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Vayikra - March 31, 2006

We are here again, at the doorway of the book of Leviticus. And the next two parshiyot open this book by outlining in great detail the different types of sacrifices the priests were to offer God on behalf of their people- which animals are to be brought, how they were to be slaughtered and flayed, what parts were to stay on the altar as a gift for God and what would become the portion consumed by the priests. As we approach these sections of Torah today, we have two choices. We can look at these ancient rules and regulations and conclude that they have nothing to say to us today. After all, the Temples in Jerusalem have long been destroyed and the discipline of avodah, sacrifice as a form of worship, has been replaced by a different kind of avodah, prayer. But as I always say to our Bar and Bat Mitzvah students, if we took that approach, we may as well go into the ark with a scissors and cut these words out altogether from our sacred scrolls.

Since most of us don't want to do that, the better option is to wrestle with the texts in an attempt to redeem the spirit of these words and bring a new sense of relevance to their outdated specifics. And here is where we take our place in line after the Rabbis of old. If it wasn't for their belief that all of Torah, even the practices they could no longer perpetuate in the absence of the cult of Temple worship, was meritorious of study because it had something to teach, then Judaism would have died in the first century of the Common Era.

Now I have always thought about Vayikra and its neighboring portion Tzav as bringing forward to us a model of worship. If sacrifices were the way the Israelites of old related their gratitude, humility, sin and restoration to God, then we are to learn that our words of worship today can be patterned similarly. However, this year, I began to think about this portion in relation to what the rest of the book of Leviticus is about- the Levites and the Priests. Leviticus, aptly named, is all about what Priests and their Levite helpers could and could not do, and their roles as diagnosticians of physical and spiritual purity and impurity, and ritual directors.

And so one could look at that these first two parshiyot all about the sacrifices and see them not as necessarily about the act of worship but as emphasizing the act of eating- a Priest's cookbook of sorts. After all, a person may have brought his goat to the Temple to express gratitude for some blessing in his life, but it wasn't as if that animal sat on a grill and turned to ashes. The sacrifices were the means by which those who served in the Temple were physically supported by the community. The altar was the Levitical kitchen. Listen to the instructions from this week's portion: "If his sacrifice of well being is an offering from the herd, he shall bring one without blemish. He shall lay his hand upon the head of his offering and slaughter it at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and Aaron's sons, the priests, shall dash the blood against all sides of the altar. He shall then present from the sacrifice of well being as a gift to the Lord, the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is about the entrails the two kidneys and the fat that is on them, that is at the loins and the protuberance on the liver which he shall remove with the kidneys. These Aaron's son shall turn into smoke on the altar... as a gift of pleasing odor to God." (Lev 3:1-4)

In reading the text from this vantage point, one sees that there is a system, a pattern, by which the Priests were to eat. After slaughtering the animal in the presence of the community, they were to remove its blood in some kind of ritualistic fashion depending on the type of sacrifice, certain token parts were to stay on the altar and turned into smoke, as God's portion of the offering, and the rest was permitted to the Priests as a meal.

So now, you are saying, what does this have to do with us? Didn't we Reform Jews get rid of all those distinctions between Priest, Levite and Israelite? Yes, we did. And when the Rabbis reinterpreted the vast literature of Leviticus, they too removed the spirit of the caste system it established as in their religious reconstruction of the sacrificial altar. For the Sages of the Talmud, the altar no longer resided on the Temple Mount, the altar was now seen as residing in every home where Jews ate with proper piety. And the table around which Jews gathered to dine was named a "small altar," which elevated every Jew to the vaunted status of priest and the act of eating to being akin to offering sacrifices and bringing God the enjoyment of sweet savor.

Along the rabbis' line of thinking, if our tables represent the altar upon which God is implicated in our partaking of food, we may wonder what recipe book we are to follow in our eating habits today. Here, I wish to make a clear disclaimer to all of you. Many of you know I am a vegetarian. I am one for the very reason that I believe our eating habits can be elevated to acts of holiness and that dietary choices carry with them ethical demands.

That being said, I do not in any way shape or form believe that vegetarianism is the only expression of those beliefs. That there can be numerous ways to act upon the spiritual directives of our tradition being said, let's trace what axioms Judaism seems to imply with regard to eating. First, of course we know there are taboo foods, like pork and shellfish. Truthfully, we can only understand these taboos today as relics of our past that are irrelevant unless you see proscription as a means of developing spiritual discipline. I could say much more about this but the more important point is how much proscription Judaism really demands of us. This leads to the second and most important rule of thumb with regard to our Jewish approach to eating and life in general.

Jewish tradition repeatedly reminds us that we are flesh and blood incarnations of the Divine image who are created to participate in, protect, and partake of God's Creation. Daniel Boyarin identifies this strand of tradition as teaching us that we are "carnal" beings, people for whom the pleasures of the flesh are never necessarily denied. In other words, extreme abstinence and asceticism have not come to define Jews, but at the same time neither have orgies and Saturnalia entered into our religious practice. Instead, Judaism teaches us that we are to see a nuanced lifestyle that allows us to enjoy the pleasures of our world so long as we do so in a constructive fashion that strives to maintain human dignity.

And here is exactly where the rubber meets the road with regard to there being ethical considerations to the act of eating, elevating it from the realm of pure sustenance or pleasure or both, to a realm of sacredness. If we are to live up to our mandate as human beings who are created to participate in, protect, and partake of God's Creation and Jews whose lives are constructed in a fashion that strives to maintain human dignity, we have to reexamine the way most Americans eat.

Judaism teaches that "the earth is the Lord's" and that we are to be partners with God in preserving the world, but current American animal-centered diets and the factory farming of cows, poultry and fish associated with supporting over 22 billion domesticated animals worldwide have major negative ecological effects. These include soil erosion and depletion, water, air and land pollution related to the production and use of pesticides, fertilizer, and other chemical inputs. These enormous numbers of farm animals produce unsustainable amounts of animal waste that cannot be recycled naturally, and cause the destruction of millions of acres of tropical rainforests and other habitats annually, potential causing global warming in order to create land for grazing and the production of feedcrops. And while we probably never think about it, it is a fact that harmful amounts of methane are emitted into the air we breathe during the digestive process of cattle.

Moreover, Judaism mandates that we are not to be unnecessarily wasteful (bal tashchit, Deut. 20:19,20), but on a per calorie basis, we know that livestock agriculture requires 20 times more land and 10 times more energy and water as the production of vegetable-based foods.

As well, Judaism stresses that we are to share our bread with hungry people. And yet over 70% of the grain consumed in the United States and 2/3rd of the grain exported by the United States is fed to animals destined for slaughter while 20 million people, primarily children, die annually from hunger and its effects. It should shame us to know people die and many more remain malnourished while we know that a mere 10% reduction in current American meat consumption could save enough of resources to amply feed more than 60 million people.

Besides living constructively with regard to preserving human dignity, Judaism also teaches compassion for animals, tsa'ar ba'alei chayim. I am not talking here about animal rights per se, but we cannot turn a blind eye to the facts on the ground that under the pressures of our dietary demands, demands we make by our supermarket choices, animals are raised in corporate farming environments under cruel conditions, in crowded, confined cells, denied fresh air, exercise, and any emotional stimulation, are maimed and disfigured and then fed and injected with antibiotics and hormones.

And finally, Judaism mandates that we be very careful about preserving our health and our lives. And yet, in the year 2006, the typical high-fat, high-cholesterol American diet which reflects a 60% increase in meat intake since1950, has been linked to the three most frequent American killers--heart disease, stroke, various types of cancer and other degenerative diseases. A former U.S. Surgeon General even estimate that 68% of diseases in this country are diet related.

I hope you noticed that I have not yet used the buzz word we typically employ when we talk about Jewish eating. And that is because I don't really think that what I am talking about tonight is about keeping kosher. In part, I agree with my colleague, Rabbi Seth Limmer, who, in the recent CCAR journal outlined the difficulties Reform Jews should have with the traditional forms of kashrut and the way the corporate world has institutionalized the particulars of kashrut system but has eviscerated it of its spiritual relevance in today's society. While he proposes that Reform Jews should reclaim and re-envision kashrut, I am not.

What I am suggesting is that too much is at stake for our world in the simple act of eating, an act which can, and as our tradition teaches should, be made a holy act. We, Americans have become painfully disconnected from the process of agriculture and farming to realize the imbalance we have caused in the system we through our enormous demands. And our world, the people, the delicate ecological systems, and we ourselves are and will continue to pay for it unless we choose differently. Perhaps by choosing meat a little less, perhaps by purchasing more organically farmed products, perhaps by supporting small local farms or gardening at home. The statistics are powerful. A mere 10% reduction in current American meat consumption could save enough of resources to amply feed more than 60 million people, as well as relieve a portion of the environmental pressures corporate farming causes.

I was recently at a conference on ethics where it was said by one of my teachers, Dr Eugene Borowitz, that there was a time the ethical impulse was seen to on same level of mitzvah, a religious command. Today, our lives are framed in terms of choice, we act upon how we feel not on what can be identified as right, which has given rise to great moral relativism. And he concluded a true ethical imperative has virtually disappeared. Perhaps I am an idealist. But I believe it doesn't have to be so. I truly believe that we can discover how important we are by knowing how our choices matter in the scheme of the universe. My life has more meaning on the whole when every day my eating choices reflect a deeply held ethical impulse, that I am participating in an effort to make a difference. And it helps me see that I am fulfilling a God given mandate to be a human being who is a partner in protecting and sustaining God's world. To me, knowing and acting upon that mandate is a great moral and ethical imperative. And there is no greater mitzvah.


Rabbi Batsheva Meiri