Rabbi Joshua Waxman: August 2007 Archives

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.

I wish I shared Rabbi Grossman’s rosy assessment of the legacy of the Lebanon War, which marks its one-year anniversary next week. She lists a number of factors that she cites as positive outcomes from the war, and it is certainly true that there are some improvements. On the other hand, she fails to mention Hamas’ takeover in Gaza, the decreased morale of Israel’s citizens, the stagnation in the current administration and at the top ranks of the army, the strengthening of Palestinian militants in southern Lebanon, and the final nail in the coffin of the all-important myth of Israel’s invulnerability. All of these factors can be traced to Israel’s disastrous decision to go into Lebanon–a fitting irony since it was Israel’s original incursion into Lebanon under Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon that first began to erode that myth.

If there is one lesson to come out of the last 50 years, it is that wars launched to gain territory or with the "strategic intent" of realigning the neighborhood hardly ever go the way the aggressor intends or desires. From Korea, to Vietnam, to the First Lebanon War; from the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan to Rwanda to Kossovo to Iraq to the Second Lebanon War, time and again the hostilities have backfired in the face of the aggressor.

The clear lesson is that voluntary wars, in Hebrew milchemet reshut, have no winners. (Witness the immortal words of Kevin Kline’s pro-America character in "A Fish Called Wanda": “We didn’t lose Vietnam. It was a tie!”), and there is something distasteful about debating who lost less, as Rabbi Grossman does. This is not to say I’m a pacifist; Israel needs to stand up to aggression and to respond militarily if provoked to maintain its security. However, launching full-scale wars on the shaky premise of installing friendly governments or creating new allies ought to be so thoroughly discredited as a tactic that any minister or government official should be ashamed to propose it. Yet Dick Cheney is making coy remarks about attacking Iran and Ethiopia is fighting a proxy war in Somalia, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

For all countries considering military action to promote foreign policy, the Lebanon War should serve as a stunning rebuke.