Contrapuntal:
Jewish law makes the distinction, disingenuous as you may feel it is. You don’t have to agree with it, but it is a genuine distinction. The bee’s stomach is essentially a beer barrel. Sure, what come out has been changed, but the substance wasn’t ever a part of the bee’s body.
…and yet the enzymes that convert it from nectar to honey are?
So you can have minute amounts of animal products, what is the limit in percentage terms?
Sort of reminds me of South American Catholics eating Capybara becase its not ‘meat’ since it spends a large part of its life in water - a process of post jutification if ever I saw it.
Can’t even be honest and transparent about it, bloody religions, seem to be all the same and always the scribes manouevering around the obvious to keep the believers clean.Same mechanism is used to go along with all sorts of utterly heinous crimes, and we wonder why our boys are over in other countries dying to combat other religious nutters.
Convenient how the religious can see the illogical in other religions, but never in their own.
Not really.Scroll down to the diagram. All of those apparatuses before the cask (i.e. barrel) are the bee’s stomach. The barrel simply stores the final product. Now granted, in the case of the bees, the barrel and the other parts might be the same, but suggesting that the stomach *only *stores the final product is wrong.
*Most *of it wasn’t. Is that consistent with Jewish law? I honestly don’t know.
I have seen some claims (nothing worth citing in MPSIMS, let alone GQ) that the word d’vash translates as “fermented honey” or “fermented date juice.”
Also, in the descriptions of sacrifices, halav keeps being translated as “fat.”
So eretz tzavat halav u’d’vash might translate as “land flowing with fat and booze” – that is, junk food.
I was about to make a commentary here, but then I remembered this is GQ. So the GQ point is, be careful of the translations.
Look, the answer is that honey has been kosher for thousands of years. The reason Jews know honey is kosher is because it’s mentioned in the Torah that ancient Israelites ate honey, the same Torah that contains the commandments to keep kosher.
If you don’t care that the Torah allows Jews to eat honey, then you also don’t care that the Torah commands certain dietary restrictions either.
Jews who keep kosher are fine with the legalistic interpretations, because the whole point of keeping kosher is simply because you were asked to keep kosher. There may or may not be a larger divine purpose behind the rules, but the point of keeping the rules is that you keep the rules. If there’s a larger purpose behind the rules, it’s never mentioned in the Torah, and any speculation on the purpose of the rules is merely human speculation, unless there’s any future divine guidance on the subject.
Of course, since I’m not Jewish, and don’t believe in God, it’s all kind of moot to me anyway. But following the letter of the law rather than the spirit is fine according to most Jews, because for lots of things they don’t believe they know what the spirit of the law is, so all they’re asked to do is follow the letter of the law.
Contrapuntal:
Thanks for the diagram link. What I was apparently thinking of was what the diagram labels the “Fermenter” rather than the barrel.
Contrapuntal AND casdave:
In the main, the rule is that if the non-kosher substance adds a significant and desireable flavor to the end product, then the mixture is no longer kosher. Any bee substance that remains in the honey imparts only an undesireable flavor to the honey, and therefore is considered legally insignificant.
(There are other rules that also must be considered in discussions of mixtures of kosher and non-kosher substances, but when it comes to bees’ honey, this is the one that applies most relevantly to your question.)
Bolding mine.
Scuba_Ben:
Helev is fat, not halav. Halav is unquestionably milk.
There might be some confusion here because certain constructions of the word helev end up vowelized similar to halav - e.g., Leviticus 9:19, the word “fats” is vowelized as “halavim”.
Contrapuntal, I’m not saying that the enzyme processing the nectar doesn’t cause the honey flavor. I’m saying that the enzyme itself does not taste good. Yeast is what causes barley-hops-water to develop its desired beer flavor, but you wouldn’t take a chunk of brewer’s yeast and munch on it.
Thanks, I thought I had the vowels off.
If it causes the honey flavor, then surely it “adds a significant and desireable flavor to the end product” therefore it must mean that “the mixture is no longer kosher.”
If it causes the flavour, doesn’t that mean that it is imparting “a significant and desireable flavor to the end product”?
But pig’s milk is just the result of enzymes acting on pig food. The enzymes themselves don’t taste good. The milk is just the food converted to a tastier form by the enzymes in the pig. There is no difference at all in kind. Any animal product is just the result of enzymes acting on that animal’s food.
If an animal product is acceptable so long as the food that it was enzymatically transformed from is acceptable, then both pig’s milk and honey should be kosher.
If an animal product is unacceptable because it was substantially changed in flavour and chemical composition by the enzymes of a non-Kosher animal, then neither honey nor pig milk is kosher.
This isn’t just nit pickery. Honey is more chemically different from the food that the bees ate than pig’s milk would be from pig’s fed on cow’s milk. In both cases the transformation comes entirely from enzymatic action, and in neither case do the enzymes taste good.
Let’s not tiptoe around it: Honey is bee vomit. More generally, would the vomit of any other non-kosher but herbivorous animal itself be kosher?
If it were specifically defined as kosher in the bible, yes. If God said to Moses, “And I will lead my people out of Egypt, and take them to a land of milk and rabbit puke.”. . .
It’s not all that controversial, except among a certain segment of the Orthodox population that wants to believe that the tanaim and amoraim were scientific geniuses and that the Torah and Talmud are scientifically inerrant and inherantly superior to modern science.
It does nt matter if this had been defined as Kosher because the technology of the time was not up to defining it in any other way, the real question is, why does it continue to be Kosher when we know differant?
Why is it that religion seems to have huge problems with adjusting to knowledge?
What religions tend to do is redefine things, and they use lawyeresque weaselling to conitnue with these anomolies, instead of accepting fact and moving on.
You would imagine that a supreme being might actually look well upon the advancement of human knowledge, so why does religion have such problems?
This really is a fundamental flaw in many religions and it’s one significant reason that secularism has gained credibility - religion simply can’t credibly fill in the gaps.
It’s true that religions eventually accept such changes in human knowledge, but they tend to be dragged along with this process, its usually a very reluctant process, so we have the spectacle of secular science being more of a reforming force than anything from within religious organisations, we have to face up to the fact that society is no longer rooted in a buch of wandering shepherds in a society where literacy was the exception and women were considered to be possessions, and look at the (better in my opinion) reality of modern society.
That’s not quite right either. In going from the phrase generally translated as “Thou shalt not cook a kid in its mother’s milk” to a prohibition of eating a meat dish in the same meal as a milk dish (until, I believe, four hours have past, why four, and no one measured hours in those days and in medieval times, hours varied in length depending on the length of day), they made a huge excursion into trying to determine the spirit of the commandment. Incidentally, I once read about a tribe of, IIRC, Falashas who kept a genealogy of their goats and kids and were careful never to stew a kid in its mother’s milk.
There is certainly nothing in the Torah about separate dishes either. It is all an attempt to outdo your neighbor in holiness. Had honey not been mentioned explicitly, I doubt it would be considered kosher today.
Contrapuntal:
It’s an agent, not an additive. In Jewish law, that’s the difference. Once the honey is made, if you could theoretically extract the minute amount of bee enzyme, you still have tasty honey (possibly even tastier).
Blake:
No, pig’s milk is the result of enzymes acting on the pig’s BODY TISSUE. Let’s say you took a baby female piglet that’s never had a drop to eat or drink outside the womb, and you injected it with its mother’s lactation enzymes. It will still produce milk from its teat. (at least I assume a pig could, the phenomenon of “witch’s milk” has certainly been observed in people) The food the pig eats becomes digested into its body, and the body tissue, in turn, becomes milk.
Captain Amazing:
Have we been reading the same book? He pretty much advocates a non-literal reading of Genesis. That’s a pretty radical departure from millenia of Jewish tradition.
Hari Seldon:
Seriously? You really think that the way Kashrut practices have developed is nothing more than personal one-upmanship?
I bet bacon-infused rabbit puke would sell quite well.
No. The idea is not to determine the spirit of the command. The idea is to “build a fence around the command;” to lay out a set of rules for practice that will keep the practioner so far away from the actual command of the Torah (mitzvot d’oraita) that there is no possibility of accidentally transgressing it. It’s true the Torah doesn’t call for separate dishes, but if you don’t use separate dishes, a slatternly housewife may well fail to clean the dish well, and you will have accidentally mixed yesterday’s milk from the cow with today’s freshly-slaughtered calf, the child of that cow. This command is also a mitzvah, but it’s part of the mitzvot d’rabbanan, the laws derived from the rabbis. This kind of fence-building mitzvot d’rabbanan is called a gezeirah.