Shabbat Shemini ~ On the Eighth Day / 2 April 2016 ~ 23 Adar II 5776
Whenever I speak with friends about travel, the conversation often shifts to the quality or type of food available. “What a great restaurant,” “I really loved the …” Travel conversations with traditional Jews—which often also relates to food—usually touches on what kosher food was available and how they dealt with their observance in another country. For committed and engaged Jews, one of our first travel concerns is whether there will be a kosher meal or something close to it. Cultural exploration involves cultural integrity.
This Shabbat, our Torah reading begins to shift focus from the sacrificial system for priests to structures of purity and holiness for ordinary people. Leading off the next section of Leviticus is the mitzvah of kashrut and the many dietary laws that have defined Jewish identity and practice. In Exodus we learned to separate milk and meat. In Leviticus, we are directed to the types of animal life that are permitted or prohibited for consumption. Domesticated animals must have split hooves and chew their cud. Fish must have both fins and scales. The criteria for birds are not given, but the non kosher fowl seem to be birds of prey. Only some locust/grasshoppers are permitted.
I have become a big fan of the writing of Michael Pollen. In his book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan points out that cooking mediates "between nature and culture”. He explores the classical elements of fire (cooking with heat), water (braising and boiling with pots), air (bread making), and earth (fermenting). He observes that eating the flesh of another living creature is a powerful act that requires social regulation. If kashrut depended exclusively on Leviticus, only meat consumed in the context of sacred sacrifice would be permitted. In Deuteronomy (12: 20-21), we are instructed about common consumption—eating fleisch outside the priestly purview, a practice that became normative.
In our Torah portion, the core concept of kashrut is mandated: “I am the Eternal your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy” (Lev. 11.44). In addition to the basic belief that kashrut is a path to personal holiness, many other explanations have been offered. One of the first efforts is found in the a composition—ostensible a letter from Aristeas to his brother Philocrates—composed sometime in the middle of the 2nd century BCE. In the context of describing the first Greek translation of the Torah, the letter reveals what Alexandrian Jews thought about the apparent arbitrariness of the dietary laws. One questioner asks, if God deemed all creation ago be good, why would one species be fit for eating but another not?
The letter indicates that the kohen gadol responds that these distinctions are intentional, instructive and allegorical, intended “to awake pious thoughts and to form the character.” Distinctions among birds teach us to avoid meeting our own needs at the expense of others. Cloven hooves remind Jews to discriminate between right and wrong in moral conduct. Ruminating on food teaches us to “chew on” the deeds of God.
A few centuries later, the Rabbis of the Talmud teach that kashrut develops self-discipline and humility. In the medieval period, Maimonides and Nahmanides suggest that there are medical reasons, an approach subsequently rejected by Abravanel. More recently, Leon Kass has returned to the ancient Alexandrian argument: the traditions and taboos of eating are intended to elevate the human from an animal-like state to that of a human being of culture. He writes that kashrut “build[s] into daily life constant concrete and incarnate reminders of the created order and its principles and of the dangers that life—and especially man—pose to its preservation. In these restrictions on deformation and destruction, there is celebration of Creation—and of its mysterious source” (Hungry Soul, 221).
Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik emphasizes moral character—humility—and covenantal identity when discussing kashrut. “By keeping kosher, Jews express the belief that they are chosen, separate from the nations until the end of time”. However, “the criteria employed in making these choices—hooves, leaping legs, and scales—remain unexplained…. In this way, the laws of kashrut inspire not arrogance, but humility; for even as the Jews are informed that they are the chosen of God, they are immediately reminded that they are not themselves gods.”
As many of you know, pork became the object of intense Jewish attention during the time of the Hasmonean-Maccabees: “A Jewish mother and her seven sons were arrested. The king was having them beaten to force them to eat pork” (2 Maccabees 7). The relationship between pork and oppressive power was evident during the Iberian Inquisition. Serving pig was an easy way to check the loyalty of new Christians.
Jonathan Schorsch cites The Singular Beast (1999), by French anthropologist Claudine Fabre-Vassas, who describes the denigration and exclusion of those who refused to eat pig —Jews and Muslims—in rural Europe. “Body parts of the pig were given Jewish names; Jews were called pigs (conversos were called “pork chops”); pigs served as stand-ins for Jews in Easter processions; Judas in Passion plays would be sprinkled with pig blood; ritual holiday meals had suckling pigs stand in for Christ; and people held children before baptism to be piglets, devils or little Jews who grew “pig’s teeth” and “Jew hair.” A line in a song from Burgundy put it this way: “The more we enjoy the piglet / The better Catholics we become.”
Anthropologist Marvin Harris believed Judaism’s pork taboo stemmed from the need pigs have for lots of water, a scarce resource in much of the Middle East. in Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas contended that kashrut regulations were an attempt to bring order to a disorderly world, as well as an attempt to effect order on high. Prohibited foods seems to break boundaries and not fall neatly into any category. Typical fish had fins and scales. Pigs were different from other farm animals. Cows, goats and sheep could also provide milk; pigs required slaughter. Returning to Leviticus, Douglas later proposed that Israelites were only allowed to eat animals that could be sacrificed. Prohibited animals were not impure, but rather that "it is abominable to harm them."
Even Christopher Hitchens, the noted atheist, got into the discussion. In God is not Great, he provided another reason. Noting similarities between humans and pigs—porcine DNA and human DNA are similar; porcine heart valves can be transplanted into humans; pigs are smarter than many other farm animals; pig skin looks almost human—he points out that the scent and sight of suckling pig and roasting human infants is similar. If his theory is correct, the intensity of the prohibition against pork may have been related to the revulsion against human sacrifice.
In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan describes four ways humanity obtains food: the current industrial system, the big organic operation, the local self-sufficient farm, and the hunter-gatherer. He follows each of these processes—from photosynthesis to a plated meal. Pollan points to a dilemma between nature and industry. Eating is our most profound engagement with the natural world, but industrial eating obscures important ecological relationships and cultural connections. This has become an important part of my thinking and the consciousness of many others in this century.
That last point is why I and other committed Jews are critical of Pollan, who once wrote, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.” I’m not troubled that he has a pet pig named “Kosher.” If he and other Jewish foodies love pork, that’s their choice. A decade ago, when Pollan appeared at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, the evening was described as including “many a joke about Jewish boys liking artisenal pork.” He devotes a quarter of the book Cooked to his quest to learn about a whole hog southern barbecue and discusses his own annual pig-roast. I understand that for some, transgressive activity—eating and enjoying what is forbidden—is like a savoury sauce for the meat. But eating pork as a way to declare themselves liberated from what they take to be an irrational superstition really troubles me. Pollan and others don’t respect kashrut. They deny its significance for others and they deny their own identities.
In 2013, Pollan discussed whole-hog barbecuing with talk-host Leonard Lopate. Pollan said, “I think there is a place for pork in the kosher rules…To the extent that the kosher rules are about eating ethically, I think eating pig can be a very ethical kind of eating.” To which his host commented, “Only two or three thousand years of tradition out the window.”
What I don’t get is how these same foodies can devote attention and praise to the wisdom of traditional food and kitchen culture, while simultaneously denigrating millenium-old patterns of Jewish eating. In this, they are similar to Jews who believe that it is desirable for other cultures to have their own language, literature and land, but find Zionism objectionable for Jews.
Pollan seeks to encourage “deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating.” He criticizes the abandonment of “the cultural norms and rituals that used to allow people to eat meat without agonizing about it.” Then he turns his back on his own culture, Judaism.
In his critique of the foodie culture, Jonathan Schorsch writes, “Almost every traditional cuisine that Pollan lauds developed as a strand within the holistic web of a traditional nature-culture that included supernature: mind, wisdom, spirit, cosmology. Practice emanated from this holism, yet Pollan and his peers have internalized the Western distaste for significant parts of it, a distaste that can, ironically, be read as itself part of the very process of modernization that Pollan decries.”
In the final section of his book, Food Rules, Pollan says that he is seeking a “set of manners, eating habits, taboos, and unspoken guidelines that together govern a person’s (and a culture’s) relationship to food and eating. He recommends eating only at a table, eating only with other people, taking a moment to meditate on where your food comes from before consuming it, or eating treats only on weekends. [He] attempts to add a dash of mindfulness and ritualization to the materiality of their food” (Schorsch).
As with good writing, the particular should illuminate the universal. Alice Munro’s stories are most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. A specific setting and circumstance can provide insights for readers far away to discover about themselves
The culture and character that our Torah tradition seeks to inculcate in us is most particular and quite universal. It teaches to recite berakhot of gratitude for our food, to eat at a table, to bring Torah discussion to our meals, to direct tzedakah for food to the poor, and to plan special feasts for Shabbat and Yom Tov. Most of all, self-restraint is one of the essential elements of kashrut and most of the other mitzvot. As Schorsch writes, “Kashrut comes within a dense, rich, long-standing culture promoting, ideally, upright, prudent, modest living, including reverence for and balanced coexistence with the natural world.”
Make no mistake. Although at Beth Tzedec we may have relaxed some rules for weddings outside of our synagogue, we strongly believe in the principles and practices of kashrut. We won’t coerce, but we will seek to convince.
Too many modern Jews are distant from our heritage, sometimes lacking knowledge, sometimes resentful. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach once commented that “I ask students what they are. If someone gets up and says, I’m a Catholic, I know that’s a Catholic. If someone says, I’m a Protestant, I know that’s a Protestant. If someone gets up and says, I’m just a human being, I know that’s a Jew.” But we want human insight to flow from a covenantal perspective.
Kashrut is more than simply kitchen Judaism. It travels with us wherever we go. It is a complex cultural quilt that says that through our particularity, through our traditions, we enter and express a universal aspiration to be more deeply human. The mitzvah of kashrut is not simply a cultural curiosity. Kashrut is a shot-out to each and every Jew, a reminder of our history and an aspirational call to the holiness that God has called us to embody.
http://rabbiedbernstein.com/tag/jonathan-schorsch/
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/87719/forbidden-food
http://azure.org.il/include/print.php?id=151
http://thetorah.com/the-earliest-explanation-for-kosher/
