In re those silly kosher laws

The kosher laws, beginning with the ones in last Shabbat’s parashah, Shemini, have been among the most controversial and least observed categories of mitzvot throughout our history. To so many people, at least from the days of the Second Temple on, the whole idea of kashrut is nonsense.

It was that way back then, and it is likely even more so today, because there is so much more for people to complain about today than there was 2,000 years ago.

People come up with all kinds of justifications for why they consider kashrut to be nonsense.

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One of the most popular justifications is that many of these laws are just plain silly, such as not putting a clean tablecloth used for dairy meals on a table at which meat will be served. If a body of law, say these naysayers, contains such nonsense (their word, not mine), then that whole body of law is silly and may be ignored with impunity.

Really? California law makes it illegal to eat a frog that died during a frog-jumping contest.

In Georgia, people who sidle up to llamas do so “at their own risk,” meaning they cannot sue the llama’s owner if they were injured. They can sue, however, if they were injured by a bucking bronco or any other animal.

Another Georgia law — I really love this one — makes it illegal to carry an ice cream cone in your back pocket on Sundays. It is legal on any other day, but never on Sunday. Just do not sit down while carrying it there the other six days.

In Alaska, it is illegal to whisper in someone’s ear while actively hunting moose.

Kentucky outlaws selling dyed chicks, ducklings, or rabbits — unless they’re sold in quantities of six or more.

Then there is this finger-lickin’ good law that has been on the books in Gainesville, Georgia, since 1961: It is illegal to eat fried chicken there with anything but your fingers (not that anyone will make you fork over a fine).

Silly statutes exist in a great many law codes, but that does not make those codes any less valid. Only the kosher laws are treated so disdainfully.

What makes it worse is that these laws that either appear to be silly or are silly are not really “kosher laws” at all. Rather, they are fences that were built around the genuine laws of kashrut to protect us from accidentally violating one of those.

Well-intentioned and perhaps even necessary as some of these “fences” may have been when they were first imposed, the road to hell, as they say, is often paved with good intentions, and these fences are no exception. They have helped to obscure the reason for “keeping kosher” — a reason that is as relevant today as it ever was — and have thus caused so many people to mock those laws and the Torah that mandated them. That is a tragedy because its kosher laws are among the devices the Torah uses to train us to live moral and ethical lives as it defines morality and ethics.

There are two groups of law in the Torah. The mishpatim are laws with logical reasons, such as prohibitions against stealing or committing murder.

Chukim, on the other hand, are laws that have no rational reasons for being, or at least none that we can deduce. The laws of kashrut are chukim. On their face, they have no rational reasons for being.

Several of our Sages of Blessed Memory made this point by noting that God could just as easily have said that pig meat is kosher, but cow meat is not. Because God gave us these laws to teach us something in a way not easily ignored, God had to choose one over the other to create that way, and God chose beef over pig. I will come back to that.

There is nothing in the Torah about mixing meat and milk — not milk from cows and goats, and certainly not milk from birds. Mammals produce milk, birds do not.

In three separate instances, the Torah warns us against cooking a baby goat in its mother’s milk. A law that is repeated three times is a law the Torah takes very seriously.

In a strict constructionist sense, having chicken parmigiana for dinner does not violate this law because chickens are not goats, and chickens do not produce milk. Two of our most respected talmudic sages, Rabbis Akiva and Yosi Ha-G’lili (the Galilean), argued that mixing chicken with dairy of any kind is permissible by both the written and the oral law.

Cooking beef in goat’s milk also does not violate the Torah’s injunction because a cow also is not a goat, and the law specifies goat.

Because of its threefold repetition, Rabbi Akiva considered a goat to be a stand-in for all domesticated animals, so cooking beef in goat’s milk does violate the law even by his standards. Mixing the milk of undomesticated animals with meat, however, is allowed, he said, because they are not included in the Torah’s prohibition.

In order to keep us from inadvertently violating that law, though, our Sages built a series of “fences” that make an accidental violation virtually impossible. They banned mixing any milk with any animal meat, period, and we must abide by that. Eventually, despite what Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yosi Ha-G’lili taught, our Sages added chicken and other birds to the mix for various reasons. (They did not include fish because those reasons really would have been silly if applied to fish.)

In any case, today, the odds are astronomical that the cow’s milk we buy will have come from the animal that also produced that ribeye steak we are about to eat. The prohibition still stands, however, because it is not about what we may or may not eat and never has been. It is about making moral and ethical behavior part of our DNA in a profound way.

What is more basic to life (with the exception of breathing) than food and drink? And how often do we take a sip of something or snack on something without actually thinking about it first?

What would happen, though, if, before we took that sip or that bite, we had to stop and ask ourselves, “Am I allowed to have this”?

The kosher laws exist to force us to ask that question. It is the Torah’s way of accustoming us to make moral and ethical choices in everything we do.

There is something really gross about weaponizing a substance meant to sustain life in order to take life, but it is way beyond gross when that weaponized substance is the milk the victim’s mother produced to nourish it. In the 1st century C.E., the philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote that to do such a thing was to exhibit “a terrible perversity of disposition.” The person doing that demonstrates a profound lack of compassion, said Philo, who regarded compassion as an essential element of the soul.

In the 12th century, one of Rashi’s grandsons, the biblical commentator Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (the Rashbam) was equally blunt when he wrote that to do such a thing “is a shameful, distasteful thing.”

Rashbam added: “The Torah teaches you such things as a way of emphasizing…respect for life.”

The Torah has a very pointed concern for all life. We have a whole category of law that emerges from this concern — tzar ba-alei chaim, or “causing distress to living things” — which forbids causing unnecessary pain, physical or mental, to any living creature.

That is why the Torah wanted us to be vegetarians, something it made very clear in its very first chapter. When that proved impossible for us humans, God grudgingly allowed meat-eating, but only if we use the most exacting and humane methods of killing the animals we plan to eat.

This grudging acceptance on God’s part led the leader of the Jewish community in Judea in the early second century, the Sage who edited the Mishnah as we have it today, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, to say this: “The Torah teaches…that a person should not eat meat unless he has an extraordinary appetite for it” — an extraordinary appetite, not just an ordinary one. He also said this: “A person should not teach his child to [have an eagerness for] meat….”

There are some seriously gross practices, as well, when it comes to the forbidden seafood. Live lobsters, for example, are thrown into pots of boiling water. Raw oysters often are still alive when they are eaten, although I doubt that most “oysters on the half-shell” diners are even aware of this.

To sum up, because they involve two of our most basic needs, eating and drinking, the laws of kashrut are among the best ways for us to achieve holiness, which is possible only by living the moral and ethical lives the Torah requires of us. As the Rashbam put it, it is the Torah’s “way of emphasizing…respect for life.”

There is nothing silly about that.

It is truly sad that people think kashrut is silly, but why they do is even sadder: No one ever told them what keeping kosher is really all about.

Shammai Engelmayer is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.