Re'eh 5768

Re'eh: Mann Ist Was Mann Est: One Is What One Eats.

This old German folk saying is relevant not only for our physical health and our body's condition but also for our spiritual health and our soul's condition. The German proverb is taken seriously by many of the world's religions that seek to elevate the physical act of eating that humans have in common with animals to a spirtual discipline characterized by dietary laws. This is the common denominator for Hindus, Buddhists and Taoists in the Far East, for Jews Christians and Muslims in the West and even for Native Americans and Australian and African aborigines. But the objectives of each religion are different as are their dietary laws that express the unique culture of each tradition.

For Jews the objective is the hallowing of life expressed in the reverence for life as indicated by the verse in our Torah portion: "But make sure that you do not partake of the blood; for the blood is the life and you must not consume the life with the flesh (Deut.12:23). From the Jewish perspective, as explained by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel and the greatest Kabbalist of the 20th century, vegetarianism is the human ideal. The first humans in Eden were vegetarians and the Jewish messianic vision pictures all of humanity and even the animal kingdom as vegans in the Messianic Age (Isaiah 11).
According to this interpretation, the eating of meat was a concession made owing to the decline in human spirituality and moral consciousness after the Flood in the time of Noah (Genesis 9: 2-4). This is the general principle according to Rav Kook. But is there any significance in the detailed laws in which animals, birds and insects are classified as kosher or non-kosher?

First, as the ETZ HAYIM Torah commentary (page 637) points out on the dietary laws discussed in the Sidrah Sh'mini (Leviticus 11:1-47), considerations of health do not play a role nor does concern for meat spoiling in the desert heat. Does one really need a law prohibiting eating spoiled meat? The central issue as stated in Leviticus 11:44 is holiness. The root meaning of holiness is to
"set apart," and the Jewish dietary laws do have the intended purpose of setting apart Israel from the nations, Jews from non-Jews. They are a badge of Jewish identity. Holiness also implies unity, integrity, as well as perfection of the individual and the species. As biblical scholars and anthropologists have pointed out, holiness in this sense applied to the dietary laws means that kosher animals conform fully to their class. Non-kosher animals are imperfect members of their class or their class itself confuses the scheme of creation and the order of the world. The pig does not conform to the perfect model of the domesticated meat-animal in a rural socie ty because it is not ruminant (does not chew its cud) though it has cloven hoofs. The Torah law code sought to
separate not only animals that were generic opposites but even those that appeared dangerously close to each other. Thus the prohibition in our Torah portion of boiling a kid in its mother's milk (Deut. 14:21). The Hebrew mind had a horror of the hybrid whether it was an animal bird or insect that seemed to straddle two groups or even a fabric woven of linen and wool (Deut. 22:11).
This lack of separation symbolized the return to chaos that existed before God's separations in Genesis 1 that are the hallmark of creation.

To sum up, the dietary laws symbolize for Jews and non-Jews that as God brought order out of chaos, so must Jews, by using as food creatures that fit safely into clear categories of classification. Similarly, by avoiding as food the indeterminate and amorphous species that evoke echoes of primordial chaos, the Jews symbolically demonstrate their obligation and determination to uphold the clarity and order of creation. The Jewish dietary laws consider as non-kosher the meat of predatory animals or birds because as God is a living God and God's commandments confer life on those who observe them, so must Jews forfeit as food creatures that are primarily predators.

Rabbi Joseph Schultz