The Meaning Behind our Kashrut Laws or Keeping Kosher

Nadene Goldfoot                                

FALAFEL- WITH PITA AND BEANS

  We all need to eat, but we are given certain regulations about what we can eat.

First of all, Abraham left the city of Ur of the Chaldees located at the southern end of the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia with his family and headed out West to the less populated countryside of Canaan. The reason he did this was to leave the bustling city-life and temptations of this culture of polytheism and human sacrifice and follow his aha-moment of belief in one G-d only and where that would lead to a far different life of  a different way of looking at morality.                                                              

It took Moses; from Moses back to Amram, Kohath, Levi, Jacob--Israel, Isaac, Abraham;  about 6 generations later;  to come up with food laws that would keep the children of Abraham together and not mix in with other people's fancy of foods;  thus assimilation into their environment.  It would be like separating them from others and keeping them apart, in order to remember who they were and what they were responsible for.

Kashrut was developed.  These were regulations determining the Dietary Laws that Jews Israelites followed.  The basic laws  in the Torah (Pentateuch)  are developed in the Oral Law and by rabbinic regulation.  

According to these laws, only a small proportion of living creatures are permitted to be eaten, and every precaution is taken to avoid the consumption of blood or the partaking of meat with milk products.  Other prohibited foods include bread from which the dough-offering has not been separated, 1st-year fruit produced off of trees, and milk derived from a prohibited animal like a camel.  There are extra rules to follow for the period of Passover, laws prohibiting the eating throughout the festival of leaven and leaven products (foods made with yeast or causing wheat to rise).  

Vegetarians are following Kashrut laws  and should get 5 stars for doing so.  It makes cooking so much easier.  Otherwise, they would need 2 sets of dishes and pots and pans; one to use while using milk and its products of ice cream or cheese or a glass of milk,  and one for meat.                            

Speaking of meat, beef and chicken are most popular.  If beef, only certain parts of the animal are okay to eat, the parts that do not produce those yummy  T-bone or sirloin steaks.  We get the tough parts because of where the aorta vein is that carries blood.  We do not eat blood in any way, shape or form, despite what all the blood libel accusations throughout the Ages have thought of us.  Blood has always been verboten !  Forbidden!!  No blood sausage for us.  No rare steaks.  I always get furious when I read about the many blood libels against Jews.  Ignorance about people the accusers have feared or hated is no excuse.  They've gone ahead and killed Jews for something so false by just believing hear-say.  Disgusting!

                       New York City's oldest kosher butcher

Why?  Blood is regarded in the Bible as the seat of life or even as life itself.  This is one of the 7 laws given to Noah and is repeated several times.  The punishment for violating this prohibition is to be "cut off" from the people.  So the butcher has to drain the blood from a slaughtered animal and cooks follow the cooking rules before it is eaten.  The allowed parts to eat are soaked in salt water to remove any blood. It is served well-done.  

This goes way back to the high priests in the Temple to sacrificial rites symbolic of atonement;  this is based on the passage, "I have given the blood to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the life of all flesh." (Lev 17:11, 14).  Lev 19 is especially important.   “Kosher” is an adjective (“Kashrut” is the noun) used to describe food that is “fit” or “clean” or, in other words, prepared and served according to Judaism’s 3,000-year-old dietary laws. The complete list of kosher foods is found in the book of Leviticus.                       

Animals we can eat, but not the deer as to kill it, the law cannot be followed.  We don't hunt, though the phylum is okay.  

So other animals are not eaten, like camels, dogs, cats, or pigs or any shellfish or any fish without fins and scales. That means No to lobsters, oysters, shrimp, clams and crabs.  Swordfish is a no no and so is sturgeon which has disputable scale characteristics.   Pigs are a big no-no- no.  It just happens that pigs are eaten by most of all other religious people except the Muslims, who share this with us Jews, or Hindus who are vegans or other vegans of the 21st century. The reason why so many eat of pigs, is because it is a cheaper meat to buy.  In Texas, where they raise a lot of cattle, people on ranches are eating pigs, especially workers on ranches or even students.  We know today that pigs happen to have high IQ's for animals.  Small ones have made great pets for people.   

We're told which animals are not okay by the scientific knowledge developed 4,000 years ago of anatomy of the animals.  It's awe-inspiring to see. It goes into phylums and all, something that has always impressed me.   

Then there is the manner in which the allowed animal dies.  It must be killed by a special man trained to do so.  His method is to cut the throat of the animal with a very sharp knife, quickly and carefully so as not to cause any pain to the animal.  He's the shochet, a man of piety, trained in this field.   He is to handle the poultry as well.  The meat then should be bought from a kosher butcher.  

Animals killed in huge slaughter plants are not killed this way; they are shot in the head as they walk along a walkway. This has been going on at least since the 1960's, maybe earlier in huge slaughterhouses in the USA.  

Milk and it's products are eaten on separate dishes from the meat dishes.  We do not use recipes where milk and meat are mixed together.  We separate the time between eating a milk product and a meat product.                             

This goes back to Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deut. 14: 21, "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk."  This includes fowl meat as well as animals such as cows and sheep and goats.  

 Depending, some people separate the time by one hour, others by 6 hours.  Try a science test and mix the two together on a petri dish or just in a dish and watch what happens.  That's what happens in your stomach if eaten together.  We don't do that.  The reason behind it is beautiful.  The science of it, though not the reason, is to allow time for the deterioration of the fatty residue which clings to the palate and does not easily rinse out, and of the meat particles lodged in the crevices of the teeth.  So a reverse is allowed.  If you drink milk first, you don't have to wait so long to eat beef.  You can rinse your mouth out, eat a piece of bread, then the meat meal, unless you ate a hard cheese first;  then wait longer.  

The laws against eating blood and not mixing meat and milk are to develop not just health benefits, but to develop a higher moral reasoning emphasizing that the purpose of holiness was also involved in the specifics.  They were to wean the Israelite away from bloodshed and from insensitivity to the feelings of any living creature.                                

We do not even slaughter an animal and its offspring on the same day.  We do not drink milk and think of the cow giving milk to her calf and then turn around and eat the calf .  How Yucky!   The idea is that the "unclean foods)-not kosher to eat, beset the soul, preventing, its moral and spiritual virtues.  It may be that in the long run, the food people eat-or abstain from eating perhaps even more--does have an influence over the character of a people, some of their values, and moral-ethical sensitivity.  Some foods cause us to become very ill when it doesn't affect others.  What we ingest is important to us.                     

We do not use a morality police such as is practiced in Iran today. We never have and never will do such things as that.  It's up to each person to follow our ethical laws.  One's peer group, the people one associates with, is enough to provide checks and balances in one's life.  Following the laws of kashrut becomes a habit and conditioning, especially if you understand it. Our people did not catch diseases that swept through areas like others did.  Combined with our kashrut laws were the laws of cleanliness, handwashing, checking veggies for insects and washing them off, etc.    

Resource:

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2013/10/moses-put-jews-on-diet.html

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

Book:  To Be a Jew, by Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin

https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Projects/Reln91/Blood/Judaism/kashrut/kashrut.htm  

https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2011/02/campbell-soups-and-islams-halal.html

https://www.wikihow.com/Buy-Kosher-Food

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2018/05/hold-meat-its-dairy-time.html

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2016/03/vegan-diet-in-judaism.html

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2014/01/differences-between-kosher-and-halal.html

Celebrating Shavuot in Safed Forty Years Ago

 Nadene Goldfoot                                              

May 29, 1982: Letter to my mother in Ontario, Oregon from Safed, Israel:

 We got back to Safed, ran to the supermarket on the way in, went home and collapsed.  Thursday was Shavuot, and Don and Maureen had been invited over for dinner.  I served borsht with sour cream, some delicious cold smoked fish that is better than kippered salmon, salad, cheese blintzes with sour cream and cherry preserves, and for dessert we had cheesecake with cherry topping.  Don was in seventh heaven.  I have to brag that everything tasted so good.  The blintzes came from your cookbook that you had given me.  

The next night we went to their home for Shabbat dinner.  That helps when you have two celebrations back to back to cook for.  The only problem is walking there and back, but the exercise is good for us.

Thursday night you are supposed to stay up all night and study the Tanach (bible).  Don and Maureen conked out and went home, but this eleven-ear-old Moishe came over and studied with us until about 2:00am.  At midnight, we all went outside and said a special prayer, because at midnight, the heavens were to open up and your prayer was to go directly up to HaShem (g-d).  Moishe thought the heavens really would open up and was afraid to go out at first.  His father was at the synagogue and really stayed up until 7:00am.  Anyway, we had lots of fun with Moishe, as he would say, "Stop!  I don't understand that," and we would go over some passage.  I think the kid is going to grow up to be a Tzaddick.  He's so smart.  Well, I've had a nice respite from my Jr. high students, and tomorrow I must be back in the saddle.

From my book, Letters From Israel, @ 2003  

Hold the Meat! It's Dairy Time!

Nadene Goldfoot                                     

Erev Shavuot falls on Saturday evening this year.  Shavuot is then on Sunday and Monday.  As we in Oregon had Cinco de Mayo, a historic holiday of Mexico, we Jews have historic holidays, also, and this one coming up is historic and religious which has us remembering the actual time when Moses received the Torah, now a 2 day festival.  This is when G-d revealed Himself directly to the 600,000 Israelite and other slaves that Moses had freed from Egypt, when they had already started their Exodus , their march of freedom from 400 years of slavery in Egypt.

According to our tradition, We ALL stood at Sinai with the 600,000.  It had to have been a mind-blowing occasion as we haven't forgotten this experience.  I think of it as earth-shaking, a traumatic experience that entered our very being.

Moses was born in c1391 BCE and died in 1271 BCE at age 120.  He was not allowed in Canaan but died outside of it in an unnamed grave on purpose so as to prevent anyone from worshipping him.
                                                                               

From that day on, this moment or hour, or days, however long it took to receive the Torah, which are the Five Books of Moses, we remember it yearly with its special day and customs that have evolved.  One custom is to stay up the entire night of Shavuot, studying and discussing the Torah.
                                                                               
I had the privilege of doing just that when I lived in Israel in the town of Safed.  Our neighbor's son, about age 10 or 11, parents from the States, would come over to our house to visit, and this little boy was amazingly bright.  He spent Shavuot with us because his father was in the synagogue.  So he and my husband discussed all sorts of tidbits from the Torah.  He asked Danny questions and was more mature about the answers than most adults would be.  It was enjoyable and so educational.

The other custom is in eating cheesecake and  a dairy Kugel.  The reason this is the time for dairy items is that  after Sinai with its Kosher laws of not mixing meat with milk, the Jews could not spend a lot of time preparing a meat meal during the holiday.  This involved finding and slaughtering the animal allowed for food such as a cow, kashering the meat, which is a fairly lengthy process of salting, etc., There were other reasons.
                                                                                   

The Torah's words are like milk and honey.
When receiving the Ten Commandments, we should not be reminded of the golden calf episode and the following breaking of the first tablets of Ten Commandments. Then we received 613 more laws, most of which we follow anyway, the same number of bones in our body. 
                                                                             

There is a tradition of studying a small section from every book of the Bible (Tanakh) and every section of the Talmud in order to study symbolically the entire body of Jewish religious writings.
                                                                               
Realistically, it's up to the group involved in studying together, they should choose.  The story for us is that the Israelites fell asleep during the night before the receiving of the Torah and had to be awakened by Moses.  To show our eagerness and because we do not have Moses to awaken us, we stay up all night.
                                                                           

During the Exodus, from Egypt back to Canaan
where Jacob and his sons had lived before the drought when
they had left seeking pasture and food

It is said that the heavens open  up at midnight on Shavuot, which make this time the best for our prayers and thoughts to ascend.  There is also something very special in spending an all-nighter studying such a special subject  where you can greet the sunrise and receive the Torah.
                                                                           

As a conservative Jew, I had never experienced this holiday, but did in Israel.  I will always be thankful of having that youngster with us which made it even more meaningful and delightful.

We did eat cheesecake, however.  And we had dairy meals instead of meat.  Part of the laws of kashrut are that we do not eat meat and dairy foods together.  Different groups have different lengths of time to separate eating them.  Some were known to wait an hour, some 6 hours apart.  If you drank milk first, you could eat meat shortly afterwards, Mama said.    The idea is not to mix the two in one's tummy and more.
                                                                           

 One reasoning of not eating the two together is to not hurt the cow's feelings of eating her child and then drinking her milk on top of that.  It does teach children to be aware of even an animal's feelings in how it's being treated as well as his or hers own brothers or sisters and friends.  I love this teaching and when you understand why, of course it's a beautiful thing to practice.
                                                                           

For Friday night, it's nice to bake twin Hallot (2 loaves of Challah) thinking of the two tablets Moses brought down from the mountain or the 2 loaves of bread which were offered in the Temple.  Some even add a ladder of 7 layers of heaven which G-d rent as He descended onto Sinai.  In Hebrew, the word for ladder is Salam.  It is equivalent in Gematria (numbers) to Sinai.  This is getting into a little of Kabbalah, I see. 

So get out the recipes of blintzes and cheesecake.
                                                    

 Here's a recipe I'll share for a Prize Winning Dairy Kugel

1/2 lb medium sized noodles, cooked in salt water and drained
1/8 lb melted butter
1/2 cup sugar-make it scant
1 cup sour cream
2 cups milk,
1/2 lb cream cheese,
1 lb cottage cheese,
1/2 lb farmers cheese
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 beaten eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix all ingredients together and stir in the noodles.  Pour into a 9X13" buttered casserole dish.
                      TOPPING
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup slivered almonds
2 Tablespoons melted butter

Combine and spread on noodles or sprinkle on separately

BAKE AT  350 degrees for 1 and 1/2 hours.
Enjoy!

Resource:  The Jewish Catalog
http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2014/01/differences-between-kosher-and-halal.html
http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2016/03/vegan-diet-in-judaism.html