JUDAISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The Spiritual Ecology of Kashrut

by Rabbi Samuel Weintraub
Rabbi Samuel Weintraub is the rabbi of B'nai Israel of Danbury, Connecticut.
This article is reprinted with permission from Reconstructionist, Winter 1991/1992, pp. 12 - 14.

There is no regular human activity so laden with personal and cultural meaning as that of eating. We eat not only to sustain our bodies, but also to allay our anxiety, to celebrate our success, and to drown our sorrow. Families use the dinner table to reward a child's obedience, establish a sibling's dominance, or punish a child's rebellion. Our cultures -- secular and religious -- prescribe rituals of eating to celebrate victories, mourn losses, install our leaders, and bid them farewell.

Over the last three decades, our attitudes and practices of eating have undergone a veritable revolution. Beginning with classic works like Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, legions of nutritionists, chefs, holistic healers, spiritualist teachers, consumer advocates, and environmental activists have changed everything from crop pesticides to digestive supplements. Health food stores have expanded from the unkempt fringes of Haight Ashbury and the East Village to Nob Hill and Fifth Avenue. Blue chip conglomerates, like Kellogg's and Nabisco, now promise pure fiber, no cholesterol, low sodium, and natural sweeteners. Every person reading this article knows a number of people who have quit smoking, limited their fat intake, stopped eating red meat, and begun vitamin plans.

Another, and often profitable, example of this revolution is the proliferation of new diets. A browse through any major bookstore confronts the shopper with scores of popular, alternative regimens: Pritikin, Maximum Metabolism, Macrobiotic, Rotation, Mood Control.... the list is endless.

Traditional Judaism also prescribes a diet, the biblical-rabbinic system of kashrut. This system is presented in the Torah in four different places, the most detailed of which is Leviticus Chapter Eleven, which contains a long list of permitted and prohibited animals. For example, you may eat animals that chew their cud and have a split hoof, like cattle and lamb. You may not eat animals that either don't chew their cud or don't have split hoofs, like rabbits and pigs. Most domestic fowl, like pigeons and turkeys, are permitted; most wild or predatory birds, like ostriches and eagles, are not. You may eat fish with fins and scales, like trout and snapper. You may not eat fish that don't have these traits, like mussels and lobsters. Also forbidden are a great variety of other living things, like insects, reptiles and "swarming crawling things." Later, after the biblical period, the rabbis further developed this system, creating more distinctions, and introducing shekhita, a special, ritual slaughter for the permitted land animals.

To many today, the ancient Jewish system of kashrut, when juxtaposed with our modern, scientific regimens, seems mysterious and inaccessible at best, or anachronistic and irrational at worst. The sound health literature of the past three decades gives little indication that our bodies or our planet will be much worse off for our avoiding rabbit and consuming chicken, or our avoiding pork and eating flounder. Indeed, it seems that even many Jewish educators today feel uncomfortable with kashrut. While creative books are written explaining and promoting Shabbat, the Jewish holidays, the Jewish life-cycle, or Jewish ethics, scant, and often ambivalent attention is given to kashrut. The Jewish Catalog, one of the most popular interpreters of Jewish tradition to contemporary Jews, in its chapter on kashrut devotes ten pages to kosher food recipes, six pages to a guide to keeping kosher, but only four paragraphs to the possible meanings of kashrut!

Of course, there are contemporary thinkers who have sought to make these ancient traditions meaningful. Their writings essentially root kashrut in one or more of three rationales: ethics, Jewish nationalism, and personal spiritual development. The ethical basis of kashrut was stressed by Samuel Dresner who (with Seymour Siegel) wrote The Jewish Dietary Laws for the Conservative movement in 1959. Dresner describes, for example, the prohibition against eating animals that are either predator or prey, the relatively painless slaughter of shekhita, the concern with the morality of the shokhet, or ritual slaughterer, and, as the biblical text implies, the inception of kashrut as a compromise with the original biblical ideal of vegetarianism.

Mordecai Kaplan specifically endorsed kashrut as a means to perpetuate "Jewish identification and distinctiveness...The urgency for strengthening whatever factors in Jewish life make for survival is even greater now than in the past...[kashrut] is particularly effective in lending Jewish atmosphere to the home, which, in the Diaspora, is our last-ditch defense against the inroads of assimilation." [1]

Kaplan also appreciated kashrut for "generating spiritual values, in that it can habituate the Jew in the practice of viewing a commonplace physical need as a source of spiritual value." [2] Herein, Kaplan is drawing closer to the original rationale for kashrut. Why, according to the Torah, do we keep kosher? If we turn again to Leviticus, we find that, after the enumeration of permitted and prohibited animals, the text concludes: "For I am the Eternal your God; sanctify yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am holy." We keep kosher to be holy, as God is holy. Moreover, this concept of holiness is associated more frequently and strongly with the dietary laws than with any of the other 613 biblical commandments.

What does it mean to be holy, to be godlike? Partly, it means living ethically, for God is associated throughout the Torah with justice, compassion, and mercy. But holiness is more than ethical living; it involves an underlying religious attitude from which ethics and other humanistic systems are built. [3] That attitude, as Abraham Joshua Heschel described so eloquently, is one of awe, of an overpowering, nonrational appreciation of purity and completeness in the world and purpose and caring in all life. In strikingly ecological language, Heschel once defined awe as an "intuition for the creaturely dignity of all things and their preciousness to God." [4] This sense paves the way for ethics. As Professor Fritz Rothschild writes, "One has to be responsive before one can become responsible." [5]

Jewish ritual tries to maintain within us this sense of awe and responsiveness. In one essay entitled "A Loaf of Bread," Heschel wrote: "We say 'Blessed be Thou, O Eternal our God, Ruler of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.' Empirically speaking, would it not be more correct to give credit to the farmer, the merchant and the baker? [Rather] we bless God who makes possible both nature and civilization." [6] Similarly, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, the Hasidic master, taught, "'Who brings forth bread from the earth' because through bread we bring divine wisdom into our world, announcing (with the Psalmist) 'All the world is full of God's glory!'"

As with the blessing over bread, so with ] kashrut. As some insightful scholars have observed, the original biblical system of kashrut served as a reminder to people of the world of when they believed it was first created, pure and whole. In a pathbreaking essay, "The Abominations of Leviticus, " the anthropologist Mary Douglas noted a correspondence between the patterns of permitted and prohibited animals and the classification of animals in the Genesis creation story. She points out, for example, that animals fall into certain "pure" categories at creation by virtue of their means of locomotion, whether walking on all fours, swimming, or flying. Thus, animals that blatantly cross the primordial boundaries -- like the crustaceans which are sea-bound yet crawl -- are impure. [7]

The specifics of this analysis are debatable, but herein I am interested in Douglas's general appreciation of the connection between biblical kashrut and creation. For Douglas, kashrut sustained a collective Israelite consciousness of the origin and preciousness of the natural world. By their food laws, the Israelites appreciated order and wholeness in the natural world, and joined in the holiness of that world's Creator. Kashrut, then, is a kind of spiritual ecology, manifesting a deep, subliminal process which Mircea Eliade termed "religious nostalgia," the universal desire of people to "live in the world as when it came from the Creator's hands, fresh, pure and strong."

Today, however, even for those who observe it, kashrut has been emptied of much of its spiritual content, which explains perhaps why books like The Jewish Catalog approach it so tentatively. And the fault for that lies not in those who observe kashrut, who are mostly well-meaning, serious people, but in modern society, which has so desacralized the world. To the primitive Israelites of the Torah, the existence of the natural world meant something. The spirit of God breathed through it; a good and fertile land was a sign of God's blessing, and the prophets' Messianic forecasts spoke of lions and lambs, fig trees and green pastures. For modern, technological people, however, the world is mostly a sum of physical reserves we'd better exploit cleverly, and not stupidly exhaust. Steers and veal calves, in the idiom of American agribusiness, have become "biomachines" (and, unfortunately, most of our kosher-slaughtered meat originates in the factory-farming of these "biomachines").

We must re-cultivate a spiritual appreciation of the natural world if we are to cherish and preserve kashrut. Otherwise, to paraphrase Heschel, kashrut becomes a lovely response to a question no one is asking anymore. Fortunately, we have, in modern ecological consciousness and in the traditions of kashrut, possibilities to inspire that sense of awe towards the natural world.

As a first step, it is important that eating cease to be an automatic, unconscious act. To quote Nachman again: "One who does not savor ones food has clearly separated from the God of Blessing." Sadly -- with pre-cooked foods, microwaves, take-out and home delivery -- many of us hardly touch our food before consuming it, let alone physically prepare it or reflect on its origin in divine love and wisdom. To appreciated again this sacred origin, it will be helpful to teach people these blessings before eating foods and to create new meditations to ponder before the blessings. Further, given the harmful character of much modern food, these kavanot might reflect on the mitzvah of preserving a healthy body.

Indeed, a renewed attention to kashrut should creatively engage our society's concern with health and ecology. Since kashrut is, originally, a meditation on the world as "fresh, pure and strong," Jewish educators should develop serious, adult classes in ecological kashrut. These classes would consider which foods are kosher in the primordial sense, which foods preserve the world's original wholeness. Are highly processed or refined foods kosher? Can we, for example, label as kosher the tomato sauce that our children eat in school cafeterias, even if it contains no meat or lard, when, as one study recently found, the actual vegetable content of some sauces is a low as eight percent?

Further, since kashrut is concerned with the purity of our food production, as well as consumption, these classes should consider the social and natural contexts of our food manufacture. Should a Jew eat lettuce picked by California migrant workers with canisters of toxic organophosphates strung from their shoulders? We should at the very least question the kashrut of food that is the product of child or other oppressed labor, or the cause of natural perdition, as is much cash-cropping and cattle overgrazing. Nor would this concern be new to Jewish tradition, which has since the writing of Leviticus forbidden the enjoyment of the fruits of oppression.

These classes should also study Dresner, Douglas, and others who recover the ecological and moral messages of kashrut. Particular attention should be given to the medieval, mystical Jewish tradition, which explored the spiritual importance of our eating. The Iggeret Hakodesh, a 13th century tractate on sexual morality, for example, devotes one chapter to the proper diet before intercourse. It argues that the kind of food a man eats, and the way that he consumes it, will affect the embryo, fetus and offspring that he engenders. The Iggeret especially notes the placement of the dietary laws in Leviticus before the discussion, in Chapter 12, of a woman giving birth: "The placement of the [chapters]...is to inform you that a man must sanctify himself by eating foods proper for intercourse, in order that his seed be clean, holy and moderate." Today we may disagree with the biology and male-centeredness of the Iggeret, and we may be more reticent about the spiritual influence of the foods that we consume. Nonetheless, the tractate teaches that how and what we eat forms part of a great ecological system whose physical and moral consequences surpass our immediate consumption.

Finally, just as educators have developed "ladders" of observance for those wishing to keep Shabbat, we might formulate a ladder of kedusha within kashrut. This ladder might begin with the observance of the Toraitic laws, move from there to following the rabbinic expansion of kashrut (especially as it concerns the preparation of food), then to avoidance of food that modern nutrition deems harmful, and on up to complete vegetarianism, the original, biblical ideal.

These suggestions, hopefully, will not only enhance the observance of kashrut, but also heal the split that tragically, many Jews feel between their Jewish identity and their ethical or humanistic concerns. For both kashrut, and the modern ecology movement, are rooted in the religious quest for the purity of human origins. And the Jewish traditions of kashrut are rich enough to serve national Jewish survival, individual spiritual growth and planetary well-being.

Notes
1. Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, p. 252.

2. Ibid.

3. Jacob Milgrom, "The Biblical Diet: Laws as an Ethical System," in Studies in Cultic Theology and Terminology, pp. 109-110.

4. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 75.

5. Heschel, Between God and Man, edited and introduced by Fritz A. Rothschild, p. 29.

6. Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 63.

7. Mary Douglas, "The Abominations of Leviticus," in Purity and Danger, pp. 41-57.