I’m breaking a bit with tradition by asking this before sunset on Friday, but here goes:
The reason for not mixing meat and dairy in kosher food is a prohibition on cooking a calf in the milk of its mother (more or less paraphrased). By that reasoning, shouldn’t it be non-kosher to serve a dish combing eggs and chicken?
Given that this is a religious question, I suppose “G*d said so” (or didn’t say so) might in fact be the answer, but if there’s some sort of text or rabbinical reasoning on this I’d be interested in knowing.
I have never kept kosher, but from what I’ve been told eggs aren’t dairy, they’re Pareve. As such, there is no problem combining them with various meats including poultry.
Eggs aren’t meat or can be confused with meat. Eggs aren’t milk, and come from animals that don’t produce milk.
But birds do feed their young with stuff that comes out of their bodies, which is all that nursing is. They just “nurse” differently (by regurgitating food) rather than processing food into milk to be fed to the chicks. So don’t mix chicken with regurgitated food from a chicken.
The analogy of eggs and chickens, for mammals, would be… eggs and mammal. There is no kashrut law, AFAIK, about cooking a cow along with its ovaries.
I’d like to point out that the birds that typically “nurse” their young with regurgitation are not the ones whose eggs we normally eat. We eat pigeons, but I’m not aware of a market for pigeon eggs. We eat chickens and eggs, but baby chickens are fed regurgitated food by their mother.
The cattle we eat are typically not the ones who give us our milk and cheese. By the time dairy cows are sold for meat, it’s unlikely their offspring are being sold for meat.
I recently had a long talk with my Rabbi about keeping Kosher. I will (probably badly) attempt to relate what I think is a relevant point in that conversation. I never have kept kosher, but my daughter (who is 8) recently asked us if we could start keeping kosher at home. It has become important to her. I went to the Rabbi for advice and brought up Leviticus and how so much of kashrut law seems arbitrary. Specifically mentioning that it was essentially impossible to eat the milk of a cow and that cows baby at the same time and also that the law specifically talked about goats and so why should we even care about non goat meat? I knew he keeps kosher but it felt like it wasn’t for me and I was conflicted about my daughter being interested.
His response was that, if you go by Leviticus, it’s very easy to dismiss keeping kosher as a relic of another time but that is thinking about it differently than he thinks about it. He, like I, was raised in a fairly secular home and did not keep kosher until he was an adult. He pointed me to deuteronomy and some Talmud and said essentially that, the point of keeping kosher is to have a set of rituals that separate Jews from non Jews. That they are complicated enough to require thought if you eat meat so that you do not simply mindlessly consume animal flesh, but simple enough that they are follow able. In his opinion kosher operates on a continuum and that the act of attempting to keep kosher is more important than any of the reasons listed in Leviticus.
I should note that I am not Orthodox and that Orthodox probably view this differently, but this was an explanation that made a ton of sense other me. It is not “because God says so” and it is not because there is really any internal logic. It is because we are Jews and part of being Jewish is following customs that require you to think about the choices you make every day. You intentionally place obstacles in the path of life because it forces you think about your life. The obstacles we place are chosen because they are the ones that gave always been chosen.
So is it OK to have a cheeseburger if you think about it, and acknowledge that you are not eating the calf and the mother’s milk at the same time?
I understand it’s a continuum. I read once that some rabbis say eating a gardenburger with cheese on it is not kosher, because it has the appearance of not being kosher. Yet many Jewish people eat turkey bacon. There’s a guy in New York that sells beef hamburgers with soy cheese, and he has been praised and condemned for it. So there does seem to be a continuum up to and including appearances. But given that it’s, as you say, ‘essentially impossible to eat the milk of a cow and that cows baby at the same time and also that the law specifically talked about goats’, can/does a cheeseburger fall onto the kosher spectrum?
As far as I can tell, the bible only says don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk. During the early rabbinical period, all these rules were elaborated, refined, extended, mainly in the interest of proving that I am holier than thou. The attempted prohibition of veggie cheeseburgers is a perfect illustration of that (and shows it was not confined to the early rabbinic period). Don’t get started on this or some rabbi will decide that chicken soup with matzoh balls made with egg are traif. It’s already bad enough you can’t use butter.
We were never kosher when I was growing up, but I had cousins who were. We were very envious of them because they got to drink soda with dinner, while we had to suffer with milk. Little did I know how much healthier that was.
I mentioned to my Reform Rabbi that there was no chance that the cheese came from the cow’s parent. He explained that milk represents life, and the blood of the meat represents death, and we should not mix the two.
And I’m posting on Shabbes.
Straight up, this was a major takeaway for me. That said, he really leaned on the whole “do this because you want to not because you have to… And you should want to” bit.
He likened it to wearing a yarmulke. He said, technically you just are supposed to cover your head, and only in certain situations not always. He could easily just wear a baseball cap everywhere. But he is proud of his Judaism and, moreover, does not want to pass as gentile even though he could. The yarmulke is his way of saying “I’m Jewish and I don’t care who knows” He said, for him, keeping kosher is the same thing. You do it because following the rules is what Judaism is about. If you don’t follow the rules what’s they point? Judaism doesn’t care about faith, only about adherence to the customs.
He was more eloquent and persuasive than I am being. Though not so persuasive that I am not posting on a Friday night.
Actually, your suggested answer to such “religious questions” dealing with the “why” of each of the 613 commandments (“mitzvah” singular, “mitzvoth” plural) is correct, as it happens, for the mitzvah of kashrut. All the jazz about kindness to animals, awareness of this and that, is fine, but the bottom line is exactly as you’ve said.
A whole class of mitzvoth ultimately are “explained” by that. But not all of them. Ie, not merely because searching piously for rationale of the mitzvoth happens to be a “religious question”–which of course by definition is whatever the heck the Rabbis feel like talking about in the Talmud.
FWIW (some contexts more than others) I believe [cite needed] the Rabbis in the Talmud were envious of the pork eaters, assuming it must be really good for the rest of the world to eat it. But waddya gonna do,? as Rabbi So-and-So said in the name of Rabbi So-and-So.
