“Re’eh,” means “See”. The texts says “see!! I place before you today a blessing and a curse — the blessing that will come when we fulfill God’s commandments, and the curse if we abandon them. As the Israelites go into the land, says the text, they should put those blessings on Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval. The list of blessings and curses is given in Ki Tavo, along with the procedure. After that, the portion goes onto centralizing worship in the Temple; warnings regarding false prophets, a repetition of the list of kosher and not kosher species, laws regarding the ma’aser, or 10%, to be given to the temple or to the poor, tzedakah, the laws of the shemitah or sabbatical year, and the description of the three festivals in which we would be supposed to go up to the Temple in Jerusalem – Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot.
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KS – We are called children of God in our reading, and because of that it is requested of us to observe kashrut, to refrain from eating certain animals and from mixing milk and meat. Sounds funny, if you think of it, to the ears of many non-Jews – and to the ears of many Jews as well.
A friend of mine, Barbara Levitt z”l, was kosher. She told me her experience in a wedding in which she had requested salmon. And an acquaintance of hers, also Jewish, was having some sort of meat. And of course, this lady had to tell Barbara how outdated Barbara was, still clinging to the old ways, God does not care about what you eat! God does not care about what goes into your mouth, jut what comes out! The woman was being so strident, that my friend eventually had to say – I have no idea about God, but you are not being nice at all to me right now.
The midrash affirms that God cares about us and gave us the mitzvot – kashrut specifically – because God cares. Not like an OCD guy, taking notes about what you eat, but about who you become. God cares about that immensely – who are you becoming with your actions? The mitzvot are given to make us better people – particularly food, but not exclusively food. Many of our mitzvot are given to accustom us to kindness.
What is the guiding principle of all the animals you can eat? They are not predators. They don’t tear their food. They don’t become feral. You can have feral cats, feral dogs, wild boars are a menace. But deer? No. Have you ever heard of a feral cow? Even sheep, and we see every so often one which has escaped and been in the wild for years, don’t become feral. In 2021 in Australia one such ram was found, and he had been 5 years in the wild. And he continued to be a sheep. And they took 80 pounds of wool from the poor thing. And he continued to just be a sheep. Sheep, it turns out, do not become feral. You can have wild goats, and wild sheep, but once domesticated, they don’t revert back. And those are the animals you can eat. It is known among breeders of cattle that if a mother rejects a calf, you can always find some other cow that will let it suckle on her.
This is not a trait exclusive to cattle, other animals do that too – the story of the dachshund who raised a pig is so well known that it became a child’s book. But kindness is the basic make up, the Torah says, of the animals you can eat.
The same thing applies to not mixing milk and meat. This is seen as a supreme cruelty: using the liquid that sustained the animal as a way of killing it. The same thing can be said about eating lobsters, that need to be boiled alive, or eating a limb of an animal that is still alive. Those actions are cruel.
The guiding principle, say the rabbis, is kindness. Kosher food should be a reminder, when done right, of the ultimate value of kindness. Eating is something we do every day, we, lucky ones, several times a day. And at every instance we should be reminded – kindness is the point.
Among the many birds we cannot eat is the stork, called hasidah in Hebrew. From that same word comes the word hasid, and the word hesed, lovingkindness. And then, of course, a student asks rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg why the stork, the hasida is not kosher. And reb Shmelke says it has to do with hesed. And the student is even more bothered by this – after all, the hasidah, the stork, is known for her devotion and her lovingkindness to her young! To which reb Shmelke says – yes, but she only cares about her own young. The hasidah never extends that love to any other baby bird, never helps others. And that makes the stork not kosher.
So my friend Barbara, who has died recently, was right in her discussion with the lady at the wedding: Barbara herself was a kind woman, always trying to help, always giving a hand to whoever she thought needed one, and the lady, who did not think about what was going into her mouth, apparently was not paying attention on how she was communicating with other people either.
So may this be a week of awareness of what comes into our mouths, and also of what comes out. May we be kind, loving and forgiving to one another. Shabbat shalom.