Through its abrogation of kashrut, Christianity stressed that one’s famil­ial and national past is by and large immaterial to what is important about one’s identity in the present; the Enlightenment scholars, in their own way, agreed. In contrast, Judaism stresses that God chooses a family and a na­tion; one’s covenantal identity is determined not by how one acts but by one’s heritage. Though this may seem counterintuitive, and troubling, to the modern mind, Wyschogrod suggests that by sanctifying people not only based on individual faith, but also on familial and national bonds, God teaches the world what it means to be human. Jews insist that human be­ings are born with a history, and a family, and these are important aspects of one’s identity. One cannot just cut oneself off from one’s political past; rather, one serves God with one’s entire identity, familial and national. This, Wyschogrod writes, indicates that God wishes us to serve him in “the full­ness of our humanity,”⁶¹ utilizing every aspect of our identity in our worship of the Almighty:

To believe that the individual can be lifted out of his nation and brought into relation with God is as illusory as to believe that man’s soul can be saved and his body discarded. Just as man is body and soul, so man is an individual and member of a nation. To save him as an individual and to leave the national social order unredeemed is to truncate man and then to believe that this remnant of a human being is the object of salvation. The national election of Israel is therefore again a sign of God’s understand­ing of the human predicament and the confirmation of and love for that humanity.⁶²

The election of Israel prefigures the election of all of humanity, teaching them that one’s past—familial and national—is not irrelevant to our service of God. Kashrut, for the rabbis, expresses this message; the dietary laws are a symbolic expression not only of an individual’s Jewishness, but also of the collective familial and national nature of that chosen status.

With the abrogation of kashrut Christianity announced to the world the extension of God’s covenantal favor to the entire world, and the irrel­evance of family and nationality. This, they believed, set the stage for the second coming of Christ, in which the whole world would worship God as one. Judaism, too, believed quite strongly that one day God would elect the nations of the world as he did the Jewish people; yet at the same time, Israel insisted that the distinctions among the nations would never disappear. Even as the prophets proclaimed that there will come a day “when God will be one and his Name one,”⁶³ they also insisted that there will be multiplicity amidst monotheistic unity. At no point will God’s covenantal love require that man declare the irrelevance of his heritage, of familial and national status. Though now all are chosen, the distinction between nations remains, and the nations will serve God in the fullness of their humanity:

On that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the Lord at its border. It will be a sign and a witness to the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt; when they cry to the Lord be­cause of oppressors he will send them a savior, and will defend and deliver them. And the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians; and the Egyptians will know the Lord in that day and worship with sacrifice and burnt offering, and they will make vows to the Lord and perform them. And the Lord will smite Egypt, smiting and healing, and they will return to the Lord, and he will heed their supplications and heal them. In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians. On that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.”⁶⁴

Even when God makes a covenant with the entire human race, nev­ertheless his love will be directed not at humanity, but at the distinct na­tions that humanity comprises. This concept—of a messianic age in which the sovereignty of nations is preserved—is one utterly absent in Christian eschatology. The Jewish political theorist Daniel Elazar once noted that in contrast to passages such as these, Christian texts are devoid of any vision of the endtimes that involves nations as distinct entities:

God’s response to the Tower of Babel suggests the decisive biblical re­jection of the world-state as a single entity. At no point does the Bible diverge from this position. Later prophecies regarding the messianic era call for or forecast what properly may be termed a world confederation of God-fearing nations federated through their common acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty and dominion, with Jerusalem, where all go up to wor­ship God, as its seat. Such a confederation is like the original confederation of Israelite tribes writ large; it is the antithesis of the world-state attempted through Babel or projected for the future as the Roman or Christian ec­umene that will unite all nations into one people. The biblical position has remained that of the Jewish political tradition ever since, in opposition to the ecumenical stance of much of Christianity.⁶⁵

It appears, then, that kashrut, in expressing the importance of distin­guishing among the animals, is a message that is at once particular and at the same time universal. By keeping kosher, Jews express the belief that they are chosen, separate from the nations until the end of time. Yet at the same time, the way Jews approach the animal world teaches us a great deal about how God approaches humanity, and what Jews were chosen in the first place to represent to the world.

We live in an age when the modern Jew is often alienated from, or down­right resentful of, his Jewish heritage. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, reflecting on his visits to American campuses, once reflected that “I ask students what they are. If someone gets up and says, I’m a Catholic, I know that’s a Catho­lic. If someone says, I’m a Protestant, I know that’s a Protestant. If someone gets up and says, I’m just a human being, I know that’s a Jew.”⁶⁶ But what Jews such as these miss is that in claiming to be nothing but a human be­ing, they deny not only their Jewishness but their very humanity. “Nothing could be more striking,” notes Britain’s former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, “than the fact that a people whose very reason for being in the past was to be different, chosen, particular, should today define itself in purely universalist terms, forgetting--surely not accidentally—that it is precisely in our partic­ularity that we enter and express the universal human condition.”⁶⁷ The laws of kashrut have reigned in Jewish kitchens for millennia, but it is today that the message they embody is most desperately needed. The laws of kashrut are no mere cultural curiosity, but rather a reminder to each and every Jew of all that his people has been--and all that God has called it to be.

 

Meir Soloveichik is an Associate Fellow at the Shalem Center, and a Contributing Editor of Azure. He is Assistant Rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Man­hattan, and is working on his doctorate at Princeton University. His last contribution to Azure was “The Jewish Mother: A Theology”(Azure 20, Winter 2005).

 

1. Leviticus 11:46-47.

2. Leviticus 11:3.

3. Leviticus 11:9.

4. Leviticus 11:13.

5. Leviticus 11:20.

6. Leviticus 11:41.

7. Leviticus 11:42.

8. Leviticus 11:21.

9. Leviticus 11:22.

10. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chi­cago: University of Chicago, 1963), p. 598 (3:48).

11. Nahmanides, Commentary on the Torah: Leviticus, trans. Isaac B. Chavel (New York: Shilo, 1971), p. 140 (11:13).

12. Nahmanides, Leviticus, 11:9.

13. Sefer Hahinuch, commandment 154.

14. Don Isaac Abravanel, Commentary on Leviticus, 11:13.

15. Abravanel, Commentary on Leviticus, 11:13.

16. Abravanel, Commentary on Leviticus, 11:13.

17. Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb, trans. Isidor Grunfeld (New York: Son­cino, 1962), par. 454.

18. Hirsch, Horeb, par. 454.

19. Genesis 1:29-30.

20. Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (Chi­cago: University of Chicago, 1999), p. 206.

21. Kass, The Hungry Soul, pp. 206-207.

22. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 207.

23. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 207.

24. Genesis 8:21.

25. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 220.

26. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 220.

27. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 221.

28. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 221.

29. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 218.

30. Newtol Press, “Kosher Ecology,” Commentary, February 1985, p. 55.

31. Robert Alter, “A New Theory of Kashrut,” Commentary, August 1979, p. 50.

32. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 219n.

33. Genesis 9:1-3 (emphasis mine).

34. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 213.

35. Deuteronomy 4:5-7.

36. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 198.

37. Leviticus 20:24-26.

38. Deuteronomy 4:7.

39. Acts 10:9-16.

40. Acts 10:34-35.

41. Jacob Milgrom, The Anchor Bible: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 726.

42. Kass, The Hungry Soul, p. 60.

43. Kass, The Hungry Soul, pp. 224-225.

44. Yalkut Shimoni 247.

45. Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 109.

46. Pesikta Zutra, Genesis 6:12.

47. Sanhedrin 108a.

48. Avot de Rabbi Natan 8.

49. Hulin 7b.

50. Pesikta Rabati 14.

51. Rashi on Leviticus 20:26.

52. Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishna, Avot 6, introduction (emphasis mine).

53. Leviticus 20:26.

54. Bechorot 6a.

55. “A pure animal that gave birth to [an animal] akin to an impure ani­mal—even if it does not have cloven hooves, and does not chew the cud, but is akin to a horse or a donkey in every way—it is permitted for eating. When is this true? When it gives birth before us. But if one left a pregnant cow in its stall, and came and found what looks like a pig wrapped around it—even if it is nursing from it—it is not certain [if it was actually born from the cow], and therefore prohibited to eat, for perhaps it was born from an impure animal, and merely wrapped around it.” Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Forbidden Foods, 1:4.

56. Quoted by Rabbi Chaim Jachter, Torah Perspectives on Cloning—Part 1, www.kolTora.org/ravj/14-6%20Cloning%201.htm.

57. Jachter, Torah Perspectives.

58. See Meir Soloveichik, “The Jewish Mother: A Theology,” Azure 20 (Spring 2005), pp. 99-115.

59. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (Lanham, Md.: Jason Aronson, 1996), p. xvii.

60. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, pp. xvii-xviii.

61. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, p.177.

62. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, p .67.

63. Zacharia 14:9.

64. Isaiah 19:19-25.

65. Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995), pp. 118-119.

66. Quoted in Jonathan Sacks, “Love, Hate, and Jewish Identity,” First Things 77 (November 1997), pp. 26-31.

67. Sacks, “Love, Hate, and Jewish Identity,” pp. 26-31.