What Does Building the Mishkan Have To Do With Kashrut?

By Susan Esther Barnes

An imaginary conversation with God:

Interviewer: Baruch ata Adonai, blessed are you Adonai our God, ruler of the world, who has agreed to speak with me today about the end of the book of Sh’mot (Exodus) in the Torah.

God: Thank you for asking me to be here today. Of course, I would have been here today anyway, since I am everywhere all the time. Still, I’m making a special effort to be heard right now because you have a question for me that really needs to be answered.

I: Thank you. It means a lot to me, as well as my readers. As you know, we have just finished reading the book of Sh’mot. A question that often comes up around this time is why, at the end of this book, are there these chapters with so many repetitive, detailed instructions about the building of the Mishkan (Tabernacle)?

G: Kashrut.

I: Bless you.

G: I didn’t sneeze. I said “Kashrut.”

I. I don’t understand. What does kashrut, the dietary laws, have to do with the building of the Mishkan?

G. I created the world and all that is in it, including human beings. Humans, some more than others, have a tendency at times to be a bit obsessive compulsive. So when I wrote the rules for building the Mishkan, I indulged those who want to engage in that behavior. I said what colors of yarn to use, and what kinds of metals, gems, hides, and wood. How many cubits long this should be and how many cubits wide that should be. Where each thing should be placed, how many of each thing there should be, etc. You get the picture.

I. Yes.

G. Does all that obsessive compulsive detail remind you of anything?

I. It reminds me a lot of the halacha (Jewish law) about kashrut. All those rules about separate dishes and ovens, and trying to figure out how much rennet is in the cheese, which heckshers it’s okay to rely on, etc.

G: Exactly. That’s the problem.

I. What’s the problem?

G. I know people can get obsessive in general, and that they often get obsessive about food in particular. That’s partly why I wrote Devarim (Deuteronomy) 4:2 and 12:32.

I. “You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of Adonai your God which I commanded you,” and “Whatever I command you, you shall be careful to do; you shall not add to nor take away from it.”

G. Right. So the point of all the detail about the Mishkan is to show everyone, “You want details? I can write details. Here they are. All the details you will ever need, and more.” And when I write, “Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” do you know what that means?

I. The rabbis tell us it means don’t serve any dairy products with any animal, including (probably) birds, and –

G. No. It means “Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” I never wrote anything about separate dishes, or birds with cheese, or any of those other details people have added over the years. I don’t know how I could have been any more clear about it. I showed you that I didn’t want a bunch of extra details read into to the laws of kashrut by demonstrating that when I want you to follow a lot of specific details, I will say so, like I did in Sh’mot when I wrote about building the Mishkan. If that weren’t enough, I followed it up by explicitly telling you not to add to my laws.

I. So all those laws about kashrut…

G. The laws about kashrut are in the Torah. The way I wrote them. All the rest is just commentary, written by you loveable, fallible people. Now go study.

It's Better to Have Loved and Lost...

By Susan Esther Barnes

It was sudden and unexpected. There were no lingering goodbyes, no time to savor our last moments together. It just happened. One day, much like every other day of my life, I was eating treyf (non-kosher food), and the next day, with no advance planning or noticeable forethought, I was not.

Though I admit I had dalliances with sausages and peppers, with ham and with shrimp, and a certain relationship with pepperoni pizza, my true love, it turns out in hindsight, was bacon. Bacon and lettuce sandwiches (no tomato, thank you), bacon on salad, and just plain bacon. This is the only thing I truly miss, the thing I wistfully think about; imagining its aroma, the texture of it on my tongue, the feel of it giving inexorably between my teeth as the flavor fills my senses.

It made me wonder, would it have been better to grow up in a kosher home, to have smelled bacon, perhaps at a friend’s house or in a restaurant, but never to have tasted it? Would it have been preferable to feel repulsed at even the thought of lifting a pork product toward my mouth?

Although I will never truly know what it would have been like, I don’t think it would be better. I like it this way. I like how this morning, when Rabbi Lezak mentioned kashrut (the set of Jewish dietary laws), I thought about my lost love, my bacon. I like that I thought about how I miss it, and what, if I abandoned kashrut, that first bite would taste like.

I like that, knowing fully what I am giving up, I know that by following this law I am in a covenant with God. I like that my next thought was, “I loved my bacon, but I love my relationship with God more.”

Ethics and Kashrut

By Susan Esther Barnes

Last week, a kosher poultry processing plant in New York was shut down due to health violations, including a lack of soap and sanitizers in the employee restrooms and processed chicken being stored in a tank without running water. This case brings to mind the much larger kosher meat processing plant, Agriprocessors, which was the center of a huge bruhaha a little over a year ago when it was accused of being in violation of labor laws as well as the mistreatment of animals.

At the time of the Agriprocessors scandal, the question arose, “How can meat be considered kosher if the animals and the workers are mistreated?” After all, one of the purposes of kashrut (the set of Jewish dietary laws) was to make sure the animals to be eaten would be slaughtered in a humane way, causing as little pain to the animal as possible. In other words, the animals were to be treated with compassion, and thus ethics and kashrut appear to be bound tightly together.

However, in the December 2009 issue of the journal Sh’ma, Daniel Alter writes, “Talk of the ethics of kashrut hurts Jewish ethics. It renders a tradition that possesses immense wisdom irrelevant at best and nonsensical at worst.” He later goes on to say, “Ethics is ethics; kashrut is kashrut,” as if they were two completely unrelated things.

This idea that one can separate ethics from the dietary laws – or anything else for that matter – is a foreign one to me. I would argue that ethics do, and should, permeate every part of our lives, from what we eat, to what we wear, to how we behave when we drive to work in the morning. How can we say food is “kosher,” meaning “fit” to eat, if the animals and/or the workers were treated unethically? Can something truly be considered to be ritually pure if it was prepared by someone who wasn’t paid a living (or even lawful) wage? What would be the point of ensuring an animal is killed quickly and painlessly if it were allowed to suffer needlessly in the days beforehand?

When we say laws are unrelated to ethics, or when we claim the letter of the law is more important than its ethical considerations, then we are worshipping at the altar of the idol of the law. And I think we all know bad things happen when we start worshipping idols.

On Keeping Kosher

By Susan Esther Barnes

I’ve heard a lot of people who are not Jewish say they know very little about Judaism, but one thing they do know is we have dietary laws that say, among other things, that we can’t eat pork. When we follow these laws (kashrut in Hebrew), it is said we are “keeping kosher.” (I don’t know why it’s called “keeping” kosher instead of “eating kosher,” but that’s a matter to explore at another time).

The ironic thing about this being one of the few things people know about Jews is that most of the Jews I know don’t make any attempt to keep kosher. I certainly didn’t, until just over two years ago. I didn’t have any intention to start, either, but one day I was standing in line at a Mexican restaurant, and I thought, “I can have cheese on this, but if skip the cheese, it will be kosher.”

Technically, an Orthodox Jew would still not call it kosher, for a whole list of reasons which I won’t go into here. With apologies to those who disagree, I’m going to refer to “keeping kosher” in this discussion as following the basic dietary rules laid out in the Torah (the Hebrew Bible). Namely, eating only those animals that have hooves and chew their cud, eating only those fish with fins and scales, and not eating pork. And for good measure, I’ll even throw in not eating meat or fowl together with dairy, although this strikes me as being a big stretch from the admonition in the Torah to not “boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” Especially since no fowl’s mother has milk.

So I was standing in line, thinking “If I don’t have cheese on this, it will be kosher,” and I ordered my lunch without cheese. Later that day when I was deciding what to have for dinner, it occurred to me that I had the same choice to make: For this meal, will it be kosher or not? Once again, I chose, for that one meal, to go with kosher. I made this same choice, one meal after the next, until, after a week or so, I decided it was enough of a pattern that it was time to tell my husband what I was doing.

I never made a commitment to keep eating kosher, and I still haven’t. I may keep doing it for decades without ever making a long-term commitment to it. But at some point over the last couple of years it changed from a whim, to an experiment, to a mild annoyance, to a habit.

Often, people around me have no idea I’m keeping kosher. It’s easy to order kosher food at a restaurant or to make kosher choices at a buffet without mentioning what I’m doing. When in doubt, vegetarian fare fits the bill without raising eyebrows.

When the subject of me keeping kosher does come up, I have received two kinds of responses. The first, from Jews and non-Jews alike, is curiosity. The two most common questions I get are, “Why are you doing this?” and “How does it feel?” I still don’t have a good answer to either question. To the former, I generally shrug and say something like, “I was standing in line at a Mexican food joint and I decided to give it a try.” To the latter, I generally say, “Not as annoying as it did in the beginning.”

I find the question about how it feels to be an intriguing one. Why do people think it would feel different? I suppose some people think it’s healthier, so perhaps they think I’ll say I feel more energetic or something. I don’t. Cutting out unhealthy foods like bacon and sausages still leaves plenty of room for potato chips, pie, cake, and other yummy, fatty, unhealthy foods. Maybe they think it would make me feel closer to the Jewish people, but it doesn’t. More on that later. Maybe they think it would make me feel closer to God, but there are a lot of other things that make me feel close to God with a lot less effort.

The second kind of response I get when I mention I’m keeping kosher is one I have received so far only from other Jews. It is open hostility. This is why keeping kosher definitely does not make me feel closer to the Jewish people. Rather, it distances me from some of them. I don’t know where this hostility comes from, but it must be from baggage these folks are carrying around from earlier in life, most likely from their childhood. Whatever the cause, even though I make it a policy not to even suggest that anyone other than myself ought to keep kosher, there are those who seem to respond to any mention of keeping kosher as if it were a personal attack.

So we are left with the question of why am I still doing this, more than two years later, if it doesn’t make me feel any different, and if it sometimes upsets other people. At this point, the only explanation I can offer is this: Keeping kosher is a mitzvah, a commandment. There are many other commandments that I keep. Every other commandment I do, be it giving money to a homeless person, observing Shabbat, or visiting someone in the hospital, makes me feel good. Therefore, to some extent, I do these things in order to feel good. Keeping kosher doesn’t make me feel good; most of the time it doesn’t make me feel anything at all. And that’s how I know it’s the only mitzvah I do only for God.