God's Approval Rating

By Susan Esther Barnes

A recent telephone survey by Public Policy Polling asked, “If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of its performance?” The results were 52% approve, 9% disapprove, and 40% unsure.

Setting aside the question about what caused this company to decide to refer to God as “it,” I find these results to be interesting.

They did ask some additional questions, resulting in us learning that 50% approve of how God handles natural disasters, 56% approve of God’s handling of animals, and 71% approve God’s handling of creating the universe. Still, I wish there had been a follow up question asking what, specifically, people would like God to do better.

A clear majority think God handled creation well, but where, I wonder, has God gone wrong with the animals? When people answered this question, were they including humans in the equation? I certainly hope this isn’t just about Fido peeing on the carpet again.

Further, what do we want God to do differently about natural disasters? Since we have already conceded, in the wording of the question, that these disasters are natural (rather than supernatural, God-created occurrences), what, exactly, is God doing wrong? Is God supposed to fix everything for us afterward? Do we feel God isn’t supplying us with enough comfort after the fact? Should God issue advance warnings (“Hey, don’t build there, that cliff face will fall into the ocean sometime in the next 25 years” – isn’t that why God gave us engineers?)

Most of all, if God’s creation was so great, and now things are only so-so, who do we think messed it up? It seems to me God created the world, gave us a set of instructions to follow, and then stepped back and let us have at it. If we are now unhappy with the animals and the natural disasters, is that really God’s fault, or is it our own doing?

It also makes me wonder, if we called God and asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the job the humans are doing?” what would God say?

Maybe, “Well, I know they’re trying hard, but they really are making a hash of things is several different areas, and most of them don’t seem to get around to understanding what’s really important until they realize they’re about to die. So overall, I guess I’d have to say I don’t really approve.

“On the other hand, they are making some strides in the areas of equality in regard to race, gender, and sexual orientation, and many of them offer up some truly heartfelt prayers reasonably often, so I haven’t given up on them yet. Ask me again in another couple hundred years, if they're still around, and we'll see.”

Ethics and Kashrut

By Susan Esther Barnes

Last week, a kosher poultry processing plant in New York was shut down due to health violations, including a lack of soap and sanitizers in the employee restrooms and processed chicken being stored in a tank without running water. This case brings to mind the much larger kosher meat processing plant, Agriprocessors, which was the center of a huge bruhaha a little over a year ago when it was accused of being in violation of labor laws as well as the mistreatment of animals.

At the time of the Agriprocessors scandal, the question arose, “How can meat be considered kosher if the animals and the workers are mistreated?” After all, one of the purposes of kashrut (the set of Jewish dietary laws) was to make sure the animals to be eaten would be slaughtered in a humane way, causing as little pain to the animal as possible. In other words, the animals were to be treated with compassion, and thus ethics and kashrut appear to be bound tightly together.

However, in the December 2009 issue of the journal Sh’ma, Daniel Alter writes, “Talk of the ethics of kashrut hurts Jewish ethics. It renders a tradition that possesses immense wisdom irrelevant at best and nonsensical at worst.” He later goes on to say, “Ethics is ethics; kashrut is kashrut,” as if they were two completely unrelated things.

This idea that one can separate ethics from the dietary laws – or anything else for that matter – is a foreign one to me. I would argue that ethics do, and should, permeate every part of our lives, from what we eat, to what we wear, to how we behave when we drive to work in the morning. How can we say food is “kosher,” meaning “fit” to eat, if the animals and/or the workers were treated unethically? Can something truly be considered to be ritually pure if it was prepared by someone who wasn’t paid a living (or even lawful) wage? What would be the point of ensuring an animal is killed quickly and painlessly if it were allowed to suffer needlessly in the days beforehand?

When we say laws are unrelated to ethics, or when we claim the letter of the law is more important than its ethical considerations, then we are worshipping at the altar of the idol of the law. And I think we all know bad things happen when we start worshipping idols.