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SHIMINI: WE REFORM JEWS AND KASHRUT
by Rabbi Joel R. Schwartzman
Reform Jews keep seven days of Passover. That is, we don’t eat leavened
products for a full week. Our Orthodox brethren keep the dietary
restrictions for eight days. I? I didn’t eat any bread products until
after noontime on Tuesday, the eighth day. By standards of tradition, I
did really well this year. I drank no Coca Cola (even though Coke makes
a kosher-for-Pesach drink with no corn syrup, only sugar), and I
consumed no ice cream or chocolate chip cookies throughout the entire
holiday. So why did I end my abstention from bread and bread products
only after 12 on Tuesday? There are a few reasons, and some of them
pertain to the /parashat ha-shavuah/
which is Shimini. This portion
talks about some laws of Kashrut and sets down
some of the beginnings of
the complex and dizzying Jewish dietary laws, whether or not we keep
them. Oh, please don’t worry. This isn’t a sermon wherein I am going to
urge you to keep kosher. However, I wanted to talk about these laws and
their justification in our day and time because, as Jews, we should know
something about them even if we don’t keep them ourselves.
I have kept the Passover dietary restrictions to one degree or another
ever since I was a child. There was never a Passover we didn’t put our
bread products away and eat only matzah. Although
Orthodox Jews observe
the Pesach restrictions because they are commandments both in the Torah
and from rabbinic embellishments on Torah law, I suspect that, like me,
most of us keep the traditions because they are a way of honoring what
we did in our families. The customs grew up with us and now that we are
adults, we maintain that loyalty to our familial habits and traditions.
It is for this reason that I, for example, eat no pork products. They
were never part of my diet. I never knew them, so I never missed them.
And since I never missed them, and they were forbidden to my more
traditional neighbors, why start with them?
The Torah tells us not to eat of the pig. It doesn’t give any background
reason for the law. It simply tells us that any animal that does not
chew its cud and have cloven hoofs is verboten. The pig has true cloven
hoofs but is not a cud chewer. Over the centuries, people have come to
believe that the prohibition against eating pork and pork products like
bacon, ham, pork chops has been for health reasons. But, believe me,
they are wrong. The people who wrote the Torah didn’t know anything
about the trichinosis worm or bacteria, viruses or other
micro-organisms. They didn’t assign afflictions to cause-and-effect so
much as they did to a system of reward for good deeds as opposed to
punishment for bad ones.
No, the reason that a preeminent commentator, scholar and thinker no
less than Moses Maimonides, himself, gives for
the justification of the
laws of Kashrut is that these are laws which God
/has commanded/ us to
observe. God doesn’t tell us why. God tells us what to do and, if we
wish to serve God, we keep them. This is fundamentally the rationale
behind the entire Kashrut system for Orthodox
Judaism. When the rabbis
embellished the prohibition against shell fish and pork products with
the separation of milk and meat, the division of milchic
dishes and
tableware from fleshic, they saw themselves as
making a /siyag
la’torah/, a fence around the Torah. Later, in
Deuteronomy 14:21, Torah
says: “do not seethe the kid in its mother milk.” The ancient rabbis
didn’t know from cheese burgers, but in order to preserve Toraitic law,
they devised more rules, which kept the people even farther away from
the actual ordinance that God had proscribed in Torah. So again, the
thinking goes that if you don’t mix milk and meat in the same meal,
you’re not going to be breaking Torah law by boiling a kid in its
mother’s milk.
The rabbis also saw the keeping of the laws of Kashrut
as a vehicle for
self discipline. Plaut quotes the Midrash when he says: “…One should not
say, ‘I can’t stand pork!’ but rather, ‘I would like to eat it, but my
Father in heaven has forbidden it, and I have no choice.’” (Sifre on
20:26) In this way, on a daily
basis, the traditional Jew reminds him or
herself to behave in a God fearing way.
Reform Jews have mostly rejected the rationale as well as the practice.
To some degree, this has created a wall between us and our most
observant brethren. And it is not to deny that there has been a rise in
the number of Reform Jews who have re-introduced the kosher laws into
their lives. But their reasons for doing so are less an answer to Divine
decree, than a flip of their kippas to their
Jewish consciousness, of
wanting to feel more a part of /Klal Yisrael/, the people hood of
Israel, and of being able to open their homes to any Jew, whether
kosher-keeper or not, who might come to visit.
Another very cogent and compelling reason people who keep kosher give,
and I have found this to be true in my own experience, is that the laws
of Kashrut make you more conscious of what you
put into yourself, and
help remind you to be aware that, to a certain, degree, you are what you
eat. You also tend to be more cognizant of why you eat what you do when
you have to check packaging and keep food, dish and tableware-
separations in your thoughts as you prepare for every meal.
Of course there are those known as Classical Reformists who proclaim
that they don’t follow the circled “O” or “U” or “K” which indicate the
level and source of a product’s Kashrut on the
packaging in the grocery
stores. The circled “R” is enough for them! For them, that “R” might
just as well indicate “Reform!”
Like the majority of Reform Jews I know, I have rejected the
“serving-God” reason for keeping what dietary restrictions I do observe.
You all know quite well that I theologically have many problems with the
“Just World Hypothesis: if you do good, you’ll get
good; and if you do
bad, you’ll get bad.” Food taboos, as I have indicated, are more a
function of habit that I grew up with. But, in terms of Passover and the
reason why I went past noon time
to break my bread restrictions, let’s
face it. Pesach “ain’t” as hard to keep these
days as it used to be.
When I was growing up, the best you could hope for, for dessert, was
sponge cake and whipped cream…and maybe some strawberries. Yes, you
could find Passover candy, but it was usually expensive and not very
good for you. Today, there are so many wonderful Kosher-for-Passover
products, that it really isn’t much of a burden to keep the holiday’s
dietary rules. And besides, I like matzah; I love
charoset…especially
the way Ziva makes it; I love those marshmallow
cookies covered in rich
chocolate, and usually buy quantities of boxes of them because the
notice on the back tells me that Orthodox Ashkenazi and Sephardic rabbis
have approved the eating of the small amount of corn syrup in these
cookies as opposed to the corn syrup I would otherwise be eating in my
ice-cream!
All kidding aside, however, one of the reasons that I do not keep full
Kashrut, even beyond the decision that Ziva and I made years ago and
renew every so often, is that, to a great degree, the kosher food
business is an Orthodox Jewish racket. Have you noticed that products
that sell at one price the rest of the year often jump up by percentages
at Passover time? There is a reason, and it isn’t because of the laws
and commandments that God gave Moses (although they may claim it so),
that many Orthodox groups reject the Kashrut of
other Orthodox groups.
It simply comes down to a matter of /cesef!/, yes, money. In order for
some product to be judged “kosher” meaning “fit”, it must be
scrutinized, inspected and sanctioned by a rabbi. If your group’s rabbi
supervises the process, then he and, through him, the group he belongs
to gets paid. It often comes down to who controls the purse strings
which entwine the kosher food industry.
And let us be perfectly clear about the fact that these Orthodox groups
don’t accept you and me as Jews because we don’t keep the commandments
as they do. We fall outside what they believe defines what it is to be
Jewish. So, by buying these products, you and I actually help enrich the
very people who reject our claim to Judaism, our assertion that we are
Jews.
I will spare you the fullness of the rebuke I recently gave a fellow who
was on our Federation mission who, looking at the very, very frum
fellows praying at the Western Wall blurted out that the future of
Judaism lay with them. Suffice it to say, that I upbraided him by
telling him that they were the last people in whom Judaism would be
preserved. They were living in some past, dark century, and were
producing virtually nothing that would sustain them into any sort of a
future. It is people like this man who blindly give money to fanatics
like these who, in turn, given the power, would turn people like him and
you and me out from ever being part of Klal Yisrael. Their rejection of
the modern world and idolization of the Mitzvah system make the laws of
kashrut more important than the strength and
well-being of the Jewish
people.
Ironically, many today who have become Vegetarians and Vegans
fulfill
the Kashrut strictures. But their doing so often
has little to do with
their Jewishness. They, by happenstance and
philosophies derived from
other than Jewish sources, have come, for example, to a place of
respecting living things enough not to eat them. Although this is
respectful of God’s creatures, it isn’t because God commanded them not
to eat “things with faces,” as my daughter would put it, that they
abstain. Still and all, their homes would be perfectly acceptable to
Jews of all ilks, unless these Jews came with a
hankering for meat.
What we eat…what we choose to put into our bodies…is of vital
importance. As Reform Jews reach for authenticity in our Jewish-ness,
many of us are returning to customs which have long since been
abandoned. We are reinterpreting and praying prayers our Reform
forbearers rejected for theological and rational reasons. We are
re-introducing customs and observances, like the wearing of the /Tallit/
and /Kippa /that appeal to the desire to have
outward signs of what we
feel we are living inwardly. But we do these things not with the
rationale which generated them in the first place. We do them because
they are meaningful in some way to us; not because they are commanded by
God as a part of a theological system of belief.
Therein is study of a passage such as the one on Dietary Laws
exceedingly important to us. We need to know and understand the roots,
the sources of our Judaism. Having studied them, we come to know how and
why our ancestors observed them, why many Jews still practice them today
and how we shall approach them in our own lives as we move Judaism into
the 21^st century and beyond.
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