New Book: "Kapporos Then and Now: Toward a More Compassionate Tradition" by Yonassan Gershom

Every year, right before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, there is a cultural war in certain Jewish neighborhoods over a ceremony called Kapporos, in which a chicken is slaughtered just before the holy day. The animal rights people show up claiming, “Meat is murder!” while the Orthodox and Hasidic Jews who practice this ceremony accuse the activists of antisemitism and violating their freedom of religion. Epithets fly and confrontations occur across the barricades, but nobody is really listening to each other.

In this book, I seek to build a bridge of understanding between these two warring camps. On the one hand, I oppose using live chickens as Kapporos, as I have written on this blog before. (Read More...)  Like many other religious Jews before me, I advocate giving money to charity instead. But on the other hand, I am a Hasid who understands and believes in the kabbalistic principles behind the ceremony and Hasidic life in general. In fact, it is that very mysticism that has led me not to use chickens for the ritual.  And I believe it is essential for activists to understand and respect this mystical worldview if they want to be effective.

On the surface, my task in writing this book would seem easy: Explain to animal rights people the reasons why some Orthodox Jews use chickens in a religious ceremony, and explain to Orthodox Jews why animal rights people find this offensive and cruel in modern times. But there is much more to it than that. Beyond this specific ritual lies a vast chasm between two very, very different worldviews. On both sides of the issue I have found sincere, caring people who, in all good faith, believe in what they are doing. But at the same time, each side is appallingly ignorant of the other. Could I possibly write a book to bridge the gap?

To do this successfully, the book could be neither a vegetarian manifesto nor a "Torah-true" religious tract.   My methodology was to approach the subject as a combination of theologian, cultural anthropologist, and participatory journalist, examining the issue from the perspectives of both sides.   As Richard H. Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, wrote in his Foreword to my book:

“Rabbi Gershom has a very clear, conversational style of writing, scholarly yet very readable, and he explains complex issues very well. He is careful to put issues in context. He is not a polemicist, but seeks common ground and solutions. He uses examples from his own personal experience and also cites authorities.”

Chapter 1 opens with my involvement with the Alliance to End Chickens as Kapporos (Karen Davis' org), my reasons for leaving the Alliance over theological issues (read more on that...) but not the movement itself -- and how this ultimately led me to write this book.

In the rest of the book I trace the history of Kapporos and the impact of the modern meat industry on the ceremony, comparing it to my own experience raising and observing chickens in natural, free-range flocks on my hobby farm in Minnesota.   I explain how the very un-Jewish ideas of Descartes have affected Jews and gentiles alike.  And because I believe it is essential for activists to understand the mystical worldview of Hasidism, I devote an entire chapter to "raising Holy sparks," the question of whether animals have souls and/or consciousness, and how this relates to Kapporos.

In short, I explore the issue from many different perspectives and present what I believe to be a number of convincing arguments for why, in modern times, this ritual can best be accomplished by using money instead of chickens.  This will not be an easy book for either side to read, but I believe it fills an important educational gap on both sides.

You can order your copy now  on Lulu.com. Also available on Amazon but if you order thru Lulu you get a discount and I get a better deal as an author. Lulu also offers quantity discounts.

Do animals have souls (part II)

In a previous post  (go to part 1) I discussed the question of whether or not animals have souls according to Jewish theology, and then defined five different Hebrew words that are commonly translated "soul." In this essay, I will explore the question of why Western society became so callous towards animals, and attempt to show that this is not due to Judaism!

There is a disturbing tendency in the animal rights and ecology movements to blame everything negative on "monotheism" or "The Patriarchy" or "the Jews" without really understanding what Judaism actually teaches. Very often, the popular conception of what is "Jewish" is about as accurate as the Hollywood Wild West portrayal of what is "Indian." So we need to take a second look at some basic Jewish teachings before we can understand how modern society got off track.

Consider the story of the Garden of Eden, a teaching story that is originally Jewish and comes from the Torah (which is the same text as the first five books of the Bible.) The story of Noah and the Ark also comes from the Torah. So right away, we can see that Judaism gave us two of the most basic images about caring for the environment -- images that are frequently cited by modern environmental movements, both religious and secular. These stories are also basic as to how Jews are supposed to relate to animals.

Adam and Eve lived in harmony with animals in the Garden, and were told to care for the Garden. So their role was to be stewardship, not conquest.   Adam also names the animals. Now, usually this is interpreted as naming the species, but there is another, deeper way to look at this. When you name an animal, you take responsibility for it, and you also develop a connection to it. There is an old adage among farmers to "never name something you are going to eat" -- and there are many stories of farm children who did name a cow or goat and were then unable to eat it.  Naming an animal personalizes it and makes it into an individual. So clearly, Adam and Eve did not see animals as mere "things."

The Garden of Eden is also the Jewish metaphor for the afterlife.  Considering the fact that Eden has animals in it, this implies that animals must have some form of afterlife also.  Otherwise, how could the lion lie down with the lamb, as foretold by Isaiah?

Noah was instructed to build the Ark to save all the animal species from an impending catastrophe. Whether you take the story literally or symbolically, the message is clear: God values every living species on earth, and expects us to take care of them.

The Midrash (an ancient set of Jewish commentaries) tells us that Noah and his family provided each species with the specific food it needed, caring for the diurnal species during the day and the nocturnal species during the night.  [The predators, it is said in the traditional Jewish commentaries, reverted to drinking milk on the Ark -- perhaps not very scientific, but a good way of explaining why they didn't eat the other animals. Even in modern times, there are cases where artificial nutrient mixes (such as KMR kitten formula) are used to feed and/or rehabilitate animals in the absence of their natural food.]

The Ark was, in a sense, a return to the harmony of Eden for the duration of the Flood.   After the Flood, humans were permitted to eat meat, but only after humanely slaughtering them.   Judaism later went further, permitting only domesticated species as food.  Eating exotic species was forbidden, as was hunting for sport.  In later years, the rabbis would also forbid their followers from attending the "games" at the Roman arena.  To this day, Jews do not, as a rule, attend or participate in blood sports.

There were no factory farms in those days.  Herds and flocks grazed freely in the open, as it was meant to be.   Nor was meat eaten every day.  It was something served on special occasions, such as the Sabbath, or when Abraham told Sarah to prepare food for the three visitors when he was camped under the trees at Mamre.

Both of these stories, Eden and the Ark,  treat animals as living, feeling beings.  So do many lines in the Psalms and other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, as I discussed in Part I of this series.  That being the case, why has Western society -- which claims to be based on the Bible -- become so callous about the treatment of animals on factory farms in recent times?

The answer, I believe, lies in the rise of secularism, and most particularly with a 17th-century French philosopher named Rene Descartes (pronounced day-CART.)   Known as "the father of modern philosophy," Descartes is best known for his famous saying: "I think, therefore I am." But what is not as well-known is this:  He believed that only humans have the ability to think and feel.  To Descartes, animals not only did not have souls, they were incapable of feeling emotions or pain. Animals were mere things, unthinking automatons with no consciousness whatsoever. The cries of an animal in pain, to Descartes, were nothing more that the squeaking of a poorly-maintained machine. To prove his point, he once nailed his own dog to the door and ignored its cries of anguish.

Descartes was not Jewish, and his ideas about animals are not in line with Jewish teachings. Nor are they in line with Christianity.  The Roman Catholic Church condemned his books and forbade reading them.  Nor did they have much influence on Jews -- at first. When Descartes was teaching, Jews in Europe were ghettoized and not accepted at the universities where he lectured.  But ideas will spread across all barriers, so that, by the time you get to the late 1700s, Cartesianism was starting to filter into the Jewish community along with the secular "Enlightenment" movement.

This explains why Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (d. 1810), the Breslover Hasidic Rebbe, told his followers not to study philosophy.  I had always been puzzled over this, this, because Maimonides was a philosopher, Nachmanides was a philosopher, so were Ibn Ezra and Luzatto  and a lot of other classical commentators -- and we study them, right?  But after reading about Descartes, I realized that what Rebbe Nachman was talking about was secular philosophy.  He must have realized that this type of thinking would lead us away from respecting God and the creation.  As indeed it has.

Cartesianism opened the way to factory farms and other abuses of animals we see today.  Jews, in turn, are now mostly urban people, who are cut off from the land, farming, and the process by which their food is produced.   (For more this, and on re-connecting Judaism with nature, see my video, "Earth and Torah")  Most Jews are unaware that the only difference between kosher meat and non-kosher meat is the method of slaughter.  The animals themselves come from the same industrialized factory farm and feedlot system as non-kosher meat.  The days of our ancestors raising their own chickens and personally taking them to the shochet (kosher slaughterer) are long gone.

It is for this reason that I believe that vegetarianism is the highest form of kosher diet today.  I do not fault my ancestors for eating meat.  There were times in Jewish history, when we lived in harsh desert or northern climates, where vegetarianism would have been next to impossible.  God knew this would happen, and so did not outrightly forbid eating meat.   But nowadays it is easier to be a vegetarian, and with modern nutritional science, it is possible to do it with a balanced diet and and remain healthy.  Many would now argue that vegetarianism is more healthy, given all the diseases we now know are associated with meat consumption. But the bottom line, for me, is this:  Animals do have feelings, and should not be raised as if they were nothing but food-producing machines.   That is not the Jewish way.

(See also my 15-minute video, "Raising Holy Sparks,"  about the kabbalistic "energy" of eating, and how it relates to the souls of animals.)