Talk:Kashrut/Archive 6

Christianity's Attitude

I think this deserves a place in the article. As a Christian Jew I'm often asked to explain when exactly I feel God "repealed the Kashrut laws" and I do remember the story in the New Testament vaguely, but not well enough to put it in the article. It had a sheet.. that god laid down.. with all the animals in it.. and said it was okay to eat if you give thanks...

There is a specific NT source for the Christian "repealment" of the dietary laws, but I cannot claim to be conversant in the NT. Why do you need to be a "Christian Jew" (whatever that may be) to face this question? Indeed, wasn't Christianity supposed to replace Judaism? JFW | T@lk 21:43, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

My suggestion is that if someone is going to add a section about this, then it should not talk only about Kashrut, but must explicitly compare Christianity's views on Kashrut with Christianity's views on other Jewish traditions. Suppose someone would add a section to the article on Ramadan, and describe the Jewish attitude to Ramadan; it wouldn't make any sense - why is there a focus on the Jewish attitude to this one particular detail of Islam??? So too, you'd have to supply some context for readers to know why there's a focus on the Christian attitude to this one aspect of Judaism.--Keeves 12:33, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

NT Source

Acts (of the Apostles) Chapter 10 v1-8: These verses speak of an Italian (Gentile) named Cornelius, who feared the God of Israel, and one day in prayer had a vision of an angel telling him to send for the Apostle Peter. v9-18: As the men sent by Cornelius are on their way, Peter is in a famished stated & while food was being prepared he "fell into a trance". He was shown a sheet containing animals which he knew to be unclean. He heard a voice stating to, "Arise, slay & eat". However, Peter protested, noting that he had never eaten anythin which was common or unclean. He hears the voice stating "Do not call common or unclean what the Eternal has cleansed". When he awoke, he searched for a meaning to the vision, and the men arrived. v19-33: While Peter still thought about the meaning of the vision, as he realized that it was not literal, he heard the Spirit speak to him saying that three men were seeking him & that he should doubt nothing, but go with them. When Peter reached Cornelius, he noted in v28-29, that it was "unlawful" at that time for him (a Jew) to keep company with Cornelius (a Gentile), but how he was shown that he should not call any Man common or unclean.

Although the New Testament asserts that the sacrificing of the son of Mary could bring atonement for sins, it never asserts that it had the power to cleanse unclean meat. In Matthew 5:17-19, Christ made the statement that the Torah was still binding until heaven & earth pass away (the world to come). In Christian prophecy, the "Dragon" makes war with a church that keeps the Torah, and has the faith of Jesus Christ. In Romans 2:12-16, the Apostle Paul declares that those who keep the Torah will be Justified before God, and that the Gentiles believers will live in a manner that suggests that the Torah was written in their hearts. This statement of Paul's actually coincides with the promise of the "New Covenant", which is found in Jeremiah 31:27-34. The "New Covenant" is notably made with two parties, the House of Israel, and the House of Judah. Galatians 3:29 indicates also that the Gentile believers become a part of the lineage of Abraham, being adopted into the covenant.

Although the NT describes a belief that sacrificing of animals is no longer necessary, due to the sacrifice of Christ, there are no scriptures that indicate an abandonment of the Dietary Law, or most other mitzvot. Christianity appears to have initially been a sect of Judaism, but at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, most of the Gentile Christians desired to be separate from the Ethnic Jews. This appears to have been the start of the rise of the Roman Church, it also appears to show a decline in Torah observant Christians, and the mixing of pagan traditions such as solstice & the festival of Ishtar (Christmas/Easter) came soon after.

Other Reasons

The Other Reasons section doesn't seem to be encyclopedic, it reads as random conjecture. Further some of the reasons are quite a stretch from the laws. It's not so much that specific animals are excluded (for the most part) but that rules to determine which animals are kosher are defined. [unsigned anonymous comment]

SOME RANDOM CONJECTURE:

I would like to add my own "random conjecture": The Torah laws for Kashrut are linguistically symbolic. The Torah states: "You may eat (ToAKh'Loo) this from all that are in the water (MaYeeM), all that has to it fins (S'NaPeeR) and scales (QaSQeSeT), in the water, in the seas (YaMeeM) and in the rivers (NaChaLeeM), they are for you." Lv11:9 Each of the words transliterated in the above sentence have very literal meanings. The word for eat (ToAKh'Loo) comes from the root A.K.L., this word literally means "to contain or encompass all." It is an expansion of the word KoL meaning "All" and is related to the word YaKhoL meaning "to be able" or in analogous form "to encompass an act." So metaphorically, the kosher laws will tell us what (behaviors) we may "encompass" in our lives. The words for water (MaYeeM) and sea (YaM) both come from the verb H.M.H. which means "to stir up or agitate." The word for sea (YaM) literally means the "the stirred up or agitated state" and the word for water (MaYeeM) literally means "what is of the agitated state." So we are about to be told what behaviors we may "encompass" when we are in the "agitated state." The word for fin (S'NaPeeR) literally means "the sharp thing that can be removed." It is a combination of the word SeeN from the root S.N.N. meaning "to sharpen or refine" (and incidentally related to the word Sinai meaning "sharp (mountain)or refined (person)") and P.W.R. / P.R.R. meaning "to disengage, remove, break apart, smash." The word for scales (QaSQeSeT) simply means "firm." So what we are being told is:

The behaviors that we may "encompass" when we are in the "agitated state" are "to be of a refined disposition, disengaging ourselves from the situation that agitates us as well as to remain "firm."

Likewise, the word for Herd Animal (B'HaeMah) means "to brutishly and forcefully push one's way into something" (in the case of the herd animal probably toward the watering hole). These animals must be "ruminant" and have "split hooves." The Arabic for the word ruminant also means "to ruminate on something mentally" as it does in English. And the word for split hooves PaRSaH also means "to make distinctions." So the lesson here is that "we may only force ourselves into life situations if we ruminate on the situation and if we make distinctions as to what is appropriate and what not."

Incidentally, the word for Pig (ChaZeeR) means "the one who busily goes around and around searching." And we are correctly told that this behavior is inappropriate because "although in engaging in this behavior, we may make distinctions (in moving from one thing to another)=(split hoof), we do not ruminate on our experiences (because we are too busy going from one thing to the next). Any comments to Yishalom@sbcglobal.net

Another other reason, some further random conjecture

A spontaneous thesis, the kashrut was fomulated (divinely, shamanically, or otherwise) to cope with the hazards of a post-volcanic, toxic environment. This is way out of my ken- enjoy with all due skepticism. A few things to tie together,

• Kashrut was codified in the aftermath of the Exodus
• The Exodus was thought to be coincident with, even occasioned by, the erruption of Thera
• This also caused a die-off in several populations, destabilising them for years, and present higher than normal carrion rates and disease vectors
• This volcanic erruption caused massive toxic contamination, which would have been subject to bioconcentration.
• Pure herbavores would be relatively isolated from much of this, if grass could be found
• Many of the non-kosher species are opportunistic scavengers (wild pig, raptors) or bioconcentrators (shellfish, insects)
• Bird identification in kashrut is complex, apparently, but isn't a "korkuvan (gizzard, "pupik" in Yiddish) whose inner lining can be peeled" possessed by grainivores, not insectivores or raptors, evading problems of bio-concentration? All the 24 listed non-kosher birds are either shellfish-o-vores, insectivores or raptors.
• Rabbits and pigs feed on roots and burrow in the ground (ok, desperately reaching for something with rabbits, which puzzle me)

Comments? -SM 17:23, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Is this actually a published hypothesis, or is this your own theory? JFW | T@lk 23:10, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

It was a spontaneous and- I assure you- inexpert observation. The correlation of Exodus and Thera was made by Charles Pellegrino in his book, Unearthing Atlantis, though I don't know if it was his original research, and didn't have it to hand to cite before (note that the point does not depend upon whether Thera was Atlantis or not). The zoological observations are common, though the point on the relative immunity of herbivores to bioconcentration is more speculative (on my part). I cited the kashrut article wherein I found the guidance on gizzards, etc.

Subsequent to writing the above, I happened to be studying the no original research principle, and found this comment, which says, "Like most Wikipedia policies, No original research applies to articles, not to talk pages or project pages, although it is regarded as poor taste to discuss personal theories on talk pages". I started a discussion, to clarify the policy, and, perhaps, negotiate the terms of my contrition (mortified as I was to have possibly written in bad taste here).

I have no interest in pushing my theory, or representing it as authoritative in any way (the use of the word shellfish-o-vore should have sufficed to make that point). I was fishing for a published theory, the existence of which seemed probable, but of which I was unaware. Also, the Other reasons section did seem to struggle...

And I am still puzzled about rabbits. -SM 20:06, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Great article, but missing the root "Why?"

"How kashrut is viewed by Judaism today" looks pretty NPOV to me, but it lacks a binding 'why'. Perhaps it is obvious to someone who practices Judaism, but from the perspective of a Gentile reader of this article, I see all this debate about rules, pseudoscientific authoritative sounding reasoning, and nothing but a wimpy excuse for a religious explanation. As this article has grown, this section has suffered immensely. I get the impression that all this anti-semitic finger pointing in the talk page is keeping people from contributing in this regard. -Andrew

Hate to break this to you, Andrew, but the Jews themselves simply regard the laws as God-given (chukim) without a need for a good reason. The reasons you have seen are the only ones really discussed by Jewish philosophers. Maimonides suggests it is conducive to health, Hirsch maintains it is to spiritually elevate the act of eating. There is no other unifying explanation that is not already in the article. JFW | T@lk 05:11, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

With all props to chukim(ooh, that's keeper vocabulary, thanks!), I would be surprised and a bit disappointed if there was not out there some learned consideration of the catastrophic context in which kashrut arose (Andrew, see my post above for the sort of thing to which I am referring). There is reasonable hard evidence that the Exodus took place against a backdrop of enormous environmental upheaval, which would have certainly posed serious health challenges to those foraging in the Wilderness, requiring a system of precautions. And this gentile is still puzzled about rabbits. =)

-SM 09:18, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Like most religions, though, the Deity in Judaism did not feel a need to justify His laws to the people subservient to them, so you definitely won't find explicit reasoning in the Jewish source texts. i.e. The Torah does not have footnotes. Any socio-political/scientific reasoning is speculative at best. Modern Orthodox Jews do not use as their basis for keeping kosher that it made biological sense 3,000 years ago. They do it because it's written in the Torah, plain and simple. 38.112.113.242 23:39, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

It's not so simple as that. Take the "no meat with dairy" law. That's not what the Torah says. The Torah says not to boil a goat in its mother's milk.--RLent 16:27, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Are we to assume that God gave laws capriciously, without any other reason than He wanted to, and that mankind has no right to wonder at the utility of those laws? -- Cecropia 00:16, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Your theory is interesting. Have you considered publishing it? JFW | T@lk 10:54, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

And what's with the rabbits? They're not kosher. JFW | T@lk 10:54, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

That's a famous one...rabbits or hares are said to chew their cud, but to not have a split hoof. See Lev. 11:6. (They do eat their food twice, but not at all in the same manner as ruminants. It's a classic "proof" used by Bible detractors that either the Torah wasn't given by God, or that God ch"v isn't omniscient. My personal belief is that "cud" is an inaccurate translation.) Tomer^talk 02:37, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Re rabbits, that was my puzzlement, my framework explained only weakly why rabbits might have been declared unclean: do kosher animals not eat roots and tubers, perhaps (greater bioconcentrators)? Camels and rabbits have soft toes, not hooves per se, but couldn't guess what that means. Asking whether anyone else had thought along these lines was really the extent of my publishing ambitions [blush], apart for hopes of a footnote mention should someone else subsequently decide to do so. =)

Interestingly, Leviticus 11:37-38 seems to indicate fear of a specific biocontaminant, or perhaps in the prohibition in 11:38 whether a carcass is kosher may not matter. More theorising, um... I'll stop now.

-SM 06:01, 7 December 2005 (UTC)