Shmini (Leviticus 9:1-11:47) April 10, 2021/28 Nisan 5781

In 2015, I spent nine months teaching English to middle school students in Weifang, Shandong Province, China. Part of my responsibility was to also teach about English speaking culture and American culture in particular. To that end, near the end of November, I taught my students about Thanksgiving. On the title slide of the PowerPoint, I had a clipart image of a dancing turkey. As soon as I opened the presentation, in nearly all 14 of my classes, I was greeted with choruses of "fire chicken, fire chicken." You see, the Chinese word for a turkey literally translates to "fire chicken" (from the vibrant color of the bird's head). Turkeys, being native to the Americas, don't play a big part in Chinese cuisine. However, despite not being native to the Middle East either, Israelis eat more turkey per capita than almost any country in the world. It might, therefore, come as a surprise that turkeys were not always universally accepted as being kosher.

In the sixth reading of this week's parashah, God gives Moses and Aaron the rules for what species of animal may and may not be eaten. Fish must have fins and scales, land animals must have cloven hooves and must chew their cud, and insects are entirely disallowed except for four species of locust. Birds are a different story. Rather than give a set of criteria based on which we can look at a bird and identify whether or not it is kosher, we have a list of 22 birds that we may not eat, the understanding being that the rest are, at least in theory permitted. This poses a bit of a conundrum for the seeker of kosher poultry. The Talmud gives a list of characteristics that kosher species of birds have (a backward-facing toe, a peelable crop, a gizzard, and that they are not predators), but it isn't having those traits that makes them permitted; it's just that permitted species happen to have them. For that reason, standard practice is to only eat birds that we have a tradition of regarding as kosher. As with most things in Judaism, the point in time to which we look to establish traditions is quite long ago. So, when Jews first came in contact with turkey, they had to decide whether to treat it as kosher. Through a series of debates and investigations, the consensus is that either turkeys are enough like chickens that they can count as chickens, or that even if they are not halakhic chickens, Jewry has developed a tradition to regard turkey as kosher. Nevertheless, there are some Orthodox authorities who do not permit the eating of turkey, and some who, even if they permit their disciples to eat turkey, do not do so themselves out of the potential doubt.

Why does this matter, though? Surely the Talmudic characteristics, all of which the turkey displays, should be enough to permit it. For that matter, why does it matter what kind of birds or other animals we eat? Aren't all the prohibitions just a bronze age health code? We don't eat pork because of trichinosis, and we don't eat shellfish because they are bottom feeders, right? From an anthropological perspective, those are pretty compelling rationales, and Maimonides, a physician by profession, believed that all prohibited foods were inherently unhealthy (except pork, which is prohibited because it is a filthy animal, and were we permitted to raise them, our homes and markets would be as disgusting as "the place of the stool"). But, if bottom feeders are a problem, why is flounder ok? The answer, it would appear, is more complicated than simply sanitation.

The laws of kashrut are generally understood as belonging to a category of laws that are not based on intuitive rationale. They are there because God commanded them. If there is no logic to a law, then is it really sensible to keep it? In a famous vignette from the Talmud, a proselyte comes to Rabbi Hillel's school desiring to convert, but only if Hillel will teach him the whole Torah while he (the student) stands on one foot. Hillel agrees and tells him that the whole of Torah is "Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." Respectfully, I think Hillel misses something. The core mitzvah in all the Torah is in a verse we will read next week: "You shall be holy, for I, God am holy." The purpose of all the mitzvot we do is to make us holy and, by so doing, bring us closer to God. Of course, we are not God, and our holiness is not the same kind of holiness as that possessed by God, but the holiness to which we are called is no less important.

The Hebrew root for holiness, kodesh, has a meaning of separation or being set apart. When we say Kiddush on Friday evening, we set Shabbat apart from the rest of the week. The first segment of a Jewish wedding is kiddushin, wherein the groom sets his bride apart from the population of women as his wife. The mitzvot that make us holy do so by setting us apart from the other peoples of the world, and kashrut is a big part of that. By making a choice to observe the dietary laws, we identify as part of a group. We are American or British or French or whatever nationality, but we are also Jews, and that identity is no less important. We are meant to be holy in all we do - in our business dealings, in the way we dress, in how we treat our neighbors. And we are meant to be holy in how and what we eat. There is certainly some health basis to the prohibitions, not so much in the 21st century as in the ancient world, but the sanitation is really ancillary to the idea of imbuing our eating with a sense of holiness and a sense that our eating is peculiar to us as Jews.