretending to be something it is not. I like that story, but it’s not the reason I don’t eat pig. I think reasons are important and I think it’s good to think about why we do things, but we shouldn’t always try to make Mitzvot completely understandable, because religion is about a God and a Universe we don’t - and can’t understand completely. Mystery is OK.

Some Jews have not worried about why we should keep specific Mitzvot, instead saying that we should follow all Mitzvot because good things will happen to us if we do. The second paragraph of the Shema promises that if we keep the Mitzvot there will be food for us to eat, and if we don’t there won’t be. This would work, as a reason, if good things always happened to people who keep Mitzvot. Unfortunately bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. A lot of people, Jewish and not Jewish, spend a lot of time struggling with this. One solution to the problem of bad things happening to good people is to believe that eventually good things will happen to good people, even if bad things are happening now. Some good people are prepared to wait until they die for good things to happen to them - this is usually called a belief in Heaven. Some people believe that there will be a time when a person will appear who will solve all these problems and the world will be a place where only good things happen to good people - this is usually called a belief in the Messiah.

Another way Jews say keeping Mitzvot is good has to do with reasons that are not rational - they are reasons that exist at the edge of what humans can understand. Sometimes these reasons are called ‘hidden,’ or ‘secret’ or, using a Hebrew word, ‘Kabbalistic.’ For example one Kabbalistic idea behind lighting Shabbat candles is that the flame of the candle rises up and draws down the flow of energy from God into the world. According to Jewish law you are not supposed to study Kabbalah until you are 40 and these ideas can be very complicated, but the idea behind a lot of Kabbalah is this; all religious Jews believe in ‘One God,’ but Kabbalists believe that there are different sides, or aspects, existing within God and that the various different sides don’t always fit perfectly together, or that the energy that is supposed to flow into the world gets blocked and stuck. This is why the world doesn’t always make sense. This is why bad things can happen to good people. Sometimes it is explained that there is a male and female side to God, sometimes a side that is totally beyond any understanding and a side that is like a friend you can talk to or pray to. Kabbalists explain that by performing Mitzvot we can mend the broken parts that exist within God or help the flow of God’s energy into the world. Or if we break Mitzvot, for example by eating pig, we drive God’s presence further away from the world. 

I think it is possible to want to keep Mitzvot because of reasons that cannot entirely be understood. This is the belief that keeping Mitzvot is good, for me, for the Jewish people, for the world and even for God. In fact, that is what I do.

I hope that helps.

Shabbat shalom

Jeremy

Meaty Matters

I want to talk, this week, about food. What could be more Jewish a subject? In my sermon I'll be trying to translate the sense of a holy relationship with our food into an approach to the myriad of decisions a careful consumer faces every time they walk an aisle or line their stomach.

 

In this note I want to relay information provided by Henry Grunwald, past-President of the Board of Deputies and Chairman of Shechita UK.  In a letter to Rabbis from across the denominations Henry recently wrote;

 

"By now you will have heard that the European Parliament recently voted on an amendment to the EU Regulation on food information to consumers to in future label meat and meat products derived from animals that have been slaughtered by shechita, „meat from slaughter without stunning‟. This will significantly impact on the kosher meat industry, imperilling the economic viability of Shechita. The millions of tonnes of meat from animals which are not properly stunned or cruelly re-stunned by secular methods will not be required to be labelled. Labelling religiously and humanely slaughtered meat products in isolation is discrimination, and is designed to deter potential buyers.

 

"If cruelty to animals is an honest and proper concern of any consumer then all such labelling of meat and meat products if introduced, should in fairness be applied to all methods of slaughter used, which may include stunning by electrocution, captive-bolt or gassing. Consumers should also be entitled to know whether the meat came from an animal that had been mis-stunned or re-stunned, before it was slaughtered, if an informed choice is the true intent of this amendment. According to Compassion for World Farming (no supporter of Shechita), 9% of all meat slaughtered using conventional stunning in Europe is "mis-stunned" by the captive-bolt or electricity, causing additional and unnecessary pain and stress to animals. Research by the British Veterinary Association showed that 59% of sheep are mis-stunned, but the Regulation does not require labelling to indicate this. And Shechita accounts for only 0.037% of all animal slaughtered in Europe."

 

This is an invidious attack designed to cause maximum damage while appearing only minimally antisemitic. Meat-eaters and vegetarians alike, and even those who – dare it be said – don't keep kosher should all be alarmed.

 

For more information on the work of Shechita UK, please see www.shechitauk.org

 

Shabbat Shalom and B'tei Avon

Rubashkin and the Cost of a Kosher Chicken

Bmidbar - in the wilderness - no-one can hear you scream.

It might the tag line for some new Hollywood movie.

In the wilderness, maybe the Children of Israel thought they could get away with their behaviour, because who cares what goes on in a wilderness?

As a Rabbinical student I led a bus tour of America. We drove from New York, on the East Coast to San Diego on the West Coast, then north up the coast to Portland

Oregon, and then back again.

It turns out that, despite what you may have thought, there is a middle to America. New Yorkers, San Franciscans and the like call is fly-over. A wilderness.

One of my earliest literary forays into this wilderness, and I remember it well, came in a book, Boychicks in the Hood by Robert Eisenberg. In this touching collection of essays a secular Jewish guy, who learnt Yiddish from his grandmother, finds out he has a cousin who is a Satmar Hasid. So he goes off to meet and before he knows it he

has found himself on a world-wide tour of the Ultra-Orthodox world.

It is a lovely book and it was the first insight I had into a world of Bratlav Chasidim heading to Uman, the Yeshiva in Gateshead and more.

But one chapter stuck more than any other in my mind. It was when Eisenberg headed to a town called Postville, North-East Iowa. Fly-over territory.

There, far far from any kind of Jewish centre Robert Eisenberg visited a slaughterhouse. Not a normal kind of slaughterhouse, you understand,

The largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world.

Agriprocessors, or Rubashkins as it is known.

It's hard to get a sense of how powerful an organisation Rubshkins are - or at least were.

60% of all kosher beef in America.

40% of all kosher poultry comes from this one slaughter house.

When Aaron Rubashkin founded his slaughterhouse he re-wrote the book on how to provide Kosher meat, taking all the labour out to where the animals were.

The plant was a huge employer in a very depressed part of the United States, around 1,000 employees, that is sustaining 1,000 families. When the Rubashkins opened a new processing plant in 2006 the Governor or Iowa gave the company a cheque for half a million dollars, part of an incentive package to bring the work to the town.

Reading Eisenberg's book I was left with the quaint picture of he painted of 200 frum yids, sitting around, shechting chickens and cows by day, studying by night and generally feeling very bored.

It amused me, and stuck in my mind when I heard something far far more serious.

Two weeks ago Federal agents raided the Rubashkin plant. Of the 1000 staff they made 68o arrests, that is 68o arrests.

The investigating officers were looking to find illegal immigrants and they found at Rubashkins plenty.

In the last week 260 of illegal Guatemalan workers plant have been sentenced to five months in prison. The New York Times has called the raid the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

It turns out that when the Federal Government wanted to send out a message that illegal workers would no longer simply be deported they picked on this oh so Jewish employer.

And it get's worse

My colleague Harold Kravitz, a Rabbi in Minnetonka, went to visit Postville this week.He was able to meet with some of the women who worked in the plant. The men have all been jailed, but the women, if they have kids, are having their sentences delayed so they can care for their charges.

Harold wrote the following

`We spent hours hearing about appalling working conditions and the abuses that have taken place at Agriprocessors. We heard allegations of all kinds of abuses: underage workers; the poorest pay of any slaughterhouse in Iowa; supervisors who demanded payments and sexual favors in exchange for jobs or particular assignments. Workers consistently described being cursed at and screamed at to work faster and harder. We heard of people working in demanding and dangerous jobs with no training. We heard two stories of workers being struck. We repeatedly heard workers describe how a lead supervisor would demand that they buy a used car from him for more than its value in order to get a job at the plant, even though they were not eligible for a driver's license. The people we talked to are in the process of being deported. They had nothing to gain or lose from what they now say about their experiences. They are simple folk who answered questions directly without apparent embellishment'

Rubashkin have been paying their new employees $5 an hour, that's £2.50 to you or me, substantially below the mandated federal minimum wage.The Federal application to make the raid records information from an informant that a human resourcesmanager laughed when the worker presented her with three social security cards being used by three different workers, but carrying the same social security number. The source also claims to have seen weapons being traded in the plant and, God help us, a methamphetamine lab on site. The source, a one-time employee recalls that he destroyed the lab, but was subsequently confronted by his supervisor and, the source believes, this led to the termination of his employment.The search warrant affidavit is a shander, a hillul hashem, a deep embarrassment.

In fact my colleagues, members of the Rabbinical Assembly, Masorti Rabbis, have had their eye on Rubashkins for some time. A commission of enquiry into working conditions at the plant reported some years ago and a number of American Conservative Synagogues have been boycotting Rubashkin meat.A group of Conservative Rabbis, led by Rabbi Morris Allen have been doing important work in setting up what he calls Hekhsher Tzedek

Hekhsher Tzedek is a supervision not of the details of slaughter and list of ingredients of food products, but a supervision of the human labour that went into their manufacture.It is a supervision of worker pay, provision of health benefits, vacation, sick pay, training, health and safety, corporate governance and transparency and environmental impact.It is one of the most important initiatives in the Movement.It may have been in part behind the raid.It may have been being the decision of KAJ, one of the major Orthodox certification organisations in America, to stop supervising at Rubashkins.I am proud of Hekhsher Tzedek.

But I am ashamed and angry about this;

I am angry and ashamed because I, as a Kosher-observant Jew, have been turned into an accomplice to oppression.

Kol Yisrael Aravin zeh le Zeh - all of Israel is responsible for one another.

The corrupt and illegal hiring practices of Rubashkin's have wound up a wrecking ball that has now been cut loose and left to blow apart families and individuals least able to care for themselves.The corrupt and illegal hiring practices at Rubashkin's have placed a stumbling block before the blind -- economic migrants fleeing their lives of poverty in Latin America looking for a chance in the developed world.

And you must not put a stumbling block before the blind.

Not even in the Wilderness, not even in Potsville.

The verse

Lifnie Iver lo titein rnichshol -- you shall not put a stumbling block before the blind continues veyareita me-eloheicha ani Hl - and you shall fear your God, I am THE LORD

Why, ask the Rabbis ask is this extra bit of text included - you shall fear God.

Because the blind person who has just stumbled might not know if the noise of a stumbling block being placed before him was done ‘For his good or otherwise.’

And indeed no-one else might see the egregiousness done to this blind person.But God, God knows

The one who knows all thoughts. You shall fear that God,

even in fly-over territory where no-one really wants to look

Even in a slaughterhouse where we don’t look too closely because the whole business of producing kosher meat is,well, just a little too bloody for comfort.

But while we are digging around in Chapter 19 of the book of Leviticus let me share some another verse.

You shall not defraud your neighbor, nor rob him; the wages of he who is hired shall not remain with you all night until the morning

Or how about this one, from Deuteronomy

You shall not abuse a needy and destitute labourer.

Or this one from Malachi

I will act as a relentless accuser against those...

Who cheat labourers of their hire...said the Lord of Hosts.

(Malachi 3:5)

The Rubashkin scandal has barely featured in the Jewish Chronicle, but its been all over the blogosphere.Some have protested that these messy employment practices are an abuse of our requirement not to be a scoundrel in the face of the law

L fnin mishurat Kadin

But that misses the point entirely.

The problem is that employment regulations are halachah.It is prohibited to treat employees badly not from some cosy ethical standpoint.It is prohibited as a matter of din.

So where now?

I feel a sense of obligation to the families left in Postville, stripped of a source of labour that they should never havebeen offered, but now cannot do without.The local Churches are being overwhelmed by those indesperate need of support. I have pledged some of my own funds, anyone wishing to join me is invited to send a cheque to the shul marked for this purpose.

But there is also something else.

Something more important and far broader in its impact.

This grubby, far away, incident at Rubashkins threatens to draw the veil from all the things we don't want to see in these lives we live, driven by consumption.

Abraham Joshua Heshcel put it most forcibly.

why is it only required for butcher shops to be under religious supervision? Why not insist that banks, factories and those who deal in real estate require hekhshers and be operated according to religious laws? When a drop of blood is found in an egg, we abhor the idea of eating the egg, but often there is more than one drop of blood in a dollar or a lira and we fail to remind people constantly of the teachings of our tradition.

There is much in the papers and on the news about the horrors of price increases, fuel, food.

But the truth is that we pay too little for the resources we consume.

We cannot justify paying the paltry amounts we do for our food; even kosher meat, and we protest at the cost of kosher meat.

Rubashkin pay £5 an hour to their chicken pluckers. How much would you want to be paid to sit day after day in Iowa plucking chickens?

We cannot justify paying as little as we do because of the true cost of plundering the resources of the world is far greater than the £4.99 we might splash out on a T-shirt.

We cannot justify it because the true cost of a litre of diesel is far greater than £1.20 or even the £1.30 that is around the corner.

There is as Heshcel puts it blood in our dollars.

We are denuding our planet of natural resources and we are oppressing the poorest on our planet by forcing them-to turn these natural resources into consumables for our amusement and entertainment.

We assume our food, like the manna in the midbar, arrives miraculously and we drive down our prices because it makes us feel better.

We assume that clothes come ready made, without a sweatshop of Chinese tailors or Bangledeshi seamstresses having to pour over them.

We need, desperately, to being to take seriously the true cost of consumption.

We have become, since I have arrived here at New London, a Fair Trade Synagogue.

It's an embarssment, frankly.We get a certificate. You can see it in the kitchen. It means that we promise to serve only fair-trade coffee and chocolate, as long as its not too difficult for us to get these items.

How hard is that?

We need something far deeper

We need to relook at how much we really need to consume, compare it to how much food we throw away rotten, or clothes lying ever un-worn in our wardrobes.It's easy to point a finger at Rubashkin.

And Ido.

But we all need to take responsibility for the pressure put on suppliers of consumables to feed us, cloth us, tend our every whim.

We need to conduct personal consumption audits.

And we need to fear God.

veyareita me-eloheicha

For, in the final moments, our excesses of consumption and the oppression of the poor and the needy labourers we have all effectively imprisoned with our will to consume will stand before us, stacked up among the debits of our

lives.

Shabbat shalom