Episode No. 142--Keeping Kosher Without the Pain

What do I know about Jewish law? I'm a heretic. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that nonsense over the years—including from some members of my own family. So this week I'm going to let someone else say the things about keeping kosher that I've been saying—an Orthodox rabbi, no less. This episode is a newly edited version of one I presented last year.

Transcript

 Welcome to Keep the Faith, the bi-weekly podcast exploring contemporary issues through the prism of Jewish law and tradition. With Passover, Pesach, coming in just under three weeks—it arrives on Monday evening, April 22nd—the observance, or the lack thereof, of Judaism's kosher laws is certainly a topic of concern, and the future of Judaism even more so.

According to some studies, if the current demographic trends continue in the Jewish world, there won't be a Jewish world by the end of the century.

Why do so many modern Jews want little or nothing to do with living a Jewish life in all its aspects? It's because they see Judaism as a religion weighted down by strange laws and rituals, many of which make no sense to them and, in any case, have nothing to do with the modern world.

Besides, these moderns say, the people who do follow these laws and tell us how those laws are to be followed don't look like us, talk like us, or even think like us. This is especially true when it comes to keeping kosher. You can eat this, but you can't eat that; you need separate utensils of every kind for meat and dairy and other utensils for neutral foods, what we call pareve, and so forth.  And, it's better to have separate refrigerators for meat and dairy, separate sinks, and maybe even a separate dishwasher.

And then, you need to double all that for Passover.

We're told that the only foods we may eat are foods that are certified kosher by a recognized authority. If it's not certified, you can't eat it, even if there's absolutely nothing in that food that would make it legitimately not kosher.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many Jews want nothing to do with keeping kosher, or any of the other religious aspects of Judaism? You've heard me say this many times. Judaism is not a religion. It's a way of life, built around a strict code of morality and ethics that remains as relevant today as it ever was, and perhaps even more so today than ever before.

Judaism does have a religious component, true, but whatever rituals and observances the Torah imposes on us, including the kosher laws, are meant to keep us focused on that ethical and moral code because that's why we exist as a people. As you've heard me say so many times, we're God's kingdom of priests and holy nation, charged with demonstrating to the world the benefits of the Torah's moral and ethical code.

Judaism does have many laws, but most of those are man-made. They're not the Torah's laws. Our Sages of Blessed Memory understood the Torah's laws to be chapter headings for whole bodies of law. As I've discussed in so many of my podcasts, our sages created what I call the enabling legislation that allows these chapter-heading laws to be put into practice.

The trouble is that the rabbis who came after them added stringencies to the laws of the Torah and those of our talmudic sages. We call these stringencies chumrahs, and too many rabbis of our day belong to what I call the Chumrah of the Month Club. They just keep making it more difficult and more onerous for the masses to observe.

Doing so runs contrary to the Torah itself. The Torah in Sefer Devarim, the Book of Deuteronomy, warns us several times to neither add to the law nor subtract from it, and to follow a middle course, neither moving the law to the right nor to the left.

Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, is very clear about this in his farewell address to Israel. The Torah's laws were not meant to be difficult to understand or to fulfill, he said. Here are his words: “It is not in the heavens that you should say, ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and teach it to us, that we may observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea that you should say, ‘Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.”

That's not the way it is today, though, and Judaism is suffering because of it. Of course, what do I know about Jewish law? After all, I run a virtual Shabbat service these days, and I've been known to eat a tuna melt in a diner. I may have been raised in a chasidic household, and I may have been ordained in an Orthodox yeshivah—a right-wing one, by the way. But I'm now a heretic. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that nonsense over the years—including from some members of my own family. So I'm going to let someone else say these things—an Orthodox rabbi, no less, and the son of a very prominent rabbi in the ritually rigid community of Lakewood, New Jersey. His name is Rabbi Aaron Abadi, and his sainted father is Rabbi Yitzchak Abadi. HaRav Yitzchak was born on Purim in 1933. He's a recognized posek, a decisor of halachah, Jewish law, but his approach is to make Torah law accessible to everyone and intelligible to everyone.

Aaron Abadi follows in his father's footsteps. He runs a website that's extremely helpful in passing on his father's teachings to Jews all around the world, especially about all things kosher. That website is kashrut.org, K-A-S-H-R-U-T dot o-r-g. I'll repeat it at the end of this podcast.

I should add this, too: The Abadi family are Sefardi, not Ashkenazi. You heard me discuss the differences between the two groups. The Chumrah of the Month Club crowd are Ashkenazim. Sephardi halachists are not overly given to veer off to the right or to the left in their decisions.

Rabbi Aaron Abadi, tell me a little bit about kashrut.org and its mission and your father's approach to halachah. Give us some background.

“My father is a rabbi in Lakewood, New Jersey, which is very right-wing fanatic, black-hat. He's been here since the 1950s. But right near us is the town of Deal, which is anything if not the opposite. And being that my father's a Sephardic rabbi, in the old days, there weren't a lot of Sephardic rabbis. And so a lot of the Deal community would come to him for guidance. The deal community is a Sephardi community, mainly Syrian, and we're Syrian also. So my father could not tell them the rules that the people live by here in Lakewood because it wouldn't work and it's unnecessary.

“So we, as a family, actually became involved. We had to help them within their own culture to understand what the halachah is—the basic halachah, you know, you're not supposed to add. Halachah, in a right-wing Lakewood community, has evolved over so many years. And it added so many things. So you would chase away half the world.

“I remember one of my daughters coming home from school, very young. And she just learned that you're not allowed to add [to the Torah’s laws]. And how is that possible? If you're not allowed to add, why are we doing all these things? Don't go to the right. Don't go to the left. Go down the middle. Don't add and don't subtract. And yet, we add, and add, and add. It doesn't end. The adding doesn't end.

“So my father was very against that. He couldn't change the whole community, but he wanted society to know from a real, very learned rabbi, what they need to do, and what they don't have to do. And he wanted them to be able to survive in the real world.

“I always say, our website is set up for the rest of the world. Everyone else. We have people logging in from Singapore and everywhere else, and we do the best we can to help them.”

Your approach sounds a lot more like what Conservative Judaism is supposed to be about. How does that figure?

“At the beginning of the Internet, maybe 15 years ago, 18 years ago, I went online and said, let me debate some Conservative rabbis a little bit, because I want to see where they're holding.

“And most of the guys I reached, I was more to the left than they were, and they were arguing with me, you know. For some reason there's a monopoly of halachic discourse from the right-wing fanatic Orthodox, and then Conservatives seem to water it down a bit rather than remove what doesn't make any sense.”

So what's the problem as you see it?

“I went on a trip around seven, eight countries. Started in Budapest and did a circle, ended up in Slovakia, Poland, and all the way around through Austria. And I saw all the different communities and every town had a huge non-observant shul and then a much smaller religious shul.

“So we've had this issue for centuries. If the rabbis in those communities would have given breathing room to the people, they would all [be as one; there’d be no need for these divisions]. By the Sephardim they did that. So the Sephardim never had this. The Sephardim never had Conservative, they never had Reform, they never had any of this stuff. We came to shul, everyone came to shul. And I remember as a kid—now it's changed—I remember as a kid, you walked into a Sephardi shul, one guy was wearing a black hat, another guy was wearing jeans and a kippah serugah [a knitted kippah], another one came in without a kippah and he found one in the box by the door, and no one looked. Everyone joined in the prayers together.

“That's the way it should be. That's the way it should be. It's very sad what we've done here. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform—it’s political. Every person should have their level of observance.”

And that's the mission of your website.

“The main purpose is to say the truth and help the people. People should be able to follow their observance to their level without the guilt, without the insanity. So many people walk away because ‘I can't follow that, so I'm not doing anything.’”

That's been one of my arguments for a very long time. What does it mean to keep kosher? And why is keeping kosher so important for people?

“The main part of kashrut, what we believe in Judaism, is that you are what you eat. We don't really know the specifics. We don't really know what happens, but we do know, for example, that if you eat a lion, you get certain characteristics that the lion has.”

Right. In the ancient world, the warriors, before they went out in Greece and everywhere else, they would eat those kinds of attack animals.

“Correct. So that's the belief system of Judaism, mostly. And so there are basic laws, and it's not that complicated to follow. And if you follow those laws, then you're following them from the Torah.

“They're pretty simple, basic laws. These rules are all much less complex than the way they make it out to be. You don't have to follow rabbinical certification. That didn't exist when I was growing up. We didn't have such a thing.”

We just had the OU or whatever.

“The OU was minimal, and most of the right-wing community didn't rely on them.”

That's true too. The tuna fish debate in the 1950s. [The OU was severely criticized for certifying Bumble Bee tuna even though its kashrut inspectors were not able to make surprise visits to the processing plants, so there was supposedly no way for them to know whether thatw as tuna in the can or dolphin.]

“Hey, remember that? It's the most absurd issue. They think that they're eating dolphin instead of tuna fish, which is just absurd. You're going to taste the difference.”

Rav Moshe Feinstein, in fact, I think at one point said if the FDA or whoever it is says that it's tuna fish, it's tuna fish.

“That's correct. That's correct. I used to show everyone that teshuvah from Rav Moshe Feinstein. I used to show everyone. I remember one time in the yeshiva, I saw a whole debate going on by the rabbi there, and they know that I don't believe in their craziness. So I gave one of the guys debating this issue Rav Moshe’s teshuvah, and I said, show it to him.

“So when he showed it to the rabbi, the rabbi was reading it through; he had never seen it before, and then he thought for a minute and went, ‘We accept everything else from Rav Moshe Feinstein, but we don't accept that opinion.’”

You're bringing up a very important point, which then goes back to kashrut.org. It talks about keeping kosher without the pain. So what does that mean, keeping kosher without the pain?

“The Kashrut Mafia, which are the organizations that make an enormous billion dollars on certifying Kashrut, has taken away our right to decide what's kosher and what's not. Which is really what it is, it is supposed to be, and what they did till 60, 70 years ago, which is that everyone knew the basic laws, and they went out and they ate. In our world, most businessmen, even the ones from the black hat communities, when they go out of town and they have a business meeting at a lunch, they eat, but they have no idea what they're eating because they weren't taught anything.

“People that don't live in the communities with kosher foods, people that travel, they should be able to go and eat like a normal person and just know what they should eat and not eat and understand it. We put in a lot of work into the research. Things changed over the years.”

What about advice for people koshering their kitchens?

 It is the simplest thing. Over the years, I sat with my father, and It is the simplest thing. I do it on a fly. Every time I go to a Airbnb or a residence in any place that has a kitchen, you don't have to kasher your silverware, but you don't need to kasher anything glass or anything plastic. They don't absorb. In truth, even stainless steel doesn't need kashering. If you can't taste anything from the thing, everything's all about taste. If you can taste it, if you have the flavor of treif, if you have the flavor of meat in milk, and so on, then it's a problem. If you know the flavor doesn't exist, you don't have a problem.

I remember as a kid, my father said, you can't trust the kashrut of Carvel because there's no way that the O.K. is able to watch a thousand stores, so you can't trust the kashrut. That's what he told me one day. And, so, for a few weeks, we weren't trusting the kashrut. Then I sat with him and I said, ‘but Abba, this is what they sell in the store.’ He never walked into the store. So he's just talking about the logistics of the kashrut process.

“I said, ‘Abba, this is what they sell in the store. There's no way that I'm going to taste a pig in my ice cream. Even if they put in some pig, they would not be able to sell it. So why can't I eat in any ice cream store?’

“So he thought it through, and he said, yes, you can. So suddenly we were eating not just Carvel, but every single ice cream store we ever met. The same things with gum and candy. I buy chocolate. I stopped reading the ingredients. It's chocolate. Why would I read the ingredients? It's absurd. If I do taste it and it's meat in there, I'm going to throw it out.”

Do you have any final thoughts you want to leave with us?

“I'll give you one point of thought. The biggest mistake in Judaism that we have today is that it's either black or white. You're either doing everything exactly perfect, or you're doing nothing. And that is absolutely not the way the system works, and that's not the way it ever was in Judaism.

“If you go back in history, it was not this way. If you go back a thousand years and more, Judaism, everyone has their observance level, and everyone's goal in life should be to do better. And it's more important not to steal than to put on tefillin.”

Thank you very much for being with us.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast and I'd like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Thanks. Go to w-w-w dot shammai dot org and email me, please. And if you want to check out Rabbi Abadi's website—and it's well worth checking out—it's www dot kashrut dot org, K-A-S-H-R-U-T dot org.

If you don't get the Jewish Standard but want to read my columns, go to the columns page of my website.

Shabbat shalom. Stay healthy. Keep wearing those N95 masks in indoor venues, no matter who tells you otherwise. And get fully vaccinated if you haven't done so as yet, including all the available booster shots.

And above all, stay safe.