i have a pair of older friends who are moving and i am helping.
the wife has been philosophically buying into judaism and is in the process of converting (i make that distinction because she wasn’t born jewish and was raised protestant christian).
the husband ran an errand and brought me back a diet soda. the wife grabbed it and checked the label for a Kosher emblem, then told me since she was converting the rest of the way, they would not be allowing Treif (non-kosher) products into the new home.
is that actually a thing Jewish people do…that there’s a law regarding even allowing non-kosher items to ever enter you home?
if so, what is the logic?
if so, what about the families that lived in the home before (it’s a mid-70s era home, so many people lived there before).
i am not sure if this is a jewish thing or just a stricture she came up with, but i am interested.
bear in mind she also nearly disfriended me for purchasing some medical specimen human skulls on behalf of a friend (they were never for me to own). she claimed those people’s soul would never reach heaven because their body was separated. i’ve never heard any religions say that–esp not of the Abrahamic variety.
actually feel free to answer either one of those two things…
There have been, in the past, Christian groups that held that the state of the body upon burial would be reflected in the resurrected body at the last judgement. Such believers resisted amputation of limbs, for instance, holding that their eternal heavenly body would be minus one leg or arm. They opposed cremation, for obvious reasons.
(Seems absurd; one would then be happy to die young and healthy, rather than old and feeble?)
Today, very few Christians formally believe this, and yet the idea persists among many Christians at a kind of superstitious level. Their priests and ministers will tell them not to worry about it, but they still have a resistance to amputation or cremation.
Even modern Christianity humors this superstition in expressing a preference for a whole body at the time of the funeral. They try to get all the parts together. There have been lawsuits regarding bodies that were buried, with parts in one location and parts in another; descendants of the deceased have sought to have the errant parts re-united.
Obviously, in some situations, it just can’t be done. Many of the bodies of the victims at the World Trade Center were minced as fine as confetti.
But think of it theologically: if it were possible to damn a soul to hell forever, simply by cutting off someone’s head and taking it away from the rest of the body, that gives power to mortal men which ought to be reserved to God almighty. It’s a strange version of Christianity that would give me the power to overrule God’s final judgement!
I can’t answer for how common the belief is, but yes, it exists. We were taught in nursing school that for some cultures (Orthodox Jews and Muslims were mentioned specifically, but it was suggested we ask everyone), any body parts, including bandages with large amounts of blood on them, should be packaged for return to the patient’s family so they could be buried with the patient.
I was never clear if this was required for non-fatal loss of body parts. I mean, if you have a foot amputated but you’re then discharged to home alive, do you want your foot in a paper bag? What the hell are you going to do with it for the next 40 years?
I also just finished reading The Dovekeepers, a work of well-researched historical fiction, where the destruction of bodies and the subsequent failure of the souls to reach heaven was a more than minor plot point. The book was set during the Jewish resistance/Roman siege of Masada in the first century, from the point of view of several Jewish women. (Not a terribly good book, but yes, they were positively verklempt that people whose heads were chopped off or whose bones were scattered by jackals could not enter heaven.)
Asking for a move to GQ, where it’ll be more likely to get a factual answer.
In any case:
re. treif items, in theory there shouldn’t be any in the house to avoid cross-contamination, but there’s a logical limit to that - treif includes for example mixed fibers, yet I doubt the most observant of Jews will ever require the plumber to show his clothes’ orginal labels.
^all that’s news to me. my father was a minister and i grew up in various denominations of christian churches. it was always a staple to play up the fleeting, feeble nature of our mortal form and how there’s not reason to worry because we’re all due for a perfect form in heavy.
because of that, me and folks kinda chuckled at the notion of the medical specimen skulls. we all agreed: we’ll be dead. we certainly won’t care.
^^all that makes me wonder about the “doom” of organ donors. ‘way to be nice and DAMN YOURSELF.’
i have to tread lightly with this particular woman when it comes to matter of religion or philosophies. she opts in to things with a zealous fervor, and often the only option is either conflict or avoidance.
so i am not about to ask her directly either of these things…
1)There’s no law about not allowing non-kosher items into your house per se, although Halacha-observant Jews may not derive any benefit from some non-kosher foods, notably mixtures of meat and milk. Families with small children might also feel that it’s easier to just keep non-kosher food items out of their house.
Incidentally, virtually every kind of soda sold in the United States is kosher, diet or otherwise.
2) Judaism puts great emphasis on respect for the dead, which includes swift burial of all body parts. However, the idea that unburied body parts will “prevent the soul from reaching heaven” is more of a folk belief than a formal Jewish teaching.
WhyNot: Yes, amputated body parts would be buried even if their owner is still alive.
she goes fullbore hardcore on things, so i am really curious how this plays out re: hired help. they hire everything done (painters are in the house now/lawncare people/hotub maintenance/photoshopping lessons and so on). as i said, she snatched my diet coke because she was all set to not allow me to bring it when we took the load to the new house.
she also requested that from now on i please never bring my own food or drinks over.
my first thought was about gum or candy i keep in my pockets. “uh oh…”
but what about this: the husband is a prolific chain smoker. cigs are not kosher (he smokes the gold box of marborols). and i know he’s not cotton to give that up, nor keep them out of the house, so the whole thing makes me want to call shenanigans.
i dont know why, but i have way more of a problem with people who implement proselytizing strictures but allow for arbitrary caveats than people who don’t care even at all. i reckon that’s a character flaw on my part, but it is what it is.
Judaism is divided on the subject, but there is at least a substantial minority which believes in the literal resurrection of the dead at some point in the future, and division of the body will prevent this. Souls never reaching heaven, on the other hand, sounds like a confused half-Christian personal superstition. Most Jews do not believe in an afterlife, at least not in a heaven-or-hell sense.
Treif (literally “torn,” as in meat from an animal killed in the wild) can contaminate a kosher kitchen, so that it requires kashering (cleaning and purifying), but I think the usual belief is that you actually have to cook treif in order to do this. However, there is a tradition that unclean things can contaminate clean things by touch, so in some homes the dairy dishes mustn’t touch the meat dishes, etc. It’s usually quite practical to say that having treif in the house creates an unacceptable risk of eating it, but I don’t think the mere act of touching a can containing soda of uncertain provenance would contaminate the countertops, in most viewpoints.
As for previous occupants, the kitchen should have been kashered when they moved in, so no problems there.
Cigarettes don’t have to be kosher, unless you eat them, but it’s most likely forbidden by halacha because you’re supposed to take care of your health. Also, I can’t imagine what non-kosher ingredients a cigarette might have.
Traditional/Orthodox Judaism includes the literal resurrection of the dead, and belief in an afterlife, as a central principal of faith. However, there is no doctrine, as far as I know, that division of the body will prevent this - especially if it wasn’t by the person’s own choice.
There’s a certain skeeviness factor of having non-kosher food in your home, but it’s not really a prohibition. Also, (clean) dairy dishes can touch (clean) meat dishes all they want, as long as it doesn’t lead to mixed dancing.
what i was told is the problem is bring any non-kosher items into the house. consuming them there wasn’t the issue. cross-contamination doesn’t seem to be the issue, since i have been asked not to bring anything personal, in a bottle, as a beverage or anything else.
allowing the trief over the threshold was the issue.
that is why i wondered if there’s law or principle in play that disallows someone bringing trief beyond the mezuzah.
For some highly religious Jews it’s not a matter of cigarettes being kosher or not, but that smoking them on the sabbat meets their definition of a forbidden work activity.
That’s a different issue. Smoking cigarettes on the Sabbath is certainly forbidden by halacha, but there are plenty of Orthodox smokers who manage to abstain for a day.