No foolin'?

The goal of this blog is to bring some food consciousness to the Shabbat table.

I can still recall the day my grandfather ("Pop") explained kashrut to me.

We were sitting in his office.

He had the corner office at the Firm. He was senior partner.

Pop puffed his pipe. He leaned slightly forward in his roomy black leather chair. It was the biggest chair I had ever seen and once in a while he let me sit in it, briefly.

At such moments, he always smiled and his eye twinkled. It pleased him to share his wisdom with me.

"Years ago," he began (nowadays people say, "in the olden days," but for Pop, it was always, "years ago..."), "Jewish people didn't eat pork because it was susceptible to trichinosis. It was for health reasons. Nowadays, we don't have that concern, which is why we don't need to worry about the dietary laws anymore."

I wonder if Pop ever considered the fact that Romans and Chinese and many other nations "years ago" ate a lot of pork. Were they suffering epidemic raters of trichinosis? If so, kashrut must have given the Jews a remarkable advantage. How were the Jews able to keep the secret for so long?

And what about all the other non-kosher animals? What about the slaughtering rules? What about the blood issue? What about the milk and meat business? What about orlah and shevi'it? What about the fins and scales business? What about the Forbidden Fruit?

Years later when I started to keep kosher, I visited my grandparents and made all kinds of trouble with my diet.

With that same smile, and that twinkle, Pop said to me, "Haven't you ever heard of the expression, 'When in Rome'?"

"Sure," I said, "But look what happened to them - they're gone and we're still around!"

He chuckled.

And all the kidding stopped when a great-grandson named Seinfeld was born.

Question for your table: What do you think is the purpose or meaning of kashrut?


Shabbat Shalom

PS - Here's a link to the above book.


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Kosher Pork Chops

A few years ago, I was teaching a walk-in class in Seattle. The participants looked like a cross-section of mainstream Seattle.

The class was about the intersection between the mundane and the mystical. At one point, I asked, “Who knows the bracha to make on pork chops?”

“That’s a trick question,” a young lawyer answered. “You don’t make a bracha on non-kosher food!”

“Ah – but what if someone were starving, and the only thing they had to eat was pork chops? If they need it to save their life, then pork becomes temporarily kosher!”

Afterwards, an older lady came up to me with a word of protest. She was friendly but quite driven. “I’m a survivor of Auschwitz,” she said. “After we were liberated, we were starving. There was some non-kosher meat, and we ate it. But we would have NEVER eaten pork!”

First question for your table: What is it about pork?

Keeping kosher, gotta love it, gotta hate it.

On the one hand, it's so easy now. Walk into any Safeway and you'll find that little O-U symbol everywhere. Trader Joe's even publishes a list of their kosher products.

On the other hand, there aren't very many kosher restaurants, and very few great ones.

I used to associate "kosher" with being "religious". A little bit fanatical. But then again, I used to think someone who strictly reported every penny of income or stringently avoided gossip was also a bit fanatical.

Second question for your table: If, as Hillel said, the essence of the Torah is how we treat others, how does “kosher” fit in.

Once upon a time someone promulgated a myth that the kosher rules are based on health concerns. Pork and shellfish can carry diseases, right?

The problem with that logic is that lots and lots of ancient people ate pork. If the Jews had some kind of health secret, wouldn't word have leaked out? The Romans were ruthless, but they weren’t dumb.

In fact, it was only when the early Christians (who were Jews) discarded the kosher rules that they were able to attract Gentile converts. If it were all about health, they should have just told the potential converts, "You'll live longer if you avoid pork!"

It took me a long time to figure out this whole kosher thing.

Finally I figured it out.

It's really quite simple: The idea of kosher is: Train yourself to think: "You can't eat everything."

Think about it.

(There is an esoteric teaching about pigs becoming kosher in the Messianic age. I’m not going to put it on the blog, but email me if you'd like the details.)

Shabbat Shalom

Kosher Talk

Dedicated to Yaakov ben Ora Belka, may he have a speedy recovery.

This guy brings a small bottle of milk to the yeshiva to enjoy with his coffee. He puts a note on it: “Enjoy this milk, but please do not use last quarter-inch.”

When he goes for his 11 am coffee, to his dismay he finds the bottle empty.

The next day, he makes a larger note, so it will be crystal-clear.

Same thing happens – someone finishes the milk.

The third day, he tries a different note: “You may enjoy this milk but not the last quarter-inch – doing so constitutes geneiva (theft).”

Guess what happens? At 11 am the bottle is empty!

The fourth day, he tries an entirely different tactic. He puts a note on the bottle: “CHALAV STAM” (unsupervised milk).

Guess what happens?

At 11 am, he finds the bottle full.

Some of us are more careful about what we put into our mouths than what comes out of our mouths, or how we treat others.

If you keep kosher and dress and act religious but knowingly gossip or cheat or steal, you are a fraud.

On the other hand, if you don’t keep kosher but never asked what that means, then you are not living up to your potential.

Shabbat Shalom

PS -

Here is a short video about the Land of Milk and Honey:


Here is Ambassador Yoram Ettinger speaking plainly about reality in the Land of Israel:





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Chicken

Last night, my son came back from his first overnight field trip. One of the lowlights, the way he tells it, was a visit to a kosher butcher where chickens are slaughtered. While most of the boys crowded around the butcher to watch how a chicken is shechted, my son reports that he stood in the back and could not look. The sight of all that blood on the floor and all those dead chickens was enough to make him a vegetarian (but he thinks he can still enjoy his mother’s cholent).

I probably would have reacted the same way.

How did we get so squeamish?

(Some say that kosher shechita is the most humane way to kill an animal. See the video below and decide for yourself.)

A better question: is our squeamishness a cultural advancement or setback?

I remember when I was a kid, I thought that kosher meant that the food was blessed by a rabbi. What it really means is quality control. My brother Keith, the award-winning science reporter for NPR in Seattle, is visiting this week with his family and tells me that the FDA is trying to figure out how to deal with the mushrooming level of food imports from Asia, especially China and India.

What kinds of foods are we importing from India?

Spices. Evidently, the spices that you buy in those little jars may contain certain ingredients not on the label, such as pieces of dead insects. Hard to inspect that many millions of pounds of curry powder!

Which gets me thinking: do most people care about this issue? If I told you that your dinner contains turmeric which contained .01 percent finely chopped insect parts, would you care? What if I told you that there was a fair chance that it contained finely chopped insect parts?

Well, I guess it’s hard to eliminate or even lower the element of chance.

Unless, of course, it has that (U) or (K) in it, or “Star-K” or the like.

(Sorry, the © sign doesn’t help.)


Shabbat Shalom


PS – Not so squeamish? Here’s an excellent interview of a kosher shochet:

PPS – to learn more about the kosher supervision industry, see http://kosherquest.org


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