Kashrut question and some helal

You are completely incorrect. That is, your assertion is 100% wrong. In English, the word is spelled halal. It’s not pedantry and it’s quite meaningful.

That’s a pretty good question, actually. The why of it is simply that the Rabbis who developed the rules for kashrut did not consider that such a requirement would be indicated.

Apparently so.

Just to go back to this question - the milk/meat mixture applies to the meat of kosher mammals. Thus a beef/cheese mixture is prohibited on these grounds. A pork/cheese mixture would be prohibited on the grounds that the pig itself is unkosher, but the mixture would not incur the more stringent prohibition of milk/meat.

Under Biblical law, poultry is not meat. However, it has for centuries been considered meat by Rabbinic decree. The reasoning was that poultry meat is similar enough to “real” meat that one might get confused and actually come to permit real milk/meat mixtures. Anyone who keeps kosher today adheres to this rule.

Fish was not considered similar enough to “real” meat and hence was not included in the decree. Fish (and eggs) are considered pareve (meaning “neutral” - not milk or meat).

Zev Steinhardt

The problem is, we don’t know why we’re supposed to keep the kosher laws, other than that God said so. There have been various explanations offered at different times (that kashrut is a health code, that it separates Jews from their neighbors, that it minimizes animals’ suffering, or that it separates symbols of life and death, and many others), but they’re all speculation. No explanation is given in the Bible of the purpose of these laws.

Incidentally, the milk/meat laws also apply to any meat (including poultry, but not fish or eggs) and any dairy product. So it’s not kosher to mix lamb with cheese made from cow’s milk.

And there’s no kosher law saying you can’t cook a cow and its calf together- you could make a meatloaf with ground beef from the mother cow and ground veal from the calf, and it could be kosher (assuming the meat from both animals was kosher, and that no dairy or non-kosher meat was added).

There is, however, a prohibition on slaughtering a mother cow and it’s calf on the same day (Lev 22:28).

Zev

Indeed?
I had a discussion once with a Reform Rabbi-he and his wife caught me eatting my last cheesburger before I converted, BTW :slight_smile: - that a calf now wouldn’t have been anywhere near it’s parent’s milk. He explained that it was symbolic of life and death, milk and blood. I thought of someone who had once described to me gleefully how pigs screamed when some were killed in front of the pen. Made me want to join up right there.

Interesting! I let Empire or Aaron’s Best handle that end of keeping kosher. I presume they (or whoever actually slaughters the animals) are doing something to keep track and make sure they don’t violate that rule?

I shudder to think what would happen if I tried to slaughter an animal myself, given that I managed to pull lots of muscles giving one of my cats a bath, and also given that I once cut myself badly (lots of blood and a scar that’s still with me 10 years later) using a butter knife.

I’ve heard speculation that a benefit of the kosher laws is that fewer Jews slaughter animals themselves (because they’re not qualified as shochetim or kosher butchers), and that makes Jews less bloodthirsty and violent. I’m all for not having to slaughter cows or wring chickens’ necks for myself :slight_smile:

Interesting… For Jews, this is pretty straightforward, since the Jews follow dietary laws which are stricter than those of Islam, anyway. But what about Christians? Christians have no problems with eating pork, so pork is (or at least, can be) “food of the People of the Book”. But pork is, so far as I know, absolutely forbidden to Muslims (except, I presume, in cases of emergency, where it’s a choice between pork and starvation). So which rule applies, here?

Most Christians have no problem eating pork.

http://www.themodernreligion.com/misc/hh/pork.html

Your citation there doesn’t show that pork is forbidden to Christians, just that some random Muslim thinks it should be. And as a general statement “Christians have no problem with pork” works – the only groups I can think of that don’t eat it are Seventh-Day Adventists and Ethiopian Orthodox, and the latter will admit that it’s merely a custom rather than a religious law, i.e. they do not condemn other Christians for eating pork.