Imu Shalev: Welcome to Meaningful Judaism, where we try to answer why we do what we do in Jewish life. So many of our practices can feel like they’re just there; we do them but we’re not connected to them, we don’t feel their meaning. In this podcast, we search for that meaning by diving deep into the Torah text. Meaningful Judaism is a project of Aleph Beta Labs, and I’m your host, Imu Shalev.

Is There a Reason Behind the Laws of Kashrut?

And today, we’re talking about kashrus, the laws of kosher. We have so many laws that govern what we can and can’t eat, and how we eat, and how we prepare our food. Rabbis can spend as much as a third to a half of their rabbinic training on kashrus, because there are so many laws. And these laws, they make a big impact on our lives, where we shop, where we eat, even what our homes look like. With kashrus having that kind of impact, it would sure be nice to know the reason for going to such lengths. You know, the “why” behind it all. 

So in this series, we’re going to talk about many of these laws, like kosher and non kosher animals. Is there a rhyme or reason behind which animals we’re allowed to eat and which we aren’t? Or is it all random: Cows, good, pigs, bad? We’re also going to talk about cheeseburgers. Why is there a prohibition against eating milk and meat together? And we’re gonna talk about kosher slaughter and the laws of kisui dam, or covering blood with earth, that is a part of kosher ritual slaughter.

In this episode, you’ll be hearing me talk with my colleague Beth Lesch, a scholar here at Aleph Beta. We got deep into the meaning behind some of the most essential elements of kashrus, but the first thing we talked about was why this topic was so important, and I want to start there. Beth and I take inventory of some of the things we find difficult about kashrus on a few levels. Here’s me and Beth.

Kashrut in Our Lives

Beth Lesch: I'm thinking about myself, I’m thinking about my friends. And I think there's just a lot of social friction that comes up, having to do with kashrut, for anyone who is spending any time at all, personally or professionally, with people who don't keep kosher. There’s so much planning that you have to do. You're not eating in people's houses, you're going to a work conference and you're requesting a special meal, or you're eating a banana out of your bag.

Imu: Yeah, totally. And I think that it's kind of interesting that you just jumped to the way kashrus can complicate our lives when we’re with people who don’t keep kosher, as though there’s no imposition on our lives or anything at all complicated about keeping kosher when we’re by ourselves in our own homes.

Beth: Oh yeah, of course.

Imu: There are a ton of limitations we have when we keep kosher. But I think I understand why you jumped into interacting with others. Because I think, a lot of people who keep kosher, it doesn’t even register that we’re doing anything onerous or complicated. It’s just a part of life.

Beth: Right. When something is part of your daily experience the way that kashrus is, it becomes rote. You’re not focusing on the meaning of it.

Imu: And that’s kind of sad, isn’t it? It’s not just that kashrus is logistically difficult in a lot of ways. It’s also difficult to connect with, because it’s just so present that it’s like...invisible force. We don't even think about it. How often do you wonder about the deep meaning of not going to McDonald’s?

Beth: Yeah, not very often. You know, that is reminding me of another tricky thing about kashrus, which is – let me say it like this: It’s bad in and of itself to not know the meaning behind the laws of kashrut, just for our own personal spiritual journeys, but it’s also really hard to know what to say when people ask about it. People who are expressing sincere curiosity, they want to know, “Oh, so what’s the reason behind it? Why do you do it?” And it’s just not satisfying to start romanticizing chukim in that moment, right, and to be like, “Well, actually, I don't know why I do it, but it's my gesture to God, my Beloved, to show that whatever my Beloved asks me to do, I’ll do happily.” It’s not satisfying.

Imu: Yeah. And that reminds me: Shabbat is a really hard thing when you're in law school, and your study group wants to meet, and you explain that your religion requires you to actually take a break from “doing” and spend the moment in “being.” People are like, “Wow! That's really cool,” and you really do feel like the fulfillment of, “We’re the am chacham u’navon (wise and discerning nation)” in a mitzvah like that. Am chacham u’navon, by the way, is the idea that the nations of the world should be able to look at the mitzvos and see the wisdom in them. And that was easier to do than it was for me to explain why I couldn't taste the brownies that somebody had made, or why I couldn't go out to the restaurant that they had chosen in the evening, and why I constantly needed to bring my own food to every single event. If you can't explain why you can't eat bacon, and there you switch to say “No, it's a chok, and we do random things that God asks us to do…” then you don't quite feel like the am chacham u’navon if you don't have a good explanation.

Kashrut and Eating Animals

Imu (Narrative Insertion): So these are some of the difficulties in dealing with the meaning of kashrus. Typically, here at Meaningful Judaism, we dive into the Biblical text and read the various laws about whatever we’re talking about and see if there is any meaning contained in those verses. But when thinking about where to start, we were a bit perplexed. There are multiple places in the Torah that talk about kashrus: The section in Leviticus on kosher animals and non-kosher animals, the section in Exodus on mixing milk and meat, or the section that discusses ritual slaughter – when something sort of obvious hit us. If you’re talking about kosher, you’re really, by and large, talking about the laws of eating animals. Think about it: We don’t have laws about kosher and non-kosher fruits or vegetables the way we do about meat – “Thou shalt eat carrots, but stayeth away from grapefruit.” Kashrus is about which animals we can eat, and whether we can eat animals with milk, an animal byproduct, and things like that.

So we actually decided to split our analysis of kashrus into three parts, a kind of mini-series in our Meaningful Judaism podcast. And we’re going to talk about separating milk and meat and about kosher animals in later episodes. But to kick off our exploration, we’re going to talk about this big, fundamental question: whether and why we can eat animals in the first place. Once we understand that, it’s going to give us an important framework to understand kashrus and shed a lot of light on the meaning of the many laws. And oddly enough, the text that is going to help us understand whether and why we eat animals is the laws of ritual slaughter and the strange law of kisui dam, covering the blood of an animal. This law is in Leviticus 17, and Beth, who’d been researching this chapter, made a discovery there that had a pretty startling implication. It made her question whether we ought to be eating meat at all. Here’s me and Beth talking about her research.

The Law to Cover the Animal’s Blood

Beth: Chapter 17 talks about all these different things, about sacrifices and animals and blood. And I remember I happened upon this verse, chapter 17 verse 13: וְאִישׁ אִישׁ מִבְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל – if you are going to hunt some kind of game, whether it's a wild animal or a bird and it's going to be eaten, then here's what you have to do. You should spill out the blood and you should cover it with dust (Leviticus 17:13). And it struck me that there was something that smacked of guilt in that gesture, like we're covering up the blood, literally covering. I think the very next thing that I did was, I said: “Covering blood,” I don't think this is the only time the phrase comes up in the Torah, and I've heard this before. Where does it come up, and what might that tell me about what's going on here? So I stuck the phrase “covering blood” into my friendly Torah search engine and – aha! Aha! I knew why the words felt familiar. I was remembering them from Genesis 37, the story of Joseph and his brothers. Now maybe you’re thinking, where is there covering up blood in the Joseph story?

Imu: Literally what I was just about to ask.

Beth: Good. So here’s what happens: Joseph goes to check on his brothers. They see him and grab him and cast him into a pit. They sit down to eat bread, and then all of a sudden, a caravan of Ishmaelites are seen approaching from a distance. Judah speaks up, and he says, “What benefit is it to us if we kill our brother and we cover his blood? לְכוּ וְנִמְכְּרֶנּוּ לַיִּשְׁמְעֵאלִים – let's sell him to the Ishmaelites, and that way we won't be liable in his murder” (Genesis 37:27).

Imu: Wow. So “covering the blood” is really covering up a murder? 

Beth: It's a covering up of murder, exactly. It's an idiom. He is using this phrase, kisui dam, and he's not using it to mean literally, “Blood is on the floor, and you need to cover it up.” But it's what you do when you're guilty of murder and you don't want someone to know. And what's fascinating is that this isn't the only phrase that links the story of Joseph in the pit to that law of kisui dam that we were reading. There's other language here, too. Look at verse 22. Do you want to read it for me and tell me what you see?

Imu Shalev: Sure. וַיֹּאמֶר אֲלֵהֶם  רְאוּבֵן אַל תִּשְׁפְּכוּ דָם – Reuben says to his brothers, “Let’s not spill blood.” So it's not just covering, but let's not spill the blood of our brother. הַשְׁלִיכוּ אֹתוֹ אֶל־הַבּוֹר הַזֶּה אֲשֶׁר בַּמִּדְבָּר – “Let's throw him in a pit.” The context is when Joseph is approaching them, the brothers are actually thinking, “Let's go kill him.” And that might mean let's knife him, let's beat him up. But Reuben says, “Whoa! We shouldn't spill blood, right? We're not murderers. Let's actually sanitize this process, let's throw him into a pit.” וְיָד אַל־תִּשְׁלְחוּ בוֹ – and therefore, technically, no one will actually have made physical contact with him (Genesis 37:22).

Beth: Now what I found and still find so cool is, there's some connection between these two chapters of the Torah. But also, I think what we're seeing is that you've got one Torah idiom, which is kisui dam, the covering of blood. It doesn't just mean literally the covering of blood. It means the obscuring of guilt. And then you have another idiom, which is shfichus damim, the spilling of blood. Spilling of blood in Torah language means to murder someone. Step one, spill blood. Step two, cover blood.

Imu: It means it in our language, too. The spilling of blood refers to murder or war, violence.

Beth: Then what happens when you take those definitions and you fast forward and you go to chapter 17 of Leviticus? You can now look at this mitzvah of kisui dam, and you read the verse,  and the verse has two meanings, there are two layers. There's the literal meaning, which is the law and how we usually interpret it, and then there's the idiomatic meaning. So the literal meaning is, “Okay, a person who hunts game, he's going to eat it, what should he do? He should pour the blood out, and he should cover it with dust.” But what's the idiomatic meaning? You transfer from Genesis. The idiomatic meaning is, “A person who hunts game, and he wants to eat it, he commits a murder and he obscures the fact that he was a murderer.” That's what the verse is saying.

Imu: Yeah, it makes the slaughtering of game, or whatever it is, makes it feel like murder, which is a very, very strange place to be. When the Torah is telling you how to prepare an animal so that you may eat it, you're expecting a mitzvah to tell you the right, the good, the moral way to go through your life. It feels almost passive-aggressive of the text to say, “Yeah, you can eat it, I guess, if you love murdering things, if you just want to be like Joseph's brothers, and I guess you could spill the blood and cover it with dirt if you want to.” That's how it feels! So what is this mitzvah trying to tell me?

Were We Intended to Eat Meat?

Imu (Narrative Insertion): What we’re struggling with here is, most of us don’t typically think about the Torah as being a vegetarian manifesto. And yet what we’re seeing here is this implicit association the Torah is making between slaughtering animals and covering up murder. That sounds pretty anti-meat, and that just brings up so many questions. Like, are we really reading this right, or are we missing something? And if what we’re seeing here really is painting meat with the same brush as murder, what does that say about all of us out there who eat meat? Are we all in the wrong? Have centuries of Jews, celebrating festivals and joyous occasions with delicious dishes of meat, actually been party to some terrible atrocity? And now, thank God, Imu and Beth finally read the Torah carefully and figured it out, and, by the way, you’re welcome? That feels hard to say.

And there are other reasons to be hesitant around this claim, too. Like, what’s the deal with korbanos, animal offerings? If slaughtering an animal is something criminal, if it’s basically taking a life, why does God seem to invite us to do it all the time in the Temple? And also, maybe the most basic question is, Hey, God, if slaughtering animals is so bad, why go through this convoluted way of condemning it by explaining how to slaughter meat, but embedding all this language in it that subliminally whispers “murder”? Why not just come out and forbid it? Why be so coy? There are plenty of animals God forbids us from eating, so what are a few more?

The truth is, this last question, it’s actually more complicated than it may seem. Because, turns out, God actually did forbid eating animals. There’s a whole history to man’s ability to eat meat, going all the way back to literally the first chapter of Genesis. And when you know that history, it adds new dimensions to the questions we just asked. And it will help us better understand whether and how God wants us to eat meat, which, in turn, will help us understand the larger meaning behind kashrus. So Beth and I visit Genesis next.

Imu: You want to take us into Genesis 1?  

Beth: Mm-hmm, I do, yeah.

Imu: Maybe our first kashrus law. 

The Command to Adam and Eve

Beth: You know, not in the sense we’re used to thinking about kashrus. Really, the first time God tells us what kind of food we can and can’t eat. Okay, so it's the dawn of creation. Adam is standing on the earth. Everything has been created, and then God zooms in on the people. God gives a blessing to mankind, God tells mankind to be fruitful and multiply, that mankind is going to have dominion over everything. Yet the very next verse seems to temper that declaration of dominion. “So behold, I have given to you,” כׇּל עֵשֶׂב זֹרֵעַ זֶרַע אֲשֶׁר עַל פְּנֵי כׇל הָאָרֶץ – every single grass that is on the face of the earth, וְאֶת כׇּל הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר בּוֹ פְרִי עֵץ – every single tree that has in it a tree fruit” (Genesis 1:29). So this is God telling us what our menu is going to be. It's a plant-based diet. And I think the next verse builds on that and also further tempers the declaration of dominion, because we are not the only ones who get to order off of that menu. So every single animal, all the different kinds, the wild animals, the birds, the creepy crawlers, they also get the very same thing that God earmarked for us. אֶת־כׇּל־יֶרֶק עֵשֶׂב – Every green, grassy herb, that's what they get to eat for food (Genesis 1:30). So the animals also are not carnivores, not omnivores, but are herbivores.

Imu: Yeah, so what do you make of the fact that, right after we get the diet for humanity, we get the diet for the animals?

Beth: Yeah, interesting. By saying that we eat the same thing as the animals, God is drawing a food pyramid, and the food pyramid has two levels. The bottom is plants and the top level is humans and animals. So we are in a horizontal relationship at this moment in time.

Imu: Yeah. So, I don't know, just reading all of this, we're struck by the fact that the original humanity was vegan, or at least, the original humanity was intended to be vegan. 

Imu (Narrative Insertion): So let’s just take stock of where we are. First, we were sort of uncomfortable with the notion that eating meat is problematic, that it’s somehow a crime that needs to be covered up. It just didn’t match our experience in Judaism. And besides, if God wanted to outlaw it, He should have! Well, what we’re discovering in Genesis 1 is that God did outlaw the eating of meat. So now, what do we make of that? If we’re trying to get at the meaning of kashrus, and kashrus is principally about how we eat meat, it feels pretty important to know that God, ideally, doesn’t want us to eat meat. I think the most important question for us to tackle now is: Why did God change His mind? If eating meat is so problematic, if God originally wanted to forbid it, it should have stayed forbidden! Let’s take a look at when the law changed, and why it changed, and see if that sheds light on this mystery.

The Permission Given to Noah

God changes the laws about what man can and can’t eat at a moment of great turbulence in human history: right after the Flood, in chapter 9 of Genesis. God had caused the floodwaters to recede and tells Noah to leave the Ark. It’s that rainbow moment where God makes a covenant with Noah and humanity and declares never to bring a world-ending flood again. And as a part of that covenant, God changes the rules about eating meat. Here’s me and Beth reading and discussing the verses to see if we can figure out why – why God reversed course. And one of the first things we notice is that Noah coming out of the Ark to a brand new world sounds awfully similar to Adam in Genesis being created in a brand new world.

Beth: וַיְבָרֶךְ אֱלֹקים אֶת־נֹחַ וְאֶת־בָּנָיו – God blesses Noah and his sons, וַיֹּאמֶר לָהֶם פְּרוּ וּרְבוּ וּמִלְאוּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ – and He says to them, “You should be fruitful, you should multiply, you should fill the world.” Again, this is actually sounding very similar to Genesis 1. This is kind of like a recreation anew after the world has been wiped out. And then, in the same way that God followed that blessing with a declaration of how man should relate to the animals, it comes as no surprise, וּמוֹרַאֲכֶם וְחִתְּכֶם – “your fear, your dread, should be upon every beast of the earth” (Genesis 9:1-2). So, similar idea, but this feels like stronger language. 

What's the bottom line with all of these animals? בְּיֶדְכֶם נִתָּנוּ – “I'm giving them into your hand.” There's no limitation on that. It seems to imply whatever you want to do, you can do to them. And my question to God would be, “Really? Anything that I want?” And God says, “Yes, anything that you want.” The implication almost seems to be even — like, what's the craziest thing you can do? What is the ultimate expression of exercising your total control over them? That would have to be, you can even eat them. You can even snuff out their life and consume it and make it a part of yourself. כְּיֶרֶק עֵשֶׂב נָתַתִּי לָכֶם אֶת־כֹּל – I'm giving them to you in the same way that I gave you plants, back in Genesis 1 (Genesis 9:3).

So I keep coming back to the pyramid that's in my head. Like, where are animals on the pyramid? Are they with people? No, no, no, now we're pushing them down. Now they're on the level of plants, but there are some limitations even to that. אַךְ – “But, however, notwithstanding, בָּשָׂר בְּנַפְשׁוֹ דָמוֹ לֹא תֹאכֵלוּ – But if it has blood in it, you can't eat that” (Genesis 9:4).

Imu: Right, the text goes on to qualify this new permission to eat animals, and it says you have to stop short of eating their blood. Now, what would be really nice is if the text rounded it all out and said, “And thus is the reason I, God, hath changed My mind and allowed thee to eat meat!” But that’s not what we get. Instead, the text goes on and it says, “By the way, while we’re talking about not eating animal blood, I want to talk about people blood.” וְאַךְ אֶת־דִּמְכֶם לְנַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם אֶדְרֹשׁ – “However, even though you can spill the blood of animals, your blood, the blood-soul of humans, I’m going to seek it out.” שֹׁפֵךְ דַּם הָאָדָם בָּאָדָם דָּמוֹ יִשָּׁפֵךְ – “If you spill man's blood, by man your blood shall be spilled, כִּי בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹקים עָשָׂה אֶת־הָאָדָם – because humanity was created in the image of God” (Genesis 9:5-6).

Let's just remember where we are. We're looking, we're hunting for what I like to glibly call the kashrus laws. And there's a kashrus law in Noah. So they come out of the Ark, and God says, “Hey, just change the laws, and now you can have burgers, and you're allowed to eat animals. By the way, I'm also going to give you the laws of murder: don't kill people.” But it's very strange! Why am I giving murder laws right next to the kashrus laws? 

Beth: Yeah. And it maybe is meant to be a reminder that, even in this moment of license, what God is allowing us to do is really shocking and surprising and quite great.  

Why Did God Change the Law?

Imu: Right, so it seems like, even though God changes His mind, the fact that this permission is next to the laws of murder suggests that this was not a happy permission. So I think that the major question to ask now is, why does the law change? What exactly prompts God to take us from being vegan to some form of permissiveness around eating animals?

We talked about how where we are in the Torah is sort of the recreation of the world. The way He recreates it, it’s a less sensitive world. If humanity makes a mistake in the pre-flood world, there is a punishment following closely after, a curse following closely after. But here –  now I'm in Genesis 8:21 – God actually says: I'm not going to continue to curse the earth again because of humans, because I realized that humanity's designs, his form of his heart, specifically, is evil from his youth. And I'm not going to continue to punish or bring plague on all living things like I've done. I'm going to give a much more stable and less sensitive world. So given all of that, I had thought that one possible answer for humanity's ability to eat animals is that God is expecting less of humanity. The rules have changed, and so humanity is not going to be held to as strict of a standard as they were held before.

Beth: Yeah, that resonates; let me think about that for a second. It's very sneaky what you just said, and I'm realizing the sneakiness of it as I move from the place of, “Huh, that's an interesting read,” to the place of, “Oh, what are the implications of that? How does that change how we read Leviticus? How does that change what I buy in the supermarket?” And if that's the case, then…

Imu: It feels icky, right?

Beth: It feels icky because it's sort of a certain flavor of b’dieved, non-ideal situation. You could choose to live where I, God, am paying attention and responding to your every act. And you see that I'm there, and we're having a conversation. Or you could choose to distance yourself and live in this world that is governed by natural laws, a world that God doesn’t really set foot into. You're allowed to do that, you could choose to do that. Well, that's what we're choosing to do when we buy the Empire chicken? I don't need that on my conscience.

Imu (Narrative Insertion): So the answer we are currently weighing is that there is a l’chatchila and b’dieved distinction, an ideal and non-ideal. If you’re a meat eater, and you’re defending your moral position, you could’ve claimed, “Well, if God wanted to forbid it, He would have.” Except, number 1, God lets us know that the original law was that man should be vegan, and, number 2, God permits eating of meat in the same breath as the law against murder. And number 3, God gives the Israelites the command to spill blood and cover up the crime, as it were. The Torah seems to be simultaneously teaching us the ideal position and the non-ideal position, sort of as a concession to the base nature of humanity. It’s not that God has no problem with meat. God has low expectations from humans, and He’s not going to force this law on us even though, by rights, it’s the moral thing to do.

Now, if that’s true, then that subtle, passive-aggressive tone in verse 13 in Leviticus, that’s probably an extension of this. The permission hasn’t gone away, but the moral issues haven’t gone away either. And this leaves me and Beth in an uncomfortable position, as people who, you know, want to do the right thing, but also as people who do eat meat. We talked about that awkward position a little bit, and how we could come to terms with it.

Beth: Imu, can I share an analogy with you?

Imu: Yes.

Beth: Here's what it makes me think of. So when I first became a parent, I didn't have a lot of experience with raising kids and disciplining kids because I'm an only child. So I remember it came as kind of a shock to me when I figured out that you sometimes need to be fairly firm with your children. Your toddler doesn't want to leave the playground, and it's time to go, and sometimes, after a certain point, you just have to pick them up and put them in the car, and they don't want to be in the car seat. They might fight, and they might kick and scream. “It's time to go. I love you, and it's time to go,” and you force them into the car seat, and it's not fun, but sometimes you have to do that.

And I remember I had gotten quite comfortable at a certain point in my parenting journey with doing that, and I went away for Shabbos with my toddler and my husband to a friend's house. And the friend had a whole crop of kids who were older than my toddler, and they were playing with him. And there was a certain point at which it was time to go, and he didn't want to go. He was upset, and the five-year-old girl in this family got down with him and started, in this very creative, compassionate way, trying to persuade him that it would be a good thing to go. And I was so ready to sweep right in and be like, “Okay, time to go. Tears, whatever, you'll get over it. I love you. It'll be okay.” And she was trying to do it in this soft way, and it was a paradigm shift for me. And I remember talking about this to my husband afterwards, and I was like, so we started out as parents who didn't know how to apply discipline because those intuitions of compassion that we had were so, so strong. And then we kind of shut down the compassion in order to be able to be effective disciplinarians, and we shut it down so much that it got buried within us, and we weren't balancing two values anymore. 

And then this little five-year-old girl reminded us, “Okay, So every once in a while you do have to do that. But don't do that, if you don't have to. That's very b’dieved. But if there's a way to do this in a peaceful way, and there's a way to do this that honors your intuition, that honors your compassion, then do that for sure.” It takes a lot more patience, and it takes a lot more creativity, and I feel like the same thing is going on here. We quiet our compassion because it's too complicated to have that living in tension with, in this case, our other desires, our lust for hamburgers. 

Imu: That's a really beautiful analogy, because I think many of us tend to see things as black and white, as a binary of permitted and commanded versus forbidden and immoral. But here seems to be some balance. You’re talking about the balance of things, and your parenting journey certainly speaks to me quite a bit. When it comes to animals, it is much easier to treat a packaged chicken as an ingredient, and it is much harder to go and slaughter your first bird. And, possibly, this is one way of understanding why the Torah encodes this language of attempted murder in the mitzvah of kisui dam is that the Torah is asking you to balance two really important principles. On the one hand, you are allowed to eat meat. It might even be right or appropriate, and we can actually question that a little bit more. And on the other hand, the Torah is saying, this isn't the same thing as grabbing crackers out of your pantry. This is a life, and you're supposed to be shocked into that when you are preparing your meat.

Beth: That's right, which is a very unusual way of looking at Torah laws, right? 

Imu (Narrative Insertion): The truth is, it’s not such an unusual way of looking at Torah law. As Beth and I continued our discussion, we realized there are a number of Torah laws that are non-ideal, or are sort of a concession to human temptation.  Here we are, talking about one striking example:

Imu: Eishes yefas toar is another example of this. You go to war and you find an attractive woman, as a soldier, and you want – this is a captive, and you want to make her your wife. There's a whole bunch of rituals. There's like a major cooling-off period that it seems really designed to have that soldier, on the one hand, feel like, “Yes, I know I can have her if I really want her. But I've got to go about it in this and this way,” and the cooling-off period is supposed to make you kind of possibly cool off, and think better of treating someone else that way (see Deuteronomy 21:10-14).

Beth: Mm-hmm, exactly. 

Imu (Narrative Insertion): So Beth and I are really trying to grapple with this l’chatchila/b’dieved answer: the fact that eating meat is not ideal, a concession to human flaws. And we brought evidence that the Torah, in other places, does in fact seem to give us laws that aren’t spiritual ideals, and nudge us toward more proper ways of living. And it really could be that the permission to eat meat, and maybe all of the laws of kosher, are about this. But even with all the evidence we found, we still haven't explained korbanot  – the fact that God Himself commands the bringing of sacrifices – and that was a big loose end. Why would He do that if He thought eating meat was sort of shameful?

So Beth and I kept looking, and we stumbled on another way of seeing things, a way of seeing the same evidence that we’d been talking about until now, but arriving at a different conclusion, one that doesn’t involve the idea that eating meat is not ideal. In other words, a radically different path through everything we’ve seen so far. It all began when Beth shared an insight that she had with me.

Honoring the Animal: The “Chef’s Table” Approach

Beth: So when I was researching this piece, I was also binge-watching a show on Netflix called Chef’s Table. There's an episode – this is years ago that I saw it – it was an episode about an Italian butcher. It resonated so much with me when I was doing this research, and at the same time that I was watching it, because this guy's story is that he's born into a family of butchers. And his family, I think his father got sick and passed away, and his family needs him to take over the butcher shop, and he can't bring himself to kill an animal. It really hurts him. He transcends the difficulty, but the practice that he arrives at, it becomes of utmost importance to him that every single part of the animal gets used. So he says, “It's still hard. You know, I'm a butcher. All day long, I do nothing other than kill animals. That’s my job. I am, in the words of Leviticus 17, I am a shofech damim, and the way that I've figured out how to deal with it, and how to honor the life of the animal, is that I will not let a single piece of that animal go to waste. All of the excess stuff, the hooves and whatever else, I take it home and I cook it, and my grandmother taught me how to make it delicious.” And he says, “Because I grew up and I was a butcher's son, we never got to eat the steaks. We only got to take home all the runty stuff, and that's what I feed my family on.” And I thought it was so beautiful.

Imu: What do you make of that? Why do you think the use of every part of the animal feels intuitively like you're honoring the animal? Why does that make it better? What do you think?

Beth: That’s a great question. I don't have a philosophical answer for you yet. I mean, I'm trying to imagine the alternative, and the alternative is that you have all of these animal parts that you're just chucking in the garbage. Which sort of feels like the equivalent – lehavdil, lehavdil – it sort of feels like the same problem as an unburied corpse. Why is it a problem to not bury a corpse, and why is it that you're showing honor to a corpse when you bury it? 

Imu (Narrative Insertion): Beth’s story from Chef’s Table really got the wheels in my head turning. I found it fascinating that this young butcher intuited that it’s wrong to slaughter animals, but then he also intuited something seemingly contradictory – that slaughtering animals is redeemed if you use the whole animal. Up until now, we’ve seen the Torah as presenting us with two choices: eating meat as a b’dieved, a non-ideal situation, and abstaining from eating meat as the ideal. But this got me thinking: Could there be a third choice? Eating meat in an ideal way, too? If you treat eating the animal with gravity, you give it the proper respect. There’s something intuitively right about that. But at this point in our conversation, it was just an intuition. An intriguing possibility. 

Do we have any evidence? Well, when Beth said that not using the entire animal felt something like an unburied corpse, she reminded me of something. We had been talking for most of this episode about burying blood in earth. So I asked Beth a question: 

Imu: What is the relationship between man, their blood, and earth?

Beth: What's the relationship between man, man's blood, and earth? The blood is throwing me a little bit, Imu, because I usually think of it as being like man’s flesh. But the physical stuff of man – for that, you have to go back to Genesis 2. Go back two chapters to the Creation story, specifically verse 7. Oh, I forgot about that!

Imu: What did you just forget about? What did you just notice?

Beth: Ah, that's fun. עָפָר מִן הָאֲדָמָה – what does that mean? It means that God used a single ingredient in order to build the body of man, and that ingredient is afar, dust from the earth (Genesis 2:7).

Imu: And why is afar significant in our investigation? 

Beth: Because in the law in Leviticus, you're supposed to cover up the blood in dust, the very dust from which man was created.

Imu: That’s right. So let's play with some pieces here. What is the relationship between humanity and earth, if man has been formed out of the earth? What does it make earth?

Beth: Yeah. So we would say that earth is the parent of man.

Imu: And it's more than just the fact that this first describes how we were made of the earth. Look at that word, adam, in the same verse as adamah. It's sort of like Adam's name is nothing other than “earthling.” We're used to “Adam,” the name, but the name for humanity in the Torah is essentially “earthling.” Now, you said something really interesting. I asked you, what is the relationship between man, blood and the earth. Once we're playing word games, what is the word for blood in Hebrew?

Beth: Whoa! The word in Hebrew for blood is dam, and the reason that's cool is because there's a pyramid here. Adamah, Adam, and dam. Dam is inside Adam is inside adamah.

Imu:  So the dam, the blood, our life force, is probably the most earthy part of us, maybe, or it's in us in the same way that we are of earth. So if we are of the earth, and when you are done, you return to the earth. So, remember when I asked you, why does it feel like a way of dealing with the animal, of honoring it properly, is to consume all of it? And you said, “You know what, it feels to me like a corpse that hasn't been buried.” So let's talk about that example. A corpse that is buried…

Beth Lesch: Ah, I see where you're going with this. What does it mean to bury a corpse? It means that you are returning the Adam to the adamah. 

Imu Shalev: You're going home. It is a spiritual homecoming to return a body to the earth. Our relationship to the world around us is not a utilitarian relationship where God created a lot of ingredients for us to enjoy. It seems like the world we're created in is a symbiotic world where everything feeds everything else. We are of the earth, and when we die, we return to the earth. And, just scientifically, our bodies decompose, and there's all sorts of good nutrients in there that promotes new life. It is respectful, it is symbiotic. So when a person eats an animal and only uses some of it, and discards the rest – at least my understanding of that is, if a person uses all pieces of the animal, what they're saying is, they recognize they're in a symbiotic relationship with this animal. They're not in an ingredient relationship with this animal. This is another life that I'm in a symbiotic relationship with, and so I will honor it, inasmuch as we are cousins or we're both here to sustain one another, I will honor and treat every bit of this animal with the respect of destiny. Which is saying, all of you is important, all of you will be used symbiotically, as opposed to just using some of it and discarding the rest. It treats it with respect to give every piece of this animal purpose. That was my intuition, at least philosophically. But it was really fascinating to see how you compared that to a corpse that isn't buried.

I'll tell you where I’m going with this. We started our conversation today with the idea of, “Look, you want to be a jerk and kill an animal? Well, you need to face the fact that you're a murderer.” That's half the story. The other half of the story seems to be, “You know what, if you want to kill this animal, then you at least need to recognize your common source. You need to give the animal dignity. You need to restore the blood to the earth.” If you are eating the animal and pouring the blood onto the earth purposefully, maybe there is something elevated about that.

Beth: That's really interesting. It does seem that the permission is much more full-throated than I might have at first thought, assuming that you go about it in the Torah way, in a holy way.

Imu (Narrative Insertion): For most of our journey, we’ve been reacting to the language of murder in Leviticus 17, and exploring why the laws of covering blood seem to imply that eating meat is sort of shameful. And what we just saw is that the idea of covering dam with afar, covering blood with earth, doesn’t only evoke covering up a crime, as described in the sale of Yosef. It also evokes Genesis 2, and the creation of man and animal, both of whom were formed of the earth – afar min ha’adamah. And that seems to point to our symbiotic connection, a circle of life between man, animal, and earth, and the blood that connects all three. This second set of textual links gives us a new perspective on the mixed messages we’re getting in the Torah. And with this new perspective in mind, we decided to go back to the Noah story, to the moment God decides to change His mind and let a previously vegan humanity eat animals. If eating meat is, or at least can be, ideal, somehow, then maybe there’s something we missed. So we decided to look at the verses right before God gives humanity permission to eat animals for some context, and I noticed something.

Animal Offerings: Recognizing God As Source

Imu: The verse where God says that He's not going to change the world anymore, He's not going to change the seasons – that verse begins: וַיָּרַח – God smelled a pleasing flavor, and what is God smelling? He's smelling what happens in the previous verse, which is, Noah, he builds an altar to God. He takes the pure animals and the pure birds and he offers them as olot, as a sacrifice (Genesis 8:20-22).

I think what's really interesting here is something we miss, which is that the reason, it seems, or at least the trigger for why God declares that He's not going to change the seasons anymore, is that he smells the sacrifices of Noah. And before the laws change, around whether you can or can't eat meat, Noah has this intuition of bringing these sacrifices to God, and it's pleasing to God. If God is the consummate vegan, maybe He would be really upset about sacrifices: “This is disgusting to me,” maybe, but that's not God's reaction to sacrifices ever. It seems to be, there is a proper and pleasing way. There’s a rei’ach nichoach (pleasing aroma), there is a good way to use animals. And so, immediately, God says to Noah, “Okay, the animals are yours.” 

Imu: (Narrative Insertion): Up until now, we had seen God’s changing of His mind and giving humanity permission to eat meat as part and parcel with God’s decision to rebuild a less-sensitive, post-flood world. We live in a b’dieved world, so we can do b’dieved things. But as we read the text closely, we’re seeing that that’s not the whole story. Noah was inspired to offer sacrifices, and, somehow, God found that pleasing. This was a way to use animals that wasn’t just allowed but good, an ideal.

What is it about sacrifices that makes them different? I’m just speculating here, but the theme we keep seeing again and again is recognition of source, understanding where this animal comes from. So, maybe you either recognize the earth from which man and animals both come from, and pour the blood onto the earth. Or, you’re recognizing God, the Source of all, by using an animal in a sacrifice. Something about living in the world in a symbiotic way where you use the world, not as an over-consumer or over-dominator, but as someone who recognizes and appreciates the source of all things – it seems that something about that is an ideal, and an elevated way to live and consume meat.

So, we’ve got these two pretty different ways of seeing how the Torah wants us to relate to eating meat. What do we do with that? That’s what Beth and I talk about in the last part of our conversation.

Two Approaches to Eating Meat

Imu: I think we settled with two really good answers here as to, does the Torah want us to be eating meat, and how should we feel about it? So one of our answers is that there's an ideal, which is not to eat meat, and there's a non-ideal, which is to eat meat and to pour the blood on the ground and to confront the crime, as it were. And I think if that's the answer, there are many different implications for your daily life. It could be that if you're working on yourself, if you're trying to be a better Jew, then maybe it's best to go vegan. So that's one answer.

And there's a second answer, which is that, no, there is an ideal way to eat meat. There's an ideal way to recognize source which has its own implications. But what I kind of want our listeners to feel is the permission to choose that which is most compelling to them. And I think “that which is most compelling to them” is key here. Not “that which is most desirous,” not “that which is most fun.” But having seen this journey in Torah, I don't know what God wants of us. All we're doing is looking at the evidence, and we’ve reached two possible, compelling conclusions. So I hope that our listeners feel a pull toward one or the other.

Beth: Okay, so I appreciate that. Which one are you choosing? 

Imu: So for me, I'm in Camp Second Answer. I think that there is an ideal way to eat meat. It feels right, especially having seen what we talked about in Chef's Table, having seen why God changes His mind with Noah in that other context, that there's a reiach ha’nichoach. It just feels, to me, more compelling to say that God didn't make an entire enterprise of sacrifices purely as a concession. And I’m aware that Maimonides, the Rambam, actually does believe that. But to me, it's hard to believe that so much of the ritual of Judaism is just a concession to humanity. It makes more sense to me that, in general, and that so much of mitzvot, man in general is being told to appreciate the source of his food. Whether that source is trees, where I think it's readily apparent, when you pluck a fruit off of a tree, what its source is: it comes from this tree, it comes from the earth, it comes directly from God. Whether it's bread, which is this pulverized grass, and when we say this absurd brachah (blessing), Ha’motzi lechem min ha’aretz, “God, who brings bread from the earth.” And I say it's absurd because bread doesn't grow from the earth –  you actually make it into bread. But there's a reason why we say that brachah, that blessing. It's to remind us that this thing that had been processed and created by humans is really – its source derives from God.

So to me, the eating of meat kind of fits into that. It’s just an appreciation that this life, it came from this common source, it came from the earth. And when we eat, when we take that animal's life, you honor, you respect its life, and you pour the blood back to our common source, and you appreciate and recognize where it comes from.

Beth: So you're telling me that you’re in Camp Number Two. I'm really intrigued by Camp Two, I am. I'd like to go to Camp Two for a half-session! I think I'm leaning more towards Camp One, and I'm not even going to speak to you about arguments, because the arguments that you made are really intriguing. How do I put this? I want to be able to keep eating meat, because it's delicious, and I'm a little bit skeptical of an answer that finds a way to permit it.

Imu: You're saying that we, as scholarly as we are, we also have desires, and that augments our scholarship.

Beth: It's hard to trust that I'm reading the text and arriving at an answer in an objective way, with integrity, when I know what I want the answer to be, when I have a stake in it. But I think I might be overcompensating. I guess it comes down to this question of, you seem to think that it was ultimately unsatisfying, or ultimately uncompelling, to say that God is permitting something which is not ideal, but we furnished great examples of other situations in which that's the case. So I feel like we did that work, and I'm not ready to write it off just yet.

Imu: I think, for me, one thing is clear, according to both of us. Whether you believe meat is really, ideally forbidden, or whether there's an ideal way to eat meat, there is a commonality between our approaches, which is that you cannot go on cavalierly eating meat. You're taking a life. Slow down.

Beth: Yeah.

Imu (Conclusion): So, that’s it! This was our journey through the Torah text to understand the bedrock of kashrus, as it were, whether and how we can eat meat. Turns out, we can eat meat, but there's a lot of context for that permission, and that context is rich and meaningful. That meaning infuses the rituals we spoke about today, the rituals of slaughter and kisui dam, and it turns the very act of eating meat into a mindful act. Something not to be taken lightly, something to engage in, with respect to the animal and its source. Some things we haven't talked about yet that we’ll be getting to in later episodes, like, “Why can't we mix meat and milk together?” and “Why are some animals kosher and others not?” It turns out, the framework we laid out today will be helpful in understanding the answer to those questions, too. Stay tuned for those and for further episodes of Meaningful Judaism!

Credits: 

This episode was recorded by Imu Shalev and Beth Lesch. 

It was edited by Daniel Loewenstein, with additional editing by Evan Weiner. 

Audio editing was done by Hillary Guttman. 

Meaningful Judaism’s senior editor is Imu Shalev.

Adina Blaustein keeps all the parts moving.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.