By Larry Kaufman
Well, our Reform rabbinate has endorsed the Conservative "hechsher tzedek"  stating whether or not the meat is kosher isn't just a factor of how the animal was slaughtered, but of how the workers were treated.

Back in the days when we were boycotting California grapes, we probably talked about social justice and prophetic values - but the Reform movement wasn't at the point where it could have talked about kosher and treyf.

As it happened, our speaker at Shabbat services on Labor Day weekend talked about his participation in the recent protest march at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville. (For those arriving in the middle of the movie, that's the large kosher meat company that's been the subject of a Forward investigation and of a raid and roundup of undocumented workers by the Feds.) I told our guest that I don't keep kosher, but I consider the Postville meat treyf.

The story has been told* about the sick child who was ordered by his doctor to eat bacon. The parents consulted the rabbi, who cited pikuach nefesh, the saving of life, as the operative Jewish value - and said the parents should comply with the doctor's orders, but that they should make sure the hog was properly slaughtered. Lo and behold, the hog was found to have some kind of blemish, which was taken to the rabbi for a ruling - was it permissible to eat the meat from this animal? The rabbi inspected the blemish, and said, If this were a lamb, or a calf, I would say the blemish is immaterial. But how can I pronounce a pig kosher!

The recent resolution about the hechsher tzedek seems to provide a similar anomaly. Although the third draft of what became the CCAR Pittsburgh Principles of 1999 allowed for the possibility of kashrut, by the final draft, dietary laws had been consigned to the commentary.  That commentary did presage the recent action on hechsher tzedek:

An example of this might be extending dietary restrictions to animals raised under conditions violating tzar baaley chayim (inflicting pain on living creatures), or refraining from foods which demonstrate the oshek, oppression, of those who work the fields to harvest our foods.

Had I been one of the rabbis that wanted something like the above excerpt from the commentary to be in the body of the document, I think I might be feeling a little aggrieved right now about having been beaten to the punch by the Conservatives. But I would console myself by appreciating how far we've come in these nine years towards reclaiming and re-forming formerly rejected practices - and even more by remembering that the best way to accomplish something is not to worry about who's going to get the credit.

*I think the source for this tale in Let Laughter Ring, a collection of Jewish jokes compiled some 65 years ago by the late Rabbi S. Felix Mendelsohn of Temple Beth Israel in Chicago.

Print

Email

Comment

Post a comment