Keeping Kosher: Now What?
NIGEL SAVAGE
SHMA.COM
This year, our Sigi Ziering
column focuses on the
ethics of kashrut. Each
month, an esteemed guest
columnist will wrestle with
what Jewish texts and our
tradition teach us about
the food we eat: the
preparation of food, the
people who prepare our
food, and the food and
restaurants that are
deemed kosher. This
column is sponsored by
Bruce Whizin and Marilyn
Ziering in honor of Marilyn’s
husband, Sigi Ziering, of
blessed memory. Visit
shma.com to view the
series and responses.
Ethics Sigi Ziering
For 3,000 years, Jewish people have asked, “Is this food kosher?” — that is, is this food fit to eat? You might think that, after
all this time, we’d have sorted out what this
question means, and/or how to answer it.
But at the start of a new decade, kashrut has
moved high up on the communal agenda. These
are some of the questions we need to think
about: What does “keeping kosher” mean?
What certifications should we use? On one side,
people like Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and
Rabbi Arthur Waskow have argued that kashrut
should be a broad ethical category of consumption. They argue that we should ask not only
about our food but also about our clothes and
cars: “Is this fit for me to consume?” The questions they’ve asked for decades are now being
picked up by mainstream commentators, within
and without the Jewish community. On the
other hand, traditional Orthodox leaders argue
that broader issues can and should be raised,
but those issues should not be confused with
kashrut (See Rabbi Daniel Alter’s essay in
Sh’ma, Dec. 2009). A mashgiach can establish
whether the animal was a kosher animal (was
it a cow or a pig?), whether it was healthy or
unhealthy, and whether it was killed by a
What role will Jewish culture play in the conversation about
food and kashrut? I grew up in a household with chopped
liver, lokshen, vosht, schmaltz, and pletzels... But if you
raided my kitchen today, you wouldn’t find any of them.
Nigel Savage is the director of
Hazon. For more information on
the Hazon Food Conference,
CSAs, Jewish Food Education
Network, and other programs,
go to www.hazon.org. For
Hazon’s award-winning blog,
“The Jew & the Carrot,” go to
www.jcarrot.org.
trained shochet in accordance with the halakhah
of shechita. They argue that while many other
issues are important, including the treatment of
workers, they should be addressed by the law
of the land rather than the categories of kashrut.
Kosher meat produced or handled by workers
who have been mistreated is not unkosher, in
this argument, though people might choose not
to eat it for those reasons.
Between these two arguments step, vari-
ously, three “certifiers” of kashrut: the Magen
Tzedek, the Tav Hevrati, and the Tav Hayosher
(see Sh’ma ethics columns, September and
November 2009). Each seeks to establish a sec-
ond certification, framed in explicitly Jewish
terms, addressing what might be called the
non-kashrut elements of kashrut; each offers
consumers the information to exercise ethical
choices. Over the next decade, we’ll see which
of these certifications become normative and
how they — along with public pressure — in-
fluence institutions to act more responsibly.
