A NOTE ON
DEUTERONOMY 12:20�21
(appendix to the dvar)
When
the Lord your God extends your boundaries, as he has promised you, and you
say to yourselves, �I would like to eat meat,� because you have a craving
for it, then you may freely eat it.
����� It is reasonable to ask why the Torah
does not ask us to be vegetarian. It is not because too many people would
want meat anyway. The Torah does not�
prescribe an easy path. It asks us to transcend our human limitations,
to consider our Creator and our fellow creatures as much as ourselves. Most
people would find it easier to live without meat than without gossip, yet
the Torah reminds us over and over that we should keep our thoughts pure
our words� honest and true. How many
people can confidently say that they have been free of guile and the odd
bending of the truth even for a day? If it takes much more of a superhuman
effort to be straight with our friends than to become vegetarians, why then
are we permitted to give in to the desire to eat meat?
����� As we have seen, there are good
reasons to believe that God �wanted� all living creatures to live in
harmony, and that flesh-eating is an aberrant corollary of a fallen world.
The first generation of stubborn Israelites, fortified by the hangers-on
who had left Egypt with them, complained often about hunger and thirst and
their uninspiring diet. The quail incident shows that God was extremely
displeased with those� who wished to
eat meat. But Deuteronomy 12:20�21 does not reiterate God�s original
intention and insist that the descendents of the Israelites should be
vegetarians. Moshe did not tell the second generation to take the lesson of
kivrot ha-ta�avah to heart by
keeping meat out of the kitchen. If the command not to murder had been
meant to extend to animals, it would have been repeated here. The Torah
would have said something like, �When you have a craving for meat, remember
that you and the cow and the chicken are fellow creatures.� But what the
Torah reflects instead seems to be a concession to human appetites.�
����� One of the toughest aspects of this
whole question to understand is, on the one hand, reconciling vegetarianism
as a normal and proper course for humanity at one time and, on the other
hand, seeing the above sentences as God�s final word. Does God have a mind
to change? Can people make God change it?
�����
����� Many Christians of my acquaintance
feel a responsibility to adhere to what they call �the will of God.� I find
this concept troubling; I am uncomfortable with sentences in which �God� is
the subject and some form of �to will� is the verb. There are a number of
reasons why such statements fail to convince me.
����� First, the Torah itself is either moot
or vague on the subject. The Jewish tradition does not stray far from the
statement in Micah 6:8, that what God wants is for people to act justly,
love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
����� Second, I do not know how we can in
everyday circumstances verify any statement about the will of God. I can
know in my heart that one course of behavior is correct, and somebody else
can be convinced beyond argument of the opposite. Even granting that one of
us is �correct,� how can we know that we are obeying God�s will?
����� Finally, if God�s will comprises and
circumscribes reality, it is hard for me to understand how it can be
contravened. We might be able to mess up the toys from time to time, but
the outcome of the game is never in doubt. What God wants God will get.
����� The most common response to this
objection is free will. In all our life circumstances, we are just as free
to stray from the proper path as to walk in God�s ways.
����� Some people might want to jump to
conclusions from this passage in the Torah and say that these sentences,
like everything in the Torah, are God�s will; that we are not commanded to
be vegetarians because God wishes otherwise. But that puts us into another
swamp altogether, and I prefer to keep my feet dry.��