Clean & Unclean

March 28, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

This week we read some of the early laws of what has since become known as Kashrut. Generally, the laws allow Israelites to eat animals that have split hooves, chew their cud, and walk on all four legs. Any fish that has both scales and fins is clean and may be eaten. Most birds are clean and may be eaten, but carrion birds like vultures, eagles, and hawks that feed off other animals are unclean and may not be eaten. Insects are mostly unclean except for a few like locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets, which were favorite snacks for some ancient Israelites. Animals like moles, mice, lizards, and chameleons are also declared unclean and may not be eaten.

No one knows why some particular animals, birds, fish, and insects are designated as taboo in the Torah. For us, the pig and all swine were declared taboo, but cows were declared clean and permissible to eat. By contrast, Hindus considered cows to be taboo, saying they were too sacred to be eaten.

Attempts have been made throughout history to say that following the taboos listed in the Torah is healthy. Maimonides, who was not only a great rabbi but also a great physician, tries to make this point whenever he speaks about Kashrut. But today we know that most of the animals declared taboo in the Torah are no more harmful than those we eat. In fact, you are less likely to contract a disease by eating pork than by eating beef. And the diseases you contact by eating beef would tend to be much more dangerous than any you would contract by eating pork.

Nevertheless, Jews have an aversion to pork which is bred from thousands of years of believing in the Torah taboo. Or, as some pundits like to say, pork is only kosher for Jews if it occurs naturally in Chinese food or Texas barbeque. More seriously, you could say the same thing by saying that we set aside our taboos when it comes to matters of taste. It is certainly not health that controls what we eat. If it were, there would never be a single restaurant serving sushi. Not only that, but human tastes change over time. For many years in Europe, tomatoes were considered poisonous to humans and were not eaten.

But, if it is not health that is at the base, what is the meaning of the Torah laws? Laws concerning food taboos and food superstitions, whether they are Jewish or Hindu or Muslim, generally serve only one purpose -- to set one people apart from all others.

This issue of setting us apart is essential to the Torah. Most of what is listed as unclean is not much of a sacrifice. You are probably seldom in the mood to eat geckos or locusts. But the authors of the Torah probably never anticipated that these laws would become a fetish, carried to such an extreme that eggs which later become chickens would be declared parve or neutral, while chickens themselves would be declared fleshig or meat. Nothing in the Torah prepares us for such a lapse in logic.

There is nothing in the Torah about setting a time limit between eating meat and eating dairy. The Torah only warns us not to cook a baby goat in the milk of its own mother, but it does so as a kindness to animals, since people in ancient times lived close to their animals and knew them personally. It was the height of cruelty to take milk from Maddy the Goat and cook her baby Billy in it. You could still take milk from Maddy and cook the baby of some other goat in it. That was not so cruel.

Actually, this was the favorite dish of the ancient Near East. When the three strangers (who turned out to be angels) visited Abraham, he hurried to cook them up a feast of young goat in yogurt and, of course, they ate it. The point is that for us to live, we need to eat; and if we need to eat, something must die, whether it be animal or vegetable.

In this week's Torah portion, the dietary laws are only concerned with what is clean and what is unclean, what is pure and what is impure. But Kashrut is a system that developed long after the close of the Torah. Even after the close of the Talmud, Kashrut continued to be changed, becoming ever more complex and today there are scientists who analyze everything from toothpaste to the composition of prescription drugs. You might say that using diet to set us apart from other peoples has become an industry. And, like every industry, it usually seems that its main purpose is making profit for those who conduct it.

From the beginning in the nineteenth century, reformers set aside these taboos and food fetishes as hardly relevant to either their lives or their religion. In the modern world where injustice thrives, what should really set us apart from other nations is our drive to become a just society. I tend to side with the early reformers. When people cling to ritual fetishes like the arcane rules of kashrut, they tend to blind themselves to the real purpose of "setting us apart." As is says in our portion Shemini: "For I Adonai am [the One] who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God: you shall be holy, for I am holy."

We need to set ourselves apart less by what we eat or what we do not eat, and more by how we behave or how we refuse to behave. We need to be set apart in order to be "holy" as God is holy and in order to be "a light to the nations." Most of all, no matter what we choose to eat, we need to fulfill our ancient promise as a "kingdom of priests and a holy nation." And let us say: Amen.