Kashrut, Prayer, and Ethics

Today’s parsha contains 74 mitzvot, one of the heftiest parshiyot.
One of them is the mitzvah of shiluach haken, sending the mother bird away so she doesn’t see you take the egg.
This verse engendered significant debate about the reasons for commandments. This mitzvah goes to the very core of halachic observance, since the clear reason is that we not have a cold heart—it is training us in the ways of compassion. Maimonides says that it teaches us to be concerned about the mother bird, because even though she cannot speak, she can still feel pain. Nahmanides, on the other hand, discounts the bird herself, but says it refines our character, training us to be merciful at every moment.
Nahmanides goes on to use this mitzvah as the model for every other mitzvah. Every mitzvah comes to refine or train us in a particular way. Mitzvot are not intended for God’s benefit, and they are not just irrational decrees. We may not always know the reason for a commandment, just as I may not know why a doctor prescribes a particular medicine, but in principle there is always a reason having to do with its impact on us.
Seen this way, Jewish observance is a prescription for coping with being a flawed human in an imperfect world. The midrash calls torah a drug—it is a remedy for how to fix our soul and how to fix the world, for how to make us rahmanim, compassionate, despite the challenges of encountering reality.
This is a surprising principle if you extend it to mitzvot which do not seem inherently humanistic. People typically think of prayer as making God happy by praising him or something like that. Nahmanides would say that we have a mitzvah to pray because of how it orients us, not because of its impact on God. Jewish prayer trains us to be grateful, orients us to what is truly important in life, helps us focus on self improvement. I pray for the sick because God wants people to care about each other, not because God needs me to remind him to heal somebody. All of the mitzvot, Ramban says, come to make us rahamim, compassionate.
If this is true, then theology becomes irrelevant, even to prayer. Yes, we are required to believe in God as Jews. But what kind of God to believe in, what God is, is up in the air. You certainly don’t need to believe in a supernatural, personal God who listens to our prayers, to appreciate the value of prayer.
This understanding of mitzvot challenges some of the ways we typically observe halacha in today’s world. If much of the purpose of kashrut is to make me compassionate toward animals I consume, then it seems logically I should care even more for the workers I impact through my spending patterns. How, then, can chocolate produced using slave labor (and most of the chocolate in the world is produced using slave labor) be kosher? How can it be kosher to consume a chicken which has never seen light of day, and never had enough room to walk around, which is how chickens are raised unless they are cage free? Is that compassionate to the chicken?
Ramban has an explanation of “be holy,” in which he says that being holy means extending the Torah’s principles beyond all of the listed mitzvot, to the infinite situations of life that it couldn’t possibly deal with. In the time of the Torah, there was no factory farming, there were no chickens bred to be too fat to walk, who were kept in tiny cages in the dark. The torah is timeless in the sense that we need to extend its teachings to our present reality; its examples are from three thousand years ago, but are applicable to today. We need to take seriously the possibility that chickens raised under inhumane conditions are simply never kosher, no matter who gives the hechsher, and that we can only eat poultry and eggs from cage free chickens.
A little cross-marketing: We are starting a movie series this month, focusing on contemporary social issues as well as contemporary Israeli cinema. The first movie of our series, Food Inc, explores the food production system in America. It is an eye opening movie, which reveals shocking things I never knew about our food production system, especially the beef and poultry industries. The Sunday Torah Breakfast Club will examine some of the Jewish sources relevant to the topic raised by the movies.
Another question this raises for our contemporary consumption habits: How can products outsourced to an overseas factory, causing lost jobs, unemployment, and increased dependence on welfare, how can such a product be kosher? Tzedakah teaches me to take care first of all of my local fellows, and the highest degree of tzedakah is giving someone a job. Over the past few decades, so many jobs have been moved overseas that it is hard to find anything produced here in the US. Do I have a Jewish obligation to try to buy local, to support local jobs?
I know of a very successful entrepreneur who makes his money by taking ideas, producing them in factories in China, and selling them to Target and Walmart. He is very wealthy, and sits on the boards of a few Jewish organizations. Is that really kosher? Has he profited by causing unemployment in America?
All of these are questions that, sadly, the OU has not addressed. If the OU admitted that these are real halachic concerns, it would throw into question all of the certifications they have granted up until now, it would question their legitimacy as the most trusted hechsher.
This failure by the OU has opened the door for the Conservative movement’s Hechsher Tzedek program, and Uri Ltzedek’s Tav HaYosher program, both of which I follow and support, and invite you to support too.
The Hechsher Tzedek is a certification from the Consrvative movement which attempts to create a slate of environmental and social standards for kosher producers, including workers being paid adequately and working in safe, clean conditions. After Agriprocessors, the producer of Rubashkin’s meat, came under scrutiny for sloppy shechting practices, people who toured their facility also raised issues around worker safety. Illegal workers were being used so they could pay them sub-minimum wage. The reason shechting was sloppy, in part, was that the shochtim were tired and overworked.
The Tav HaYosher is a register of kosher restaurants which have agreed to certain standards of worker treatment. This register was created by Uri Ltzedek, and orthodox social justice organization. Only a few restaurants have joined, and those who have have received backlash from elements in the orthodox community.
These are important questions, which raise real problems with the ethics of our economic system: how are the workers treated, how are the animals treated, what impact does this company have on the environment? These are questions that all of us as Jews need to be asking.
Kashrut is meant to be more than just checking for the right symbols on a box; it is meant to be a spiritual practice of infusing compassion into every act of consumption. This is the lesson of Shiluach Haken, sending away the mother bird, having compassion for a small bird at the moment I’m just thinking about my next meal, considering how my consumption is going to affect others, even an animal.
What can we do? We can purchase cage free eggs and poultry, fair trade products, and locally produced products. We can frequent restaurants who have joined the Tav HaYosher, and let them know that we are supporting them. Please join us, too, on Sept 12 for the showing of Food Inc, and for our discussion on Sept 23 at the Torah Breakfast Club.