SH’MINI – 3rd PART
Vayikra 11:1 - 11:47
Plaut 814-823; E/H 636-642; Hertz 449-454

Today’s parashah is Sh’mini, and we are in the third part of the triennial cycle, so we read Chapter 11 in the Book of Vayikra, or Leviticus.  As with so much else in this priestly book, the main point involves kashrut.  In verses 1 to 23, we are told which animals Jews are permitted to eat, or are forbidden to eat, and, in verses 24 to 74, we are told how contact with dead animals can bring defilement.  There is a minor glitch in verse 11:42, but I will save my comment on that until near the end of the d’var.

Let’s start with one of those admonitions that teachers in Jewish schools commonly give their students.  We are dealing with some of the best-known Do’s and Don’t’s of Juda-ism, but do not jump from thinking that, because some animals are called abominations, they are, in some way, evil or bad.  No way!  The words of the text are carefully chosen.  Over and over, it says that this or that food is “an abomination for you” (שקץ המ לכמ).  The point is sometimes reinforced by adding, “and an abomination for you they shall remain.”  In short, not now and not ever for Jews—but quite OK for non-Jews.

Moreover, with some exceptions the rulings we are dealing with are only abominations for eating, not for other purposes.  But we have to be careful here.  The corpses of non-kosher animals seem to convey defilement just from touching or carrying them, a subject that is extended enormously in the Talmud.  However, many authors find verses 11: 24-40 to be incompatible with the material on acceptable foods, and they suggest that this material should appear in or after Chapter 12 where other ways of defilement appear.  Therefore, I will evade difficulty by restricting my d’var to the first 23 verses of this parashah plus that glitch in 111:42. 

More formally, there are four main pillars of kashrut.  The first appears in Bereshit (Genesis), early in our Torah, when we are told that Jews are not to eat blood, even from kosher animals.  The second pillar is the instruction not to mix meat products with milk products, which first appears in Shemot (Exodus).  The third is the distinction between animals that are kosher, which means that they can be food for Jews, and animals that are not kosher.  That pillar, and the almost identical repetition of the text that appears in Chapter 14:4-21 of D’varim (Deuteronomy), is what our parashah deals with.  The fourth pillar involves instructions for slaughtering of animals and preparation of food, but this pillar is barely mentioned in the Torah.

In saying that our parashah today deals with animals, it is easy to skip over the fact that it deals only with animals.  Not a word is said about fruits or vegetables or grains being kosher or non-kosher.  Why not?  After all, some fruits and vegetables and most grasses are indigestible by humans, and a few are highly poisonous.  The simplest answer to the question is that Jews do not need a Biblical law to tell them not to eat things that are bad for them.  A better answer is that the rules of kashrut are universally considered as Hukkim as distinct from Mishpatim.  That is, they are not the sort of rules that could be derived from observations of human behaviour and social interactions.  Instead, as Etz Hayim states (637). “The overriding purpose of the dietary code is explicit: ‘You shall sanctify yourselves and be holy, for I am holy.’”  I would not say that this statement is really explicit.  However, it does imply that we do not need a rationale for not eating pork or shellfish.  It is just what Jews do because G/d has told us to. As Jacob Milgrom points out in the Anchor Bible, “Relatively few individual statutes of the Bible are coupled with the demand for holiness. And none of these present the demand with the same staccato emphasis and repetition as do the food prohibitions.”  Hertz is less literal be equally firm:  “The Torah takes the whole of human life as its province; in the eyes of the Torah nothing human is secular” (448).

Returning to Etz Hayim, fortunately the text does not stop with saying that the commandment to be holy is explicit.  Immediately afterwards it provides text that, if you will excuse my metaphor, we can get our teeth into:

The dietary laws constitute a way of sanctifying the act of eating.  The eating of meat requires killing a living creature, constantly seen by the Torah as a compromise.  These laws elevate the eating of meat to a level of sanctity by introducing categories of permitted and forbidden.  For animals, eating is a matter of instinct; only human beings can choose on moral or religious grounds not to eat something otherwise available.

As if to emphasize the importance of distinguishing the permitted from the forbidden, the text in the first part of Chapter 11 of Vayikra is remarkably detailed.  After telling us the kosher animals both chew their cud, which is a technique of double digestion, and have completely split hooves, it goes on to point out that some animals may exhibit one or the other, but that is not sufficient; it must be both.  And in one of the very few explicit references pork in the Torah, it notes that swine do have split hooves, but do not chew the cud.  That is no doubt the origin of the malicious slander that those poor animals allegedly wave their hooves at people and try to deceive them by saying, “See our hooves; we are kosher.”  For myself, I wonder why the ruling about land animals did not start by permitting only mammals as food, and then going on to add the two additional criteria of hooves and cuds.  That would have eliminated the need to forbid explicitly all those various lizards that we can no longer distinguish today.

When it comes to animals that live in either salt or fresh water, the text follows the same pattern of setting out some general criteria between the permitted and the forbidden, but no examples are offered.  For animals of the air, the reverse is true; no general criteria are set up, but lots of examples indicate what is permitted and what is forbidden.  However, in either case it is difficult to stay clearly on the kosher side of the line between permitted and forbidden because animals can be found that are biologically on the line.  Swordfish, which are notably tasty, have scales for only part of their life cycle.  When dealing with birds, one could infer from the examples given that it is only birds of prey that are forbidden, but nothing in the text says that others are permitted.  Of course, it is easy just to put all difficult cases into the forbidden category, but that falls into the error of adopting a puritanical view of halakhah.  (Another option is to eat only those animals that your parents or grandparents ate.)  Still, even I am content to apply that puritanical approach to insects and other “swarming things.”  I don’t really want to know which locusts might actually be kosher and therefore available for my diet.

Let’s jump now to verse 11:42.  The third letter in the fourth word in the sentence, a “vav,” is larger than the other letters.  What is the significance of that oversized “vav”?  It has nothing to do with the word itself, which means “belly.”  Rather, it simply identifies “the middle letter of the Pentateuch.” At least that is what the Hertz chumash says (453).  Rabbi Plaut and Eitz Hayim are more cautious.  They both say that the oversized “vav” is “believed to be” (emphasis added) the middle letter (respectively, 823 and 642).  Does this difference imply that Orthodox rabbis can be trusted with counting letters, but Reform and Conservative rabbis cannot?  Not likely.  Rather, I suspect that it relates to the fact that there are minor differences among different texts of the Torah—surprisingly few, but they do exist, and those differences will cause variations in the counting.

We at Adath Shalom ran into a similar situation when, in preparation for Purim, we found that our text of Megillat Esther has a “bet” where we thought it should have a “lamed.”  We feared that we would have to send our megillah out for repair, but that was not necessary.  It turns out that there are two versions of Megillat Esther; some have a “bet” as the first letter in one word, and others a “lamed,” and both versions are considered acceptable for use in synagogues.  Of course, Megillat Esther is not Torah, and a difference of one letter versus another would not change the count.  However, this example illustrates why cautious commentators would hesitate to say that this particular letter is the exact middle.

I will close my d’var with a final review of the issue of which foods Jews are permitted to eat and those they must avoid.  Literally thousands, maybe millions, of words have been written about health or other humanely conceived rationales for the rules of kashrut.  They are just so many words.  All the evidence we have indicates that theological rationale was to limit eating of meat because it requires the shedding of blood and, by constricting our use of meat, we take a human step toward Godly holiness.

Shabbat shalom,