Perhaps a bunch of Rabbis with too much time on their hands came up with things like that.
TLDR: God says, “Don’t do X.” Just to be extra extra careful, besides not doing just X, you don’t do W, which resembles X but isn’t exactly the same. Best not do V either.
Well, I think I’m going to have to agree with Jesus on that one then. Why have a burdensome list of rules when they could be pared down to a simpler and easier set of rules? I think the guy just MIGHT have been onto something!
Question though: do the Messianic Jews i.e. “Jews for Jesus” still follow all of those old dietary laws? I can remember reading about another Christian denomination that followed them to some degree (7th Day Adventists?)
Well, that’s going to vary with the particular group of “messianic Jews”. Some groups still keep nearly all the laws, traditions, and holidays of the Orthodox Jews, and some throw most of them out the window.
7th Day Adventists limit their meat intake, with total vegetarianism being the ideal. When they do eat meat, they keep to the kosher meats of the Old Testament.
Some Messianic Jews keep kosher, some do not. There is no one source of doctrine on the issue, nor are Messianic Jews all the part of the same overall community, such as Jehova’s Witnesses or Christian Scientists.
If you’ve ever seen free-roaming chickens going after bugs in the garden, you know they are great predators, but I believe chicken is a kosher meat.
Or you could say that making up a very complicated set of rules (from a single straight-forward statement) creates a need to support a class of learned people to ‘interpret’ the rules. So job security for the rabbis!
It’s a “better safe than sorry” thing.
If you go to the market and buy some cheese to go with your veal, it may or may not be cheese made with the milk of that veal’s mother (all the more likely that veal is killed/eaten specifically so that humans can milk the cow afterwards). So rather than shrug and go “well if it happens it happens” at something god his own self commanded (not suggested, commanded) rabbis have opted to err on the side of caution.
Same goes for, eg, not using regular elevators or turning on the TV during the Sabbath - because it’s forbidden to start a fire on the Sabbath. And an electric spark is *kinda *like fire ; and pushing a button to close a circuit *could *create a visible spark. So you don’t do that; just in case. Because god as written seems like a detail oriented, micro managing kind of guy.
This. It’s also why you can’t eat chicken with cheese, just in case.
Talmud! Taking rules lawyering to ridiculous extremes for two thousand years and counting.
It does seem a bit extreme of an interpretation. I mean I can see the ancients being wary of some chunk of unknown mystery meat in a unspecified dairy sauce. Could be anything.
But you’d think something super-easy to confirm like whole broiled gerbil with a side of cat milk cheese sauce for dipping would be pretty safe.
There is also, I am told, an element of performance. You don’t mix chicken and cheese, or turkey and cheese on the off chance that someone might see you eating it and they THINK you are breaking the laws. That could be bad info though, I didn’t get it from a rabbi, just a kosher friend.
Why all my kosher friends are getting excited about impossible cheeseburgers confuses me because you would expect that this runs foul of that too, but I guess they figure in these modern times as long as it’s a vegetable it doesn’t matter what it looks like.
There is also the element of simply making considered choices about your food. I belong to a Reconstructionist community, where a lot of people follow more orthodox rules by choice but not because they need to (most would tell you they dont really believe in God). They take the view that part of what makes you jewish is the performance of ritual and kashrut is simply a ritual for selecting food. It gives you the opportunity to be jewish in that moment. While the Orthodox wouldn’t think of it that way per se, my suspicion is that many of them practice for similar reasons. It’s part of their identity. When you are a small band of people traveling the dessert or trying to run a country while Assyria and Babylon are constantly knocking at your door, these things become important.
I can’t help but think that attempting to milk a cat would be even more hazardous than attempting to bathe a cat…
Very dangerous. You go first. 
I read ages ago, probably when I was still a child, that mouse milk was improbably valuable because of the process of milking them and the tiny amount you get from one mouse, and that it was extremely valuable for scientific reasons. Now after reading your post (and knowing cats) I think that cat milk must be even much more precious :D.
Lamoral:
The Jewish methods of scriptural interpretation are deeper than a simple surface reading of verses in isolation from one another. The Talmud goes through an entire page discussing how, based on cues from other verses, the prohibition on this “specific recipe” really means a much broader prohibition. Additionally, the laws that define when a substance is being cooked (which has much application beyond just the milk-meat prohibition) is derived from Biblical verses elsewhere.
Rather than “presuming” to know G-d’s thoughts, the Rabbis examine G-d’s written words (i.e., the Bible) to answer questions about how to properly implement the commandments.
(This is in addition to the precautionary “fences” for observance that others have mentioned.)
I guess I just don’t understand why they didn’t “lawyer” their way to making the rules LESS restrictive instead of more! I realize that these were great scholars who studied all of this for centuries. They were sages. From what I understand, they were also charismatic religious leaders who presided over important movements in Judaism, and they were clearly very intelligent and they understood how people think. So why is it that they didn’t use that legalistic thinking to justify just doing away with these rules that make the preparation of food (which is basically the root of human existence, the means of sustenance that occurs multiple times every single day) more complicated than it needs to be?
If their reasoning was “it’s important for us to maintain a unique diet that sets us apart from other cultures”, why wouldn’t the prohibition on pork be enough?
“This animal is filthy, don’t eat it” is pretty straightforward. OK. But the giant leap of logic from “boiling a calf in its own mother’s milk” to “not ever mixing any meat of any animal with any milk from any animal” seems like just being arcane for the sake of being arcane.
Because their goal wasn’t to make life simpler. Their goal was and remains to better understand the meaning and nuance in G-d’s laws so as to be closer to him. In Judaism, following the law as correctly as possible is a blessing.
People often look at Orthodox Jewish practices such as Sabbath mode in elevators and stoves, an eruv around a Jewish neighborhood, and think that the goal is to get out of following the laws as written. But IMO that’s not a really accurate description of what’s going on. Exploring the ins and outs of the law, testing the edge cases, and discussing the proper interpretation of the rules is a way of getting closer to a true understanding of G-d’s will.
That’s from the perspective of a non-observant Reform Jew. YMMV.
Lamoral:
Because they weren’t “lawyering” with some independent agenda, they were trying to honestly understand what G-d expects of them. Sometimes it’s more restrictive than the simple meaning of one isolated verse, sometimes it is in fact less.
Because that’s not their starting point. Their starting point is, “These texts are the word of G-d. What, exactly, does G-d expect of us? What meaning does this phrasing indicate, when compared with similar phrasing in other verses, or contrasted with different phrasing in other verses? This commandment was repeated, G-d wouldn’t repeat for no reason, what new information is meant to be conveyed?” and so on and so forth.
Rather than arcane, the logic behind this extension is outlined clearly in the Talmud for all to read.
I once read a book on Biblical vegetarianism that stated the kosher rules were to make all Jews veggies, and that Jesus was no doubt a vegetarian who ate “fishplant” which later got shorted to “fish.” After all, the Essenes were strict veggies and lived in Nazareth where Jesus grew up, so of course he was a vegetarian.
Are there any specific birds that are commonly/commercially available to gentiles as food that like pork are forbidden to Jews? I can’t think of any, I assume the same distaste about these birds applies to anyone contemplating chicken substitutes?
What were/are kosher Jews supposed to do at Passover when their main dish is meat of some kind? Most modern Jews don’t kill a lamb and eat it these days; my Jewish in-laws usually had brisket or chicken–definitely NOT vegetarian. I doubt Jesus was vegetarian though, in common with the Jewish community of his time, he probably ate a lot less meat that we in modern times do.