Kashrut as a Moral Cultivator

"The Torah's commandments were not given to humankind for any purpose other than to refine people." -Genesis Rabbah 44:1

According to the Midrash, the mitzvot were created to make us into better human beings. If that's true, then kashrut has to bring us some sort of insight, realization, or mechanism that elevates our overall relationship with HaShem.  Just a few that come to mind......

1) Self-discipline.  This in inherent in any ritual, whether it be Buddhist meditation, the quotidian Kantian walk, or the seven sacraments of Catholicism. Self-discipline teaches you not to automatically give into your impulses. It gives you free will. It gives you awareness. And ultimately, it gives you a sense of self-control.  It should be no surprise that Judaism enables such self-control, even with something as seemingly mundane as eating.  The existential angst in Judaism, at least from a Kabbalistic perspective, is the inner struggle between the animal and G-dly souls.  Your animal soul just wants to eat.  You have a full stomach, it needs to be filled, so eat!  That's what animals do, after all.  But in Judaism, you go beyond that.  You think before you eat.  You are aware of what you eat. You channel those impulses and that awareness to serve HaShem.

2) Less prone to violence.  Dennis Prager makes a good point about the prohibition of consuming blood.  "It [the prohibition] produced an extraordinary antipathy to blood among Jews.  One example, in addition to the uniquely low incidence of violence among Jews, has been the vitrual nonexistence of hunting among Jews."  Judaism is an exceptionally life-affirming religion, and because of that, Jewish law abhors violence and supports the usage of it only when absoultely necessary.  The prohibition of blood consumption reinforces our commitment to eliminate violence, as well as violent tendencies from our daily lives.

3) Greater sense of compassion.  I would opine that this point is the apex of how kashrut cultivates man. R. Abraham Heschel explained that "these laws were designed to ennoble his feelings and make him sensitive to the plight of every creature. Disregard for the suffering of non-human creatures may result in insensitivity to the agony of human beings. The boy who, in crude joy, finds delight in the convulsions of an injured beetle or the anxiety of suffering animals will soon be dumb toward human pain." For Heschel, the spillover effect would not only affect treatement of animals--it would contiminate intrapersonal relations with fellow human beings, as well. Considering that Jewish people are supposed to possess the character trait of compassion (Yevamot 79a), it wouldn't bode well if we forgot the moralistic lessons of kashrut.

The agrument for compassion is best laid out in the debate of what the mitzvah of shooing the mother bird from her nest (Deuteronomy 22:6-7). Nachmanides argues that one should think of cultivating man's middot when keeping this mitzvah in mind. "The reason for the prohibition of slaying the mother and the young on the same day as well as the ordinance of sending the mother is to eriadicate cruelty and pitilessness from man's heart...not that G-d had pity on the mother bird or the mother of the young. Were that the case, G-d would have completely forbidden shechita. But the real reason is to cultivate in us the quality of mercy...since cruelty is a contagious, as is well known from the example of professional animal killers who become hardened to human suffering. These precepts regarding bird and beast are not motivated by pity for the beast but are decrees of the Almighty to cultivate good moral qualities in man."

Maimonides disagrees with Nachmanides, and believes it's about caring about the bird itself, but that is a discussion I leave for my next blog.