"What is kosher," you ask?
Good question! Grab ten random people and ask them what kosher is... you're likely to end up with fifteen answers. Heck, I might give you two or three answers myself.
Lets go back to the beginning. We'll start at "The Beginning" and then move on to my own personal Torah observance beginnings.
Genesis 2:15 states that ...the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
I am starting with this passage because I believe it is important to notice that God has been interested in and giving instructions to mankind about the food we eat since... well, since the beginning. It must be important to Him. When He instructs us not to eat something, then the instruction is, well, the Law. That's what kosher is - it is conforming to God's dietary laws, or instructions. Biblicalholidays.com puts it like this:
Biblical kosher refers to the dietary laws as outlined in the Scriptures, forbidding the eating of (1) animals that God calls unclean (Lev. 11:47), (2) animal fat (Lev. 3:17), or (3) animals that still have the blood in them (Lev. 17:12-14) as food. Lev. 11 talks about clean and unclean foods.
When my family began to observe the food laws in Leviticus 11, we began by simply refraining from pork and shellfish. It seemed like a huge step too - all the sudden we were aware of how much of our food fell into the 'abomination' category. What we didn't know at the time was that the battle to eat food that was 'kosher' according to God's word was bigger than we could ever have imagined.
At first, we would occasionally hear about a favorite food that had pork in it, or a candy that contained gelatin. As we continued to be more sensitive to what was in the food, we became more and more aware of teh fact that pork is in ... well, almost everything that we were eating at the time.Our conversations went like this; We had the best time with the kids last night. We ate Smores around the camp fire -"
"You know marshmallows aren't kosher, right? - they have gelatin in them."
"What!? Marshmallows have pork in them?" As I am reeling from the disturbing news of pig fat hiding in my desert, I pop an Altoid mint...
"So do those."
To which I reply, "ha ha, that's funny - as if you didn't already ruin camping for the rest of my life, now my mints actually have pork in them too? What ever..."
And so the story goes. We had heard about the "kosher" labels (on left) but had not given them any real thought - after all, I had no reason to eat food that had been blessed by a rabbi, right?
What we soon learned though, was that the blessing was not what the kosher label was all about. The label was a sense of security for the buyer, telling him/her that the food they were purchasing has been watched over by a person with strict standards according to Leviticus 11.
Somebody who cares about God's Law was in charge of giving the food a seal of approval, called a hechscher.
...more later - I have to get something to eat.
2 comments:
God's Dietary laws is always good for us. If you look how our teeth are developed you can safely assume that we are not intended to eat meat.
That's interesting. I will be working my way up to the kosher meat disputes - you may want to stick around, so you can add some feedback from the 'no meat at all' side.
As I was saying inthe post, we are constantly being challenged by these things - there was a time when I would have shrugged your comment off... but not any more. I may stop eating meat all together before it is said and done. In fact, my wife and I have already started discussed doing just that; mainly for a lack of hechschered meat in our area.
Thanks for the reply! Keep coming back - I could always use more input from another person who is doing these things.
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