The Sliding Scale of Kosher

By Susan Esther Barnes

Earlier this week, the tour guide we had on our trip to Israel last summer came to our synagogue to give a lecture. Those of us who were on the Israel trip were invited to come for dinner with him before the lecture, as a kind of reunion.

It was a Tuesday night, when there are a bunch of teens there for classes the synagogue holds weekly for kids who are not in Jewish day schools. Before classes start, the kids are treated to a pizza dinner. So that’s what we had too: pizza and Caesar salad, plus a nice spinach salad one of the women on the Israel trip brought.

As we were talking, I noticed our guest from Israel was not eating. I heard him mention cheese to one of the other people. I asked him, “Do you not eat cheese?” and he replied, “I eat cheese, but not just any cheese.” Oh, right.

He’s Modern Orthodox, so although there were three flavors of vegetarian pizza offered, and therefore no mixing of meat and dairy, the cheese itself was not kosher. Plus, since the pizzas were made in a place that also cooks meat, in an oven where meat is cooked, the pizzas weren’t kosher even if the cheese on them had been kosher before it was used. Similar issues apply to the cheese on the two salads.

Luckily, the rabbi ran over to the café at the JCC next door and bought our guest some tuna salad and a bag of Fritos so he wouldn’t have to go hungry. It did remind us, though, that what passes for kosher at a Reform synagogue doesn’t cut it with an Orthodox person, no matter how Modern they may be.

Last night, I went to a cafeteria-style burrito restaurant, where you walk down the line and point out the various items and condiments you want in your burrito (or rice bowl).

The woman in line in front of me happened to be from my synagogue. The man behind the counter grabbed the spoon in one of the two containers of beans and asked her, “Do you want beans?”

She said, “The other kind of beans, please, it needs to be vegetarian.” So he added the vegetarian beans, and then she asked for chicken on the burrito. He looked at her, startled, and repeated, “Chicken?” He was obviously confused, because she had just insisted on vegetarian beans. It made no sense to him that she would ask for meat with vegetarian beans.

Of course, to me it made perfect sense. In Mexican restaurants, the non-vegetarian beans contain either lard, or bacon, or both. The woman is Jewish, so she doesn’t eat pork, thus she wanted the vegetarian beans. But she’s not a vegetarian. Chicken is fine.

Along these same lines, which an Orthodox Jew might dub issues of “fake kosher,” I’ve also been contemplating the issues of “fake treyf,” or items that appear not to be kosher but are.

Probably the most common example of this is turkey bacon. Readers of my blog may recall that the thing I miss most about my non-kosher life is the bacon. (Please pause for a moment of silence while I reflect wistfully.) When I mention this to people, sometimes they ask, “Why not just eat turkey bacon instead? It tastes about the same.”

One helpful person even pointed out you can now get kosher bacon-flavored seasoning because, as the company’s slogan reads, “Everything should taste like bacon.”

Aside from my assumption that turkey bacon and fake bacon flavoring can’t be any healthier than “real” bacon, it seems to me to be missing the point. Why keep kosher if you’re going to eat things that appear to be, and taste like, forbidden foods?

Sure, one can argue we keep kosher because we’re commanded to, and since God didn’t command us to avoid eating kosher foods disguised as non-kosher foods it’s perfectly okay, but I’d like to think it’s deeper than that.

I’d like to think there’s something to the idea that we’re also learning a lesson about taming our desires. I’d like to think that by denying ourselves certain things, maybe we can learn to have a little empathy for others who have to do without things they would like to eat or have.

I would like to think that paying attention to what we eat reminds us of our covenant with God, and that we shouldn’t look for ways to weasel out of keeping kosher by using technicalities any more than we’d want God to look for technicalities to weasel out of God’s end of the bargain.

The same thing applies to Passover foods. On Passover, we’re not supposed to eat foods made with leavening, to remind us that when we fled Egypt we didn’t have time to let our bread rise. Yet the Passover section of the supermarket is filled with “kosher-for-Passover” cake and cookie mixes that look and taste like they have baking soda or powder in them even though they don’t.

In the end, it comes down to the letter or the law vs. the spirit of the law. Those who eat the turkey bacon and the Passover cake seem more interested in the former, while those who eat the vegetarian pizza seem more interested in the latter. And that’s how we get the sliding scale of kosher.

Tefillin Barbie

By Susan Esther Barnes

Tefillin Barbie. I must say, those are two words I never would have expected to put together. Which demonstrates how behind the times I am, since Tefillin Barbie has been around since 2006.

Tefillin are leather straps with boxes at the end of them. In the boxes are verses from the Torah. They are worn during prayer. One is strapped to the head so the box is on the forehead, and the other is strapped to the arm, with the box on the hand and the leather straps wound up the arm. There’s more to it than that, such as how many times around you wrap the straps, but you get the picture.

My gut reaction when I see tefillin is “Ugh.” I don’t like them. Nobody wears them during services at the synagogue I attend. So imagine my surprise and dismay when I emailed a link for Tefillin Barbie to my rabbi, and he hinted that maybe we should start encouraging congregants to lay tefillin.

The whole idea of tefillin comes from Deuteronomy 6:8. Deuteronomy Chapter 6 starts by talking about the laws, the one-ness of God, and our love for God. Verse 8 says, “And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.”

One of the things I like about Judaism is we often don’t take the words of Torah literally. We look beyond the literal to discover possible meanings on other levels. I was once told the reason we chant Torah rather than just read it is to make it sound like a song, to remind us that it, like a song, should not be taken it too literally.

On a figurative level, I like this verse. It can be a useful guide to our actions if we go around thinking that the commandments and our love of God are always on our hands and in front of our eyes, so no matter what we do or see, we shape our words and deeds accordingly.

The idea of people taking this verse literally and actually tying these words onto their foreheads and hands strikes me as a bit silly.

The main reason for my gut reaction against tefillin, however, is what I associate with them. Jewish law requires men to wear them for prayer; it does not require women to wear them. I have only seen them on Orthodox men, and in books that are clearly written only for men. As a result, the message I get when I see them is, “This is for us; this is not for you,” a message which plays into my issues with rejection.

When I was in Israel last summer, on the airplane and in every city we visited, there were men trying to get male tourists to try on tefillin, as part of their outreach effort to draw men into becoming more religious. These men had no interest in offering to lay tefillin with me, because I am female, and beneath their notice.

As a person who believes in egalitarianism, I have always seen tefillin as an outdated remnant of the old, sexist ways some Jews still cling to while I try to be a religious Jew in the 21st century. I have never viewed tefillin as religious objects. To me, they have always been a symbol of sexist exclusion.

Why would a woman want to wear a symbol of sexist exclusion anyway? We don’t want to adopt their outdated ways. We want to express our Judaism in ways that make sense in a modern, egalitarian world, a world which, I would venture to say, is a step closer to the World to Come than one in which one segment of society is excluded by another.

Just this past week, however, I began to read a book by and about the Women of the Wall, a group of women in Israel who have been fighting, since 1988, for the right to pray out loud, wearing tefillin and a tallit and with a Torah, at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I had never heard anything before about women wanting to wear tefillin.

In their book, the women explain that it is not against Jewish law for women to wear tefillin. It just upsets some religious men because they’re not used to seeing it, and many therefore are ignorant of the law regarding it, so they assume it is forbidden.

The knowledge that there are some women fighting for the right to lay tefillin puts the idea into a new light for me. Why should men claim the right to do this, and try to deny it to women? Especially Orthodox men, who claim to be bound by Jewish law? Suddenly, the idea of a woman wearing tefillin feels less like women taking on a symbol of exclusion, and more like a way to reclaim something which wrongfully has been denied to us.

Coincidentally (or not), while I was reading the book on the Women of the Wall, I came across a blog post that mentioned Tefillin Barbie.

It is particularly fitting that Tefillin Barbie was created by Jen Taylor Friedman, who, according to her website, is the first woman in modern times to have written a sefer Torah (Torah scroll, which are written out painstakingly by hand and, the Orthodox would say, only by men).

When I finally had a chance to think it all through, the rabbi’s suggestion that we lay tefillin transformed in my mind from something offensive to something that, like Tefillin Barbie, may be yet another step in the struggle of women to claim our rightful place in prayer and religious practice alongside Jewish men.

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.