August 2007 Archives

Honest Reporting gives Christiane Amanpour and CNN a C- for her reporting of the six-hour series "God’s Warriors," in which she looks at religious fundamentalism in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. However, I would give her and her producers an F.

As a former journalist myself, I am not sure what upset me more: Amanpour playing ominous “bad guy” music only under the interview with a pro-Israel fundamentalist minister and in reference to AIPAC. Or her equating the one Israeli fundamentalist who, in 1984, tried to bomb a Palestinian girl’s school (but was shadowed and arrested by the Israeli police before he could do any harm) with the popular and numerous terrorists who planned, participated in, and support the murder of innocent people around the globe--specifically in England, Israel, and the United States. Terrorists who are funded and protected both by our Arab allies and our enemies like Syria and Iran.

Rabbi Grossman suggests that “The kosher laws are supposed to raise an awareness of what we eat and a sensitivity to the needs of all living creatures.” Interesting, because just like Jews have claimed that eco-kosher is a central tenet of Judaism, Christians also have made the exact same argument about Christianity. And I bet if you dug deep enough you could find the exact movements in Buddhism and Islam. If the same Christianity that did away with eating laws could now embrace them as part of Jesus’ social gospel then I guess anyone could.

The kosher laws are supposed to raise an awareness of what we eat and a sensitivity to the needs of all living creatures--that is why the disconnect between kashrut and the humane treatment of animals is so discordant to Jewish values.

However, eco-kosher is not only an issue of demanding humane kosher slaughtering, as Rabbi Waxman raises, or even of prohibiting kosher veal where humane treatment is lacking, as was raised by the Conservative Movement this past year. Eco-kosher is really about drawing on our kosher consciousness to limit the negative impact our food and consumer choices have on the earth.

For thousands of years, Judaism has taken seriously the idea of "you are what you eat"-– in other words, that the choices we make about what food to eat (and not to eat) has the capacity to make us holy. This is the origin of ancient Jewish dietary laws, known collectively as kashrut. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi first suggested and Rabbi Arthur Waskow has since popularized an important concern about these laws: If what we eat helps make us holy, shouldn’t ethical considerations have a role in deciding what is kosher (literally: fit) to eat? Is an egg from a chicken living its entire life in a 61-square-inch cage as good for our souls (to say nothing of our bodies) as an egg from a cage-free animal? Is meat processed in a plant where workers are underpaid and work in unsafe conditions equivalent to meat where animals are treated humanely and workers are treated fairly? And can pâté de fois gras, made by force-feeding a goose through a tube shoved down its throat, possibly be kosher?

In response, Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi coined the term "eco-kashrut" – meaning eating in a way that is mindful of both ecological concerns and ritual concerns (or more properly: of the way that ecological concerns affect ritual concerns. Rabbi Waskow suggests that the category of eco-kashrut could be expanded beyond food items to other products and services such as paper, energy, etc.).

That there is a need to convene the sort of conference called "Why Be Jewish" that Rabbi Stern recently did points to precisely how poor a job the institutional Jewish world has done at providing meaningful answers to why we should care about being Jewish. Too often the answer is posed merely in terms of survival: We should be Jewish so we can raise children who will keep being Jewish. Or sometimes, if the answerer is feeling more expansive: We should be Jewish so Hitler doesn’t win.

These answers were surely convincing and sufficient a generation ago, but now they are not. The fact that they were repeatedly emphasized to the near-exclusion of any other contenders explains the sad current state of affairs where many American Jews can’t offer a compelling answer of their own. As a rabbi, I am confronted with these questions all the time from Jews whose own upbringing has let them down in this regard. Here are just a few answers:

For starters, there’s these sense of belonging and connectedness that comes with knowing you are part of something bigger than yourself: a family, a community, a people, a sacred story.

There’s the way Judaism elevates the every day instead of denigrating it, encouraging us to search for holiness within the framework of our lives.

There’s Judaism’s open embrace of tension and dialectics: of not being frightened of contradiction but instead of recognizing that the truth often lies in the tension between two poles.