I’m betting he’s thinking of the one where the rabbi and the priest are old friends, and as they are getting old, they ask each other if they ever transgressed the stereotypical rules of their respective religions. i.e., Has the Priest ever had sex? Has the Rabbi ever eaten ham?
…and the Basque shepherd says, “I wish it were dark.”
No, that ain’t it.
Essentially the same as printed in The Official Jewish Joke Book:
The Priest says to the Rabbi, “Rabbi, you keep Kosher, correct?” To which the Rabbi replies, “Of course, father.” The Priest then asks, “But have you ever broken kosher?” The Rabbi then says, “I admit that I have. When I was a young man I once indulged myself in ham, and in doing so broke Kosher.” “That’s very interesting,” remarks the priest, “for I am free to eat as much ham as I please.”
“What about you, father,” begins the Rabbi, “you keep celibate, do you not?” The preist replies, “Of course, Rabbi.” “But,” continues the Rabbi, “have you always kept so?” The Preist then says, “I admit, I have not. When I was a young man I once made love with a woman.”
The Rabbi then leans in and asks, “It’s better than ham, isn’t it?”
Well, he’s actually violating the rules, because virtually all soy “cheese” has casein (a milk derivative) in it. That’s something that has always baffled me: you’re avoiding cheese either for religious reasons, or because you don’t want any animal product - and that violates both of them. Supposedly it’s there to make the stuff melt more like real cheese.
Someone who did keep a kosher kitchen once told me that you can’t even cook chicken with dairy - where “in its mother’s milk” is clearly not possible.
Does it? The only soy cheese substitutes I have ever seen were typically targeted at vegans, and definitely don’t contain any animal products.
Here’s one : http://followyourheart.com/products/cheddar-3/
Here’s another: https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Violife-NonDairy-Cheese-Alternative-For-Pizza-Mozzarella-Flavour/362616011
Here’s another: https://vegusto.co.uk/collections/vegan-cheese/products/vegan-cheese-alternative-cheddar-no-moo-mild-aromatic?variant=38312210898
Another: http://www.buteisland.com/index.php/products/blocks/mature-cheddar-style
Another: https://shop.thevegankind.com/products/tofutti-dairy-free-alternative-to-mozzarella-block-200g?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=googlepla&variant=34889100750&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIk-uy4sC72QIV4jLTCh0XSwuaEAkYCSABEgKQ6vD_BwE
I can’t find a single ‘not-actually-cheese’ product (in markets available to me) that contains casein. I know there are lactose-free dairy cheeses (but those are just real cheese with the lactose predigested). What products are you talking about?
The way this rule gets stretched is odd. I’ve known people who kept separate refrigerators for meat and dairy. Ditto separate plates/dishes/etc.
OTOH the rules on Eruv* (wire “enclosure” thing) are stretched in the opposite direction.
For an outsider, it’s really not possible to guess which direction such stretching is going to go.
- Right now, the first paragraph of the article is mostly backwards. Hmmm.
Cheese is frequently problematic anyway because it’s made with rennet which is usually an animal (meat) product. But this is not a universal view. Usually you ask 2 Jews you get 3 answers. With Kashrut you get 5.
It’s been a while since I shopped for such products, but I definitely recall seeing them; even asked a vegan friend about it (she’s the one who told me about the melting thing). My husband used to get soy “cream cheese” and one common brand was casein free, another one was not.
Doing some googling, it sounds like it’s less common than it used to be.
Soy cheese products deceive consumers, violate vegans (from 2005)
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-soy-cheese-eaten-when-it-contains-casein
Are there Cheese Alternative that are truly Dairy-Free and Casein-Free? - Go Dairy Free
Is Casein Vegan? Milk Proteins and Vegan Cheese - Vegan.com (“Back in the bad old days, many soy cheese companies put casein in their products without disclosing it as a milk ingredient, and few vegans of the time recognized that it wasn’t vegan. As food technology has advanced, vegan cheese companies have discovered plant-based ingredients that replicate casein’s meltability. There are now several great vegan cheeses on the market that have the same stretchiness as dairy-based cheese.”)
So, depending on what fake cheese that fellow was using, his burgers may or may not have been kosher(ish). I say “kosher(ish)” because as others have noted, something that appears to violate the rules is nearly as bad as something which actually does do so (though I admit, we once fed a friend a dish made with turkey ham, with his full knowledge and permission).
Mother hens do NOT regurgitate food for the chicks. Look at the commercial hatchery businesses. They keep the chicks away from any adults, as soon as the eggs are laid, then, after the beak trimming, and sorting, they’re shipped off. No mother hens to be found.
I make two kinds of cheese and neither is made with real rennet. The first is ricotta which uses a souring agent like buttermilk, vinegar, or lemon juice. The second is mozzarella and what I use is called vegetable rennet. The explanation that came with the cheesemaking kit was that real rennet is simply too strong and would have to be heavily diluted in the quantities I make (4 liters of milk, making about a pound of cheese), plus some sour salt (sodium citrate).
Of course, commercial cheese, unless made to be kosher and pareve (neither dairy nor meat).
Chickens are precocial, while sparrows, for instance, are altricial.
That’s a line from the deleted verse of Mairzy Doats, I believe.
There is a lot of discussion in the Jewish world about how to keep the 635 rules they’re all supposed to live under - including whether they still have to obey all 635 any more.
The separate plates and dishes thing is actually pretty common. The separate stoves/refrigerators/etc. are a bit more extreme.
I’ve been eating lunch a couple times a month at the local Jewish Federation, which maintains a kosher kitchen for the purpose. Two completely separate sets of dishes, cutlery, and serving equipment for meat and dairy. This keeps most of the Jews in the area quite happy, but there’s one group that doesn’t find it kosher enough and never shows up to the social lunches.
All of this because…
And most of all, kosher sausages. If the rule is to avoid eating food which could be mistaken as treif by someone who saw you eat it, kosher sausages have to top the extended prohibition list.
The root cause of these exercises in tying knots while bending over backwards likely stems from the fact that the Talmud was written far before Maimonides got access to Aristotle’s logic through Averroes. Without that influence, there’s any number of logical mistakes made which are now difficult to back away from; The more authority you give to a source, the more embarrassing/difficult it is to change what you make it say.
For example, in the eruv business, there is a conflation between a necessary condition of what makes a private space (delineation) with whatever the sufficient condition might be. There was a desire to increase convenience so hanging a wire around an entire city can now make that city a private space. You would think it would be yet more efficient to make a small circle and say that it wraps around the earth with its apparent center the outside of the circle.
Kinda like hipsters going gluten-free vegan as a form of group signaling?
Is he Reform?
What kind of social enforcement is there of the kashrut? If someone from an Orthodox community feels like having a bacon cheeseburger, then what?
Conservative actually, though my synagogue is Reconstructionist. He was trained at a conservative seminary though and leans heavily in that direction.
For Orthodox? It depends too. There is Orthodox and there is ORTHODOX. In some communities you can be shunned or expelled. Most won’t though.
Really excellent book on non conformity in ultra orthodox communities
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00LRWK334/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519427212&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=all+who+go+do+not+return
My Rabbi in New Hampshire said his mother began keeping Kosher when he became a Rabbi. She said, “They would look at me not keeping Kosher and say, “And her son’s a Rabbi!””
What, are you accusing Paul Simon of not keeping kosher?
