I teach in a Jewish private school, and I love every second of it. It’s a cultural exchange that’s done me a world of good. I’m picking up bits of Hebrew and Yiddish. I learn a little bit about the lives of observant Orthodox Jews every day, including kosher law, which I find fascinating, if a bit abstruse.
So, I was showing off some of my newfound knowledge to my brother, and he, being my brother, had to stump me with the above question.
My first instinct was to say that, yes, marijuana is kosher. It’s a plant, and from what I’ve seen, kosher laws are the most relaxed about plant “foods”.
Then it occurred to me that the Jews I work with are scrupulous about following their host culture’s laws, and, well, marijuana is illegal. But, that may not fall under kosher laws. I’d like to ask one of the rabbis around me, but I fear I’ll give the wrong impression.
So far as I know, only meat or other products of animal extraction can be non-kosher in and of themselves.
Additionally, you may not mix dairy and meat.
Plants and plant-derived products fall in neither group, so marijuana should be kosher.
It’s still illegal, but it’s kosher.
Now we both wait for a more observant specimen of Judaism to come around and knock my answer out of the water… :o
It may be kosher, but it could be argued that smoking marijuana, like smoking tobacco, is hazardous to your health and is a form of self-endangerment. That doesn’t address the issue of marijuana as a drug.
As others have already pointed out, kosher laws are about ingestion, not inhalation. Jewish law says that one has an obligation to safeguard his or her health, but that does not render an activity non-kosher. You could put ground-up pork (for ground hog day, perhaps?) in a pipe and smoke it and not violate the laws of kosher.
And, if one were to ingest marijuana, there’s no kosher restrictions on it differently from any other vegetation. Make sure there are no bugs on it, and yum yum (I guess). And Israeli-grown produce has certain restrictions on it that I’m not going to bother going into in this post, because it’s most likely irrelevant.