From the perspective of Jewish tradition, God cares that each individual Jew and the entire Jewish people observe kashrut, divine dietary law. This begs a deeper question: Why does God care that we keep kosher?
To address this, we must let the Torah speak for itself. Remember that the following texts don’t explain human behavior or civilization scientifically or historically. They’re religious and mythic explorations of how to close the great gap between God’s ideals and human reality.
After God created human beings — the most powerful and “evolved” of the species, God gave us dominion over all living beings:
God blessed them (humans) and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”
Genesis 1:28
Should we think that we were permitted to usurp the Creator and do whatever we want with nature, God’s next charge to the first humans set limits on the unbridled exercise of human power:
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God said, “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food.
And to all the animals on land, to all the birds of the sky, and to everything that creeps on earth, in which there is the breath of life, I give all the green plants for food.”
Genesis 1:29-30
Whatever coercive authority humans might possess over nature, God didn’t intend for them to kill animals for food. According to God’s ideal for the world, all species, including humans, were supposed to be vegans.
Pretty quickly, the divine plan fell apart. Humans were expelled from Eden, Cain murdered his brother Abel, violence proliferated in the world and in the generation of Noah God sent a great flood to destroy most of humanity. The world was no longer following the ideal divine plan.
Following the flood, God modified the dietary restrictions of Noah and his family, the progenitors of the new human race:
Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grass, I give you all these. You must not, however, eat flesh with its lifeblood in it.
Genesis 9:3–4
Recognizing the human propensity for violence, God allowed humans to consume animals as a concession to those baser impulses. Yet, God also sought to curb violence inherent in meat consumption by forbidding a limb torn from a living animal, and especially the blood within that limb. This restriction is one of the seven Noahide laws derived by the rabbis of the Talmud that apply to all humans (Sanhedrin 56b). It demands that all people curb their most violent impulses by refraining from cruelty to animals and avoiding the consumption of blood, the life force that belongs to God alone. These prohibitions remind people that God is the true master of life and death.
Yet how to model and teach these values to a morally resistant humanity? It’s here that the Jewish people and their covenant with God enter the human picture. After the Exodus from Egypt and prior to the giving of the Ten Commandments, God prepared the Israelites for dedicated service as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). According to the Torah commentator Rabbi Ovadiah Seforno (Italy, 1470–1550) this means that the Jewish people would be a distinct nation of teachers, separated out by God for a unique partnership:
[God is saying:] “Only you will be a kingdom of priests, which never disappears from history, whose task it will be to teach and instruct all of humankind to call out in the name of God and to serve God all together.”
This task would be achieved through observing the commandments. The rabbis of the Talmud distinguished between ritual commandments (those between humans and God) and ethical/social commandments (those between humans and other humans). This convenient but oversimplified dichotomy obscures the fact that all the commandments, the ones about food and eating especially, have one holistic goal: to make the Jews a holy and priestly kingdom from which humanity could learn to serve God through more refined behavior.
The Torah’s rules of kashrut intertwine the ritual and the ethical with the aim of deepening our God-consciousness when we eat. Humanity was originally forbidden to eat blood and the flesh of a living animal. We Jews are called to discipline ourselves even further through many additional consumption rules. These include distinguishing between forbidden and permitted animals; special rules of slaughter to prevent an animal’s suffering; covering up blood after slaughter; not mixing meat and dairy; separating meat and dairy utensils; refraining from eating most insects and bugs; refraining from eating produce before offering portions of it in gratitude to God. God is a realist who indulges our hunger for flesh with the proviso that we eat compassionately and recognize God, not ourselves, as the source of all food. Kashrut calls the Jewish people to take this proviso even further, so that we, and all who wish to learn from us, never forget that we are not the masters of life and death — God is.
Keeping kosher is neither spiritual nor moral magic that grants us a status of inherent superiority. It is possible to keep strictly kosher while being cruel and unethical. It’s possible to eat treyf, non-kosher food, and be an ethically refined, decent person. But while it is not magic, it still has power. To keep kosher is to accept a challenge from God to transform (not suppress) our predatory animal selves into sacred selves. In this most mundane aspect of daily life, the rules of kashrut call us to strive to do more than hunt, conquer, slaughter and eat at will. They are one powerful Jewish way for us to eat — and welcome the world to eat — in accordance with God’s will and vision for a more peaceful existence.
