Animal rights group files lawsuit comparing Kapporos ritual to Wuhan "wet markets," linking it to COVID19

As readers of this blog know, I oppose using chickens for the  kapporos ritual, and have been outspoken on this issue for years. But I also oppose using antisemitic tropes to get publicity in the fight against it. 

This year, the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos has sunk to a new low.  They have re-opened a lawsuit from 2018 opposing the ritual, now linking it to COVID19. 

When I first heard about this, I assumed they were referring to social distancing and the danger of gathering in large crowds.  A concern I would agree with. But the Alliance takes it a step further, evoking, however unintentionally, an old trope about Jews being the source of plagues and diseases. This I must condemn as tone-deaf and dangerous.

 In their lawsuit, they compare pop-up kapporos centers to "wet markets" in Wuhan, China, where it is believed COVID19 mutated, and implying the same thing can happen with Hasidic Jews slaughtering chickens in New York.

This theme been picked up by animal rights groups all over the internet, resulting in posts like this tweet:

The implication here, as I read this post, is that COVID19 will jump from humans to chickens, mutate there, then jump back to humans in a more virulent form and wipe out New York City.  Not only is this an irresponsible, inflammatory scare tactic, it is scientifically impossible. Chickens do not get COVID19. The pop-up kapporos centers may be messy and cruel, but they are not incubators for a new form of coronavirus.  (Chickens can, however, give you a case of salmonella, which is why the CDC recommends not kissing or snuggling them.)

COVID19 is a mammalian virus, believed to have originated in wild bats that were being sold as food.  Isolated cases have been reported of cats and dogs getting COVID19 from humans, including a tiger in Central Park Zoo, but birds, including chickens, cannot carry or transmit it. 

The Chinese in Wuhan might eat bats, but Hasidic Jews do not, nor do they eat other kinds of wild "bush meat."  The chickens used at kaporos centers come from the very same commercial sources as the chicken sold in your local grocery.  Unless you are a vegetarian, you probably have some in your freezer. 

There is a very big difference between handling domestic species that humans have interacted with for centuries, and "wet markets" selling wild-captured exotic species with possible viruses against which humans have no resistance. 

Nevertheless, the animal rights groups are now using #wetmarket in their Tweets and posts, purposely causing kapporos to turn up in searches about COVID19 and primitive meat markets in Wuhan and elsewhere.  Making such a comparison at this point in time, when people are already panicked and angry, is bound to have negative consequences. Especially since the people involved are Jews, a group that has been falsely accused of spreading diseases in the past.

There are already antisemitic memes online, linking Jews with plagues, like this sign seen at a recent white supremacist protest. Conspiracy theories blame George Soros,  the Jewish billionaire who is everybody's scapegoat. QAnon claims the Democrats worship Satan, another accusation sometimes leveled at Jews. Adding fuel to this fire is a bad idea. 

Rina Deich, a founding member of the Alliance, has tried to assure me in a text conversation that their intent was not to say that COVID19 will mutate in chickens. Rather, they are referring to crowds of people gathering in the unsanitary conditions, where some sort of new mutation of viruses in chickens might happen. In her words to me:

 "There is a toxicologist who has spent hours with the lawyer discussing the potential dangers of kaporos, especially the way it is practiced. Just because it hasn't happened yet does not mean that in the right conditions it wouldn't happen. It's a distinct possibility."

Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't?  I suppose that is true of just about anything.  Hard to disprove a negative, they say.  

But even if this unnamed toxicologist is right, and some other virus in chickens could mutate, linking kapporos and COVID19 in a publicity stunt right now is still irresponsible. And publicity stunt it is. The first thing the Alliance did was send out a press release. Whatever their original intent, it has now gone viral.  And not everybody is making fine distinctions between Wuhan bush meat and chickens in New York.  Just read the headlines.

Deich tried to reassure me that, "When we are interviewed by the media, if we handle it the correct way, it should not fuel anti-semitism. In fact, people seeing that Jews are opposed to this practice takes away their ammunition."

Brave words. And if Deich does the interviews, it might well be true, although I doubt whether antisemites will care if Jews protest it or not.  However, if Karen Davis, their primary spokesperson, is the one giving those interviews, I do not trust it will be handled "in the correct way."  She has a bad record for saying insensitive things about Hasidic Jews, a culture she does not like or respect. (Read more on that.)

As of this writing, it is not even clear if the judge will re-open the case, which was denied back in 2018. But that doesn't really matter, because the Alliance already got what they wanted: lots of free publicity.  They have also set the stage, come October, for the public to see Orthodox Jews as a bunch of dangerous, disease-ridden people spreading the Plague.  They didn't intend it that way, but there are always unintended consequences.  I only hope it does not result in violence against the community like it did in the past, heaven forbid, when Jews were burned at the stake for supposedly causing the Black Plague. 

As I said at the beginning of this article,  I oppose the use of chickens in this ritual. I would love to see it shut down forever.  I encourage my fellow Hasidim to avoid these gatherings, not because of chickens who don't carry COVID19, but because of people who do. At the same time, I cannot, and will not, endorse this latest mutation of the anti-kapporos campaign.

Guest Column: "To Save a Life" by Rocky Schwartz

Editor's Intro: Each year I write a column about why I oppose using chickens for Kapporos, the pre-Yom Kippur ceremony practiced by some Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. I have written about it from the standpoints of history, of Jewish mysticism, of public opinion, of culture wars and politics.  In all of those stories, the chickens themselves were anonymous, suffering en masse in the background. This year, I received this story about one individual chicken whose life was spared at a Kapporos site, and the compassionate way that came about.  I was deeply touched by this true tale, and so I offer it to here, my readers. Perhaps seeing one chicken as an individual life will help you to see all of them as God's creatures, each with his or her own story to live. (Rabbi Gershom) 

*  *  *  *  *

To Save a Life

by Rocky Schwartz

On a Monday night in October, we walked into hell. We had come to protest an Orthodox Jewish ceremony called Kapporos, in which chickens are slaughtered before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Although I myself am Jewish, I am not Hasidic and did not grow up practicing Kapporos.

Kapporos chickens in a crate

On a busy street corner, men were grabbing six-week-old baby birds, flipping them upside down and slicing their throats. Behind them, a truck sat on the sidewalk, filled with crates stacked upon crates of more babies.

When I immediately began sobbing at the horror of the sight, a dozen little boys gathered around me, mocking and laughing. Someone shouted, "Kill it right in front of her!" He swung a young peeping chicken by her wings.

I was horrified that such young people could be so callous toward baby animals suffering before them. The adults present either did not see what was happening, or they did not care.

After I composed myself (read: put up all the mental walls so as to not truly see the reality in front of me), I joined about 50 activists who stood protesting the slaughter. Tensions ran high on both sides, but I tried to remain calm. I walked among those who were swinging the birds, telling them:

They feel.

They feel pain.

They want to live.

They are fighting for their lives.

*You* have a choice.

Some people responded, "Yes, I have made my choice," meaning that they had decided to have their bird slaughtered. I told them the birds didn't have a choice in having their lives taken from them. Most ignored or mocked me, but one young girl, maybe 12 years old, spoke with me. She told me her name was Rose, and said a lot of people were listening to us and and having their minds changed, even if they did not say so in public.  She herself was torn. Should she follow the lead of her parents or not?

I asked her if she would do it if the animals being used were cats or dogs.

"Definitely not," she answered.

I told her the birds are no different, that they, too, feel pain and fear. I showed her the background on my phone, in which I'm hugging my late love, a rooster named Tabitha. I told her he was my best friend, but he died in January.

"And tonight," I told her, you have the choice not to take someone else's life."

"But what do I do?" she asked. "I already have a ticket!"

A fellow protester named David instructed me to ask her to still use her ticket to get a bird, but give the bird to me after the ceremony, instead of having her killed.

"I'll give her a safe home," I assured her.

"Okay," she said, "I'll find you."

I returned to the group of protesters, hopeful but not optimistic that the child would actually return and give me the chicken.

To my surprise, only five minutes later a young figure ran toward me through the crowd and shouted, "Here!"

Rose the hen at about six weeks old,
soon after she was rescued

It was the same girl. She quickly pushed a live hen into my hands. Then we ran in opposite directions, she back into the crowd and I toward the safety of my fellow protesters Vanessa and Steven's car. As I ran, I called out a stunned "thank you," clasping the trembling, feathered body in my arms.

On the way back to the car, I hid the small survivor behind my protest sign, shielding her from the crowd filling the street, who were killing her kin. I was also afraid someone might grab her from me. Once in the car, the chicken continued to tremble in my lap, but slowly accepted gentle petting and some water. I decided to name her Rose, after the little girl who had spared her life.

While I was sitting in the car, my partner Jay spoke with the girl. He told her how brave she was and asked if she wanted to be an animal rights activist. She told him her parents are extremely protective, that she doesn't even have a cell phone or email address. She wasn't able to protest publicly, but she did care about animals. I wondered how many others in the crowd didn't want to kill their chicken, but were not as brave as this child.

Vanessa and Steve returned to the protest, managed to convince one more man to spare a baby rooster, and then drove us home.

*  *  *  *  *

Rose today, as full-grown adult

Safe at home, Rose the rescue hen sits contented in my lap, preening herself and my arm. Out in the expanse of our backyard, she chooses to stand beside me. When I go to put her to bed at night, she cries out in panic and runs after me toward my bed, until I sit with her as she falls asleep.

She still bears the marks of the life she escaped. Badly infected feet from days spent in filth and crammed into a crate. A too-big body for a six-week-old, still-peeping chick, the result of over-breeding for the meat industry.  Anxiety from her history of trauma.

But she is one of the lucky ones. Though she was specifically destined to be part of a religious ritual, her fate was to be no different from the 263 baby chickens killed for food in the United States each second, an incomprehensible 52 billion globally each year. The only difference for her? She was seen as an individual. And a child had the power to save her life.

The author, Rocky, and her new friend Rose

*  *  *  *  *

Editor's postscript:  Rocky refers to the birds being slaughtered as "babies."  These are not fluffy baby chicks, but six-week-old broiler chickens who have been artificially over-bred to grow and gain weight as fast as possible.  It is not that the Hasidim purposely choose to use babies as such; rather, it is that these are the type of chickens available from the meat industry.  The days of mother hens raising their chicks to maturity are long gone.  If you eat chicken, the likelihood is that the bird on your plate was also a juvenile bird hatched in an incubator and killed when only a couple months old.  They go to their deaths peeping in panic, never living long enough to cluck or crow. 

For more on this issue read my previous 2013 post, Kapporos Chicken's Don't Sing!  about the peeping chickens, and why Hasidim do not understand that they are crying. 

See also The Baal Shem Tov did it with a chicken, so why do you tell me not to? which explains this question from the standpoint of Hasidic mysticism.  

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.

Be Kind to Animals Week: a Jewish perspective

I did not grow up Hasidic.  There are those who immediately discount me for that reason, arguing that I am “tainted” by the secular world and therefore not a “real” Hasid.   However, I would quote back to them the adage that “The baal tshuvah (repentant sinner) stands in a place where the perfect Zaddik (saint) cannot stand.”  And both places are good, both have something to teach us.  Besides, I've been observant for decades now, so that should count for something.

Growing up in the 1950s in America, I went to public school, spent part of my summer at Scout camp, and otherwise participated in the world at large.  I was what is now called a “free range kid,” roaming the neighborhood on my bike, playing in the nearby woods, and spending a lot of time alone in nature.  For part of my early childhood we lived on the edge of what my father called a “game preserve,” where deer and pheasants were a common sight in the backyard.  The exact location was long ago lost to urban sprawl, but the memories are still with me.

Vintage ASPCA poster
"The cat they left behind"

One of my fondest childhood memories is Be Kind to Animals Week.  This was a nationwide event sponsored by the American Humane Association and the ASPCA, with posters and contests, public service announcements on TV by celebrities, and local animal-oriented events.  I hadn’t heard much about it lately, being mostly involved in the Jewish community, and I got to wondering if it still existed.  Yes, it does, and this year (2015) is the 100th anniversary!   In fact, Be Kind to Animals Week is the oldest commemorative week in all of U.S. history. It is observed during the  first week in May.

Next I wondered if it is observed in Jewish schools.  Do yeshiva students ever enter posters in the contest?  Does your school do anything to celebrate it?  I found a lot of older references to Jews participating, but very little about it in today’s curriculum.  This is not to say that no Jewish schools observe it, but it does not seem to be much of a priority nowadays, at least not enough to write about it on their websites. That’s too bad.  It would be wonderful to see some Jewish kids design posters about kindness to animals, which is, after all, a Torah teaching as well as a secular one.   It would be a great opportunity to teach the greater society about tzaar baalei chayyim, the Jewish prohibition against cruelty to animals.

It was suggested to me that the reason this event is no longer celebrated as much among Jews is because environmental issues have gotten linked to the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the New Year for Trees, which has become a sort of Jewish Earth Day.  That is possible.  But Tu’B’Shevat focuses more on planting trees and recycling trash than on animals.  Still, there is no reason why animals could not be more actively included in it.

There is also a recent movement to make the first day of the Hebrew month of Elul, which the Talmud calls the New Year for Animals,  into a humane education event.  This seems a bit topsy-turvy to me, since this was originally the day that Jewish farmers tithed their flocks, so it was hardly “Animal Rights Day.”  But it would not be the first time that a Jewish holiday got re-defined after the Temple was destroyed.  Shavuot, the “Feast of Weeks,” was originally celebrated with processions of people bringing their firstfruits to the Temple.  Today it focuses on receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai, which also took place on the same date.  Tu B'Shevat, the “New Year for Trees” is now a form of Jewish Earth Day, when people not only plant trees, but also focus on current environmental issues.  So it would not be out of line to transform "Rosh Hashanah for the Animals."

However one may choose to approach it, there is definitely a need for more humane education.   While researching my new book, Kapporos Then and Now: Toward a more Compassionate Tradition (due out in June, God willing),  I found some appalling stories about Jewish children poking sticks at Kapporos chickens, throwing stones at stray cats, chasing pigeons in the park, and behaving badly at zoos.  Not all Jewish kids do this, of course, but there were far more such stories than there should be.  Kids will be kids, and wearing a yarmulke does not transform them into saints.  However, it does make them visible as Jews and it reflects badly on the community.

So I am suggesting that if your school or synagogue is not observing Be Kind to Animals Week, then this year would be a good time to start.  Why invent another holiday when we already have a national tradition that is a century old?  In fact, it is rapidly become an international event; in my searches I found posters and articles in many languages.  Really, it should be a global event, since we all share the same planet and the animals on it.  So if you are celebrating "Kindness 100" this year, I'd love to hear about it.  Tell me what you are doing to bring more kindness to God's creatures.

Karen Davis, anti-kapporos activist, misses the mark on Jewish theology

For the past few years I have been a part of The Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos, (hereafter referred to as "the Alliance"), a protest group headed by animal rights activist Karen Davis, campaigning to end the use of live chickens in a pre-Yom Kippur Jewish atonement ceremony practiced by some groups of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews.  (Read more on that...)  I advocate using the alternative, fully acceptable by Jewish law, to use money for the ceremony instead, then donating it to charity.

Anti-kapporos protest on Brooklyn Parkway, 2014.
Karen Davis is in the center holding a chicken.
(Photo by Matthew Taub)

I was among the early founders of the Alliance org -- I even helped think up the name.  In 2013, I narrated a one-minute slide show for them called A Heartfelt Plea for Mercy, and provided text and images for some of their protest posters.  (Including the one with the mother hen and chicks in this photo.)  I do not deny or retract those things, because I still believe in everything I said back then.

However, this past year [2014] before Yom Kippur, I found it necessary to distance myself from Davis' campaign.  This article explains why.

Let me be very, very clear that I still oppose using chickens as kapporos and will continue to do so.  But I have come to believe that Karen Davis -- who is not Jewish and does not understand Judaism or Jewish culture -- is the wrong person to be leading a campaign about an Orthodox Jewish ceremony.  Especially since she draws wrong conclusions about Hasidic beliefs and refuses to listen to real Hasidim -- like me -- who try to correct her.

I do recognize that Davis has done a lot of very good work for sensitizing the public to the suffering and exploitation of chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys and other domestic fowl.  If she would just stick to science and secular animal issues, everything would be fine.  But when it comes to Jewish theology -- which she confuses with Christian thought (more on that below) -- she is like a runaway tank in a minefield.  And this year, it all blew up in my face.

Preaching to the vegan choir?

Karen Davis is a vegan.  A very radical vegan.  To her, veganism is not just a diet, not just a personal lifestyle choice -- it's a religion, complete with dogmas, taboos, and its own special terminology.

Although there is no mention of veganism on the Alliance website, the group is in fact a vegans-only club, rejecting any argument that is not 100% vegan in content.  Although nobody ever insisted I had to become a vegan (I am an ovo-lacto vegetarian, eating only eggs from my own chickens), neither would they listen to any viewpoint that was not vegan.  Over the past three years Davis, who runs the group with an iron fist, has refused to use or forward links to any of my articles on this blog that even mentioned  slaughter.  Not even if such articles were effective within the Hasidic community.  Davis, it seems, prefers preaching to the vegan choir rather than preaching to the people who actually do this ceremony.

The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of Hasidim are not vegetarians, let alone vegans, and the idea of mixing this issue with veganism is counterproductive.  If you use this "all-or-nothing" approach, most Hasidim will chose "nothing."  Going vegan means a lot more in Judaism than just giving up meat, because so many traditional Jewish foods and holy days center around meat.  It can be exceedingly disruptive to a family to go vegan cold turkey (pardon the expression.)  .

On the other hand, if you can start with simply giving up using a live chicken and substituting money for kapporos, this is not so threatening.  And it can be one step toward vegetarianism in the future.  I have seen it happen.  In fact, this has long been a Hasidic method of bringing Jews back to Torah observances:  Start with a few practices, rather than hit people with all of it at once.

When I first joined the Alliance, on the recommendation of Richard H. Schwartz, then president of Jewish Vegetarians of North America  (JVNA), I had no idea that veganism would be the litmus test for whether or not an argument could be used.  Since this was a specifically Jewish issue, I naturally assumed the keystone would be Judaism.

I had worked with Schwartz before and, although he himself is a vegan, he does not insist that this is the only way to present animal issues to Jews.  In his now-classic book, Judaism and Vegetarianism, he covers many different philosophical approaches -- from health to theology to world hunger -- as to why a person should give up meat.  And he considers them all valid.  He does not condemn Judaism for permitting meat, nor does he villify the rabbis and sages who ate it in the past.  He simply argues that in today's modern world, vegetarianism -- or even veganism -- is the best way to keep kosher.

So I naively assumed that we, in the Alliance, would take a similar approach, arguing from within the multi-faceted aspects of the Jewish worldview.  But I was wrong.

Inadvertently arousing antisemitism

I also assumed -- wrongly -- that Davis was Jewish, because "Davis" is a common Jewish surname.  Only later did I learn she is not.  This is not to say that a non-Jew cannot work on this issue, but I do feel that he or she should take the advice of those who are Jewish and who know the culture from within.  Which Davis does not.  To her, veganism is a religion, complete with dogmas she will not violate.  One of those dogmas is that you should never, ever appear to allow slaughtering anything for any reason.  You cannot ever believe that any kind of slaughter could be humane, or you become a heretic.  And that includes kosher slaughtering.  Even PETA does not go as far as Davis does.

The result is, that Davis has said and written some gross misinformation about Hasidism that has aroused antisemitism, even if that was not her intent.  I do believe her when she says she is not an antisemite and is just concerned with the abuse of animals by anybody anywhere.  But she is cluelessly naive about how her words can be twisted by those who are Jew-haters.  Targeting kapporos is not the same as protesting outside McDonalds.  Kapporos is a Jewish ceremony, practiced in some communities of Orthodox Jews who are already seen as highly visible "outsiders" by many Americans.  Unless handled with care and respect, the issue can spill over into hatred against all Jews -- which, in some cases, it has.

My attempts to educate Davis and the protesters

Early on, I raised the point that Davis was doing nothing to educate the protesters about the positive things in Hasidic culture, and that if their only contact with Hasidim was to show up once a year and yell "meat is murder" at the kapporos centers, then she was arousing hatred toward Hasidim in general.  She replied in an email that she was not the one abusing chickens, so I should direct my anger at the Hasidim, not the protesters.  She took absolutely no responsibility for the numerous vicious, antisemitic remarks coming from the vegan community in support of her cause.

We may all look alike to you,
but we do not THINK alike.
I am not the face of the enemy

Davis herself is not an antisemite, but a lot of her readers sure are.  The first time I visited the Alliance Facebook page I got flamed as "the enemy" based on my profile picture.  To her credit, pagemaster Rina Deych removed the offending comments and added to the "About Us" page a statement that the Alliance is against the ceremony only, not Hasidic culture in general.  But the fact that this happened at all was disconcerting, to say the least.  Apparently they saw only the clothes and not the face on the posters they were carrying.  If this happened with a member of any other group it would be blatant racism.

When I suggested we write some educational materials to send to protest organizers before the next year's events, she showed no interest.  So I took it upon myself to write a series of articles on my blog, as well as post a download link to Richard Schwartz's interview with me, Raising Holy Sparks: Hasidism and Vegetarianism, included in his 2012 book, Who Stole My Religion: Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal Our Imperiled Planet.  (Visit the book homepage.)

Davis' response was to write off the whole "Raising Sparks" thing as "a solipsistic conceit" (her words.)   It wasn't vegan, so it wasn't valid, period.  She even refused to forward the link to my 2013 article, Kapporos chickens don't sing! to activist Rina Deych, who told the story that inspired the article in the first place.  (However, to be fair, it does appear that other activists read the article and understood it, as witnessed by this poster in the 2014 protests.)

Whenever I posted a new article, Davis's only response would be to nitpick why it was not vegan enough.  When she viewed my 14-minute video on Raising Sparks and why I believe it leads to vegetarianism, she asked if she could use just the "Forward to Eden" part at the end and cut out the rest.  Which of course would have gutted the whole thing, so I refused.

The one exception to all this was Kapporos protests: What works and what doesn't, where I carefully danced around the vegan issue in order to get it past the Davis censorship.  That one she did link to, but not any of the materials that attempted to educate the protesters about Hasidic theology.

The last straw

The last straw for me came in August 2014, when I designed a flyer specifically directed at Hasidim, speaking from within that worldview. (View and/or download it here).  Davis would not use it because I had told the story of how the Baal Shem Tov used to cry when he had to slaughter an animal.  She accused me of "pulling a knife" (her words) on her for even mentioning slaughter in the same sentence as "compassion" and stated that the Baal Shem Tov could not have possibly have had any compassion if he was willing to slaughter at all.

She thereby wrote off the founder of Hasidim and with it, the entire culture and worldview.  (Not to mention that she also, by this argument, would write off Jesus as having no compassion, since he also ate meat.  So did Francis of Assisi, the Roman Catholic patron saint of animals.)

Davis kept citing the Mission Statement of her org, United Poultry Concerns which funds the Alliance.  That Statement reads: ""Promoting the Compassionate and Respectful Treatment of Domestic Fowl."  It was then that I realized that "compassion" is a code word for "vegan."  She could not say the Baal Shem Tov has compassion when he slaughtered because compassion, to her, means no slaughtering, period,.  And, I suppose, one cannot be "respectful" in her eyes if one is not vegan, either.  Her "About us" page says "We inform people about and actively promote alternatives."  But in reality "alternatives" is not really a plural.  Veganism is the Only Way

Comparing the Holocaust and 9/11 victims to chicken slaughter

The problem is, Davis sees any use of animals as "exploitation" and cruelty.  There are no degrees of difference in her mind between a Native American who prays for the soul of the animal he kills, reverently thanking it for giving its life so the people may live, and a psychopath who abuses animals for personal pleasure.  Beyond that, she sees no difference between animals and humans, and has compared factory farms to the Holocaust, as well as stating that the people who died in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers did not suffer any more than chickens in the meat industry.  On a physiological level that may be true -- pain is pain -- but it shows a terrible disregard for human feelings to say that the life of a child in a daycare center was worth no more than that of a chicken.  Talk about lack of compassion!

Inadvertently (?) citing gnostic canards about Judaism

It became obvious to me that because Judaism permits eating meat, Davis feels this invalidates everything else.  At one point she told me to "get in touch with the God of Genesis" -- in opposition to the God who permits slaughter.  I doubt she realizes that she had just invoked a very antisemitic gnostic Christian belief from the Middle Ages, namely, that the "real" God of compassion who made the universe was not the "God of the Jews."  Davis is not sophisticated enough in theology to realize -- or even recognize -- the pitfalls of this type of thinking.  I doubt she would actually call Jews "children of Satan" or burn them at the stake as witches like the medieval Christians did.  But as I said before, when it comes to theology, she is a runaway tank in a minefield.

Davis confuses Jewish and Christian theology about Atonement

More recently, she has taken to stating that Jews are purposely "punishing" the chickens as "objects" and that "abuse" is part of the ceremony.  She is basing this on references she found where kapporos is compared to the biblical scapegoat.  She wrongly assumes that means it takes on all the suffering of the practitioner on a physical level.  In October 2014 she was quoted as saying, referring to kapporos chickens:  “They’re treated like what they are intended to be in the ritual, punished objects,  The only role of the chicken in the ritual is to be a symbolic recipient of the sins or wrongdoings and the punishment of the practitioner, to be mistreated, to be punished.”

Mistreating chickens like this is NOT part of
the ceremony, nor is it "punishment."  It is
a by-product of the modern secular meat industry.

Yes, it is true that the chickens suffer terribly when being trucked in without food or water, then stacked in piles of little cages -- again without food or water -- for days.  But this mishandling is not part of the ceremony!  All that is required is to say the blessing and slaughter the bird, period.  Even if is done with the most gentle care, with a healthy. well-cared-for, free-range bird handled properly, it is still kapporos -- and that is what it used to be before modernization.

There is NO requirement for the bird to tortured or "be punished."  There is NO requirement for the birds to mishandled, starved, etc. -- in fact, those are things that invalidate the ceremony, which is why rabbis who oppose it will focus on the cruelty of the pre-slaughter suffering.  Everything that happens before the actual saying of the blessing is NOT part of the ceremony.  To the contrary.  The cruelty in transporting and handling the chickens under modern conditions is frequently cited as an argument against using live chickens, based on the prohibition against cruelty to animals in Jewish law.  I myself have argued that the modern cruelty of mass production cancels out any value the ceremony once had in the past -- as I explained in my 2014 article, The Baal Shem Tov did it with a chicken, so why are you telling me not to?

Because the article quoting Davis was in The American Free Press, a white supremacist pub, I thought maybe she had been misquoted, or that the interviewer had distorted her words.  So I queried her.  It took almost a month for her to reply, but she did eventually say that she had no idea of the nature of this pub at the time (which I do believe, since their title is deceivingly innocuous) and was sorry she had give them an interview.  But she did not deny the statement about punishment.  On the contrary. she defended it and referred me back to a book she had previously quoted to me in an email, where the kapporos chicken is compared to the biblical scapegoat.  (Davis thinks I do not know my own theology and is forever trying to "correct me.")

Judaism and Christianity read biblical texts very differently!

However, once again, she misunderstood the reference, because she insists on equating "atonement" with "punishment."  Davis, who, I remind you once again, is not Jewish, simply cannot comprehend that the word "sacrifice" means one thing in Christianity and another thing in Judaism.  This is a common problem in general with Bible studies, where the issue is not only translation itself, but also the nuances of words in the different cultures.  The most common example being "eye for an eye," which, in the Christian world means tit-for-tat revenge, but in Jewish law means monetary compensation for the loss of the eye -- a very big difference!   In the same way, the words "sacrifice" and "atonement" have very different meanings in Judaism and Christianity.

The words translated as "sacrifice" also have different roots in Hebrew and Greek, a detail I won't go into here.  Suffice it to say, the scapegoat was not tortured, because it had to be a perfect specimen without any blemishes.  It was not even slaughtered.  Sins were symbolically placed on its head, but only by a laying on of the High Priest's hands.  Then it was sent off alive into the wilderness.  A second goat was slaughtered, but that was not the scapegoat.  And it was not tortured, either.

Once again:  All biblical sacrifices had to be perfect unblemished specimens (Leviticus 22), which means they must have been well-treated before being brought to the Temple in Jerusalem.  There was nothing in biblical times that even comes near to the horrors of today's factory farms.

Atonement does not mean torture

Yes, some people do see kapporos as an atonement sacrifice -- but in Judaism, that does NOT mean hours of torture.  This is not like Jesus on the Cross, where suffering in agony is part of the "sacrifice."  There is nothing in Judaism even remotely resembling Mel Gibson's R-rated film, Passion of the Christ.  And just because money -- which is an "object" -- can be substituted for a chicken does not mean the chicken is also a mere "object."  The bird can be redeemed -- ransomed -- with money, but that does not imply that the chicken is the same thing as money.

The Jews doing this ceremony do not wake up in the morning and say, "I'm going to go torture a chicken today so I can get rid of my sins."  Yes, some people do see the chicken as a substitute for their own death (which is theologically wrong but people believe it anyway).  And yes, some people do believe the chicken's soul benefits spiritually from this through helping to "raise the Holy Sparks," as I have written about.  But that does NOT mean they believe the chickens have to suffer or be punished.

But again, all my attempts to try to explain these things to Davis have fallen on deaf ears, and she continues to say this thing about Jews "punishing" the chickens.  Her mind is made up and she does not want to be confused by the facts.  More recently she has also claimed (in the American Free Press interview I mentioned earlier) that the whole thing is just made up "in the guise of religion" and the real purpose is for the rabbis to make a lot of money -- also wrong, but analyzing that charge will have to wait until another article, as this one is getting overly long.

Conclusion:  The difference between me and Davis

In conclusion, I will say that the big difference between me and Karen Davis is this: I protest out of love for my fellow Hasidim, seeking to lead them toward a more gentle way of life from within the Hasidic worldview.  I understand that these communities see themselves as the last remnants of a culture destroyed by the Holocaust, and that any change in religious practice can be seen as a betrayal of their martyred ancestors.  I respect that, and try to find arguments from within the tradition.

And I have had some success in this.  Right before Rosh Hashanah this year, a Chabad Hasid called from California to thank me for putting my materials online.  He had first found my videos on YouTube, then spent three hours reading this blog.  The result?  He said it "changed his thinking."  He also said the materials he found on on PETA, The Alliance, and other sites dd not move him because it was "all politics."  I was the only one he had found who came at it from the stand point of Jewish spirituality.

Davis should take a clue from this and similar stories.  But she cannot, because she has imprisoned her mind in the narrow vegan worldview.  She has no respect for Hasidim because they eat meat, and she comes at the issue filled with anger and rage.  She insists on projecting her own biases onto somebody else's culture.  As any anthropologist will tell you, that's a great big no-no.  To understand a culture, and to meaningfully dialogue with members of that culture, you need to be willing to see things from their point of view.  Davis is incapable of doing this.  Her  agenda is to make everyone vegans and, judging from the articles she has published,  she has no real respect for any other viewpoint.  Which makes her  very ineffective.

Not long ago another Chabad Hasid called me from Boro Park, NY, asking about my stance against kapporos.  We dialogued on the "Holy Sparks" doctrine and although we disagreed on how to interpret it, the conversation was mutually respectful.  During the course of the debate he asked me point blank if I thought the protests had ever convinced anybody not to use chickens as kapporos.  And I honestly had to say no, they have not.  I cannot think of a single instance where shouting "meat is murder" has changed anybody's mind in the Hasidic world.  On his end, he told me that nobody in his New York neighborhood takes the protests seriously, either.

The Alliance gets a lot of press, but has no real effect on Hasidim. It has become simply an annoyance to put up with -- one of many for a people who get harassed on the streets every day.  If anything, the disrespect of many protesters has caused the community to "circle the wagons" and hold on tighter to the tradition.  In the end, neither side is really listening to the other.

*  *  *

ADDENDA, added November 14, 2014 

Here is yet another place where she insisted on including the shipping of the chickens as part of the ritual.  This is from a mailing she did to her own org, United Poultry Concerns back in September 2006.  So this is not a one-time blooper on her part, it is a pattern of distortion she insists upon.   She stated:  "Kapparot includes the pre-ritual cruelty to the chickens, who are forced to sit crammed together in their own excrement for days without food, water or shelter awaiting their terrible death."

NO, as I explained above, kapparot as such does NOT include any "pre-ritual cruelty."  There is no requirement to "force" chickens to "sit in their own excrement," etc.  In the past, there were no factory farm cages, no open trucks, no sitting for days in warehouses.  As I explained in The Kapparot Ritual: how tradition has become a travesty, things were very different in pre-Holocaust Europe, where Jews lived is small villages and chickens were all locally raised free-range.  The problem today is urbanization, where people do not raise their own chickens and must truck them in from miles away.

To repeat:  NOTHING that happens before the blessing is said is required as part of the ritual, period.   Everything before that is secular and has no bearing at all on the ritual itself. 

Yes, cruelty happens nowadays in transit, because that is how ALL chickens are shipped and handled in the meat industry. The Jews are no worse than anybody else in this.  Yes, it is terrible.  Yes, it is cruelty for anybody to do that to a chicken, including those who slaughtered the secular meat sitting on your own plate.  But it is NOT part of the ceremony,  It is not "Jewish."  And it is NOT required that the birds be "punished" by starving them in cramped cages for days.

Granted, this was written in 2006 before I became involved with her, so maybe she was ignorant back then?  Maybe.  But since she said it again in 2014 (as cited in the article above), she has not become any more educated on the topic.  She certainly has not listened to me or anybody else.  

ADDENDA #2, added January 4, 2015

After writing this article, I found this by Davis in another interview from 2014  where she reveals that not only does she twist and misinterpret the ceremony, she has no respect for Hasidim in general:

Davis:  Rabbi Shea Hecht of the Lubavitch community, whose father began trucking chickens to Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1974 and whose family is regarded as the leading cause of the growth of using chickens for Kapparot in the U.S., told NPR in this September 2009 report:

“The main part of the service,” he says, “is handing the chicken to the slaughterer and watching the chicken being slaughtered. Because that is where you have an emotional moment, where you say, ‘Oops, you know what? That could have been me.’”

Now, it is true that Rabbi Hecht said this on NPR, in answer to why he does not use money instead.  However, what he meant -- and what it has always meant -- is that the death of the chicken should remind us of our own mortality -- that's the "emotional moment."  But she interprets it to mean something it has never meant in Judaism,   Once again, she projects her own vegan values on another culture.  She goes on to say:

In short, Rabbi Hecht, and probably many (though not all) other Kapparot practitioners who use chickens, enjoy the experience of making and watching a helpless creature suffer and die “for them” (be punished in their stead for their sins). They like the control and are gratified by the pain and suffering they can inflict with impunity in the guise of religion. Obviously it is not necessary to cause needless suffering and death in order to improve yourself — just the opposite.

There is NOTHING in Hasidism about "enjoying" the suffering or being "gratified by the pain and suffering" and it is not done in the "guise" of religion.   Those who do it are sincere and do regard it as a form of worship.  Yes, there are differences of opinion about the validity of the ritual BUT this is true of just about everything in Judaism.  Rarely do Jews speak in one voice.  And just because one group rejects something does not mean it is invalid for everyone.

But this is not the end of it her diatribe.  It gets worse:

INTERVIEWER: Why don’t they just use bags of coins instead of the chickens?

DAVIS: As I just mentioned in the example of Rabbi Hecht, many Hasidic rabbis insist on swinging and slaughtering chickens for Kapparot instead of swinging bags of coins for symbolic atonement and charity: there is a liking for the slaughter, the power, the blood. As human psychology, it is about the desire to have an innocent victim (Lamb of God, Scapegoat, Jesus Christ, Thanksgiving Turkeys, Experimental Animals, Young Boys sent to war to be slaughtered) suffer and die for oneself/community/nation/society. It’s about the age-old system of belief in cleansing/purifying/expiating sins, vices and diseases by transferring them to an innocent victim or class of victims.

So here she actually says what I have deduced all along:  She is indeed confusing it with Jesus on the Cross, as I discussed above.  And this bit about the "liking for the slaughter, the power, the blood" is, again, NOT part of Judaism.  It is HER projection, her prejudice against anyone who eats meat, religious or not, whether in the present or in all past centuries.

When asked if all Jews do this, she says most are Hasidim but also some are "Conservative and Modern Orthodox."  I have never heard of any Conservative synagogue advocating kapporos with chickens -- most don't even do it with money.  Nor do most Modern Orthodox do it that way, if at all.  Where she gets this idea, I do not know.  Maybe she confusing Modern Orthodox with Haredim (who do use chickens)?  What I do know is that she is abysmally ignorant about the different kinds of Jews.  She often relies on third-hand information from books or uniformed non-religious token Jews in the vegan world.  Just because someone is born Jewish does not mean they know what they are talking about.

She then goes on to disparage not only the ritual, but all of the Hasidic community:

In addition, Hasidic communities/members will rarely depart from/defy what their specific rabbis tell them to do. Even if a member personally winces or objects, he or she won’t speak up publicly. These communities live strictly defined lives like the Amish, Jehovah Witnesses, and other extremely insular groups. Women are not respected as persons in their own right. Fear of being shunned/ostracized, having no other options or imaginings but to conform, stay, and obey, are motivations....

I am probably partly responsible for that last part.  At one point I tried to explain that while it was easy for her to come in once a year, scream "meat is murder," then disappear until next Yom Kippur, for people who actually live in the neighborhood, it is harder to go against the grain.  People have to live with each other, and Hasidim are not the only people on earth who avoid confrontations in order to get along with their neighbors.  That, plus the fact that public protests are not the way things get changed in traditional Jewish communities.  People do discuss things behind the scenes, there are differences of opinion, and variations within families.   Hasidim are not clones.  But neither are they going to join Davis on the barricades when she is so openly disparaging of their way of life.  As I noted above, the arguments that work are the ones she has rejected.

I explained this to her in order to get her to tone down the anti-Hasidic rhetoric but here she twisted my explanation to suit her own anti-religious attitudes -- even getting in a dig about how women are supposedly "not respected as persons" and thereby insulting my wife, who is a critical thinker and most certainly a "person in her own right."  (She just does not like a lot of publicity nor does she want her picture plastered all over the Internet.)

Davis then goes on:

Finally, the temples that do the ritual are said to make a lot of money from it — purchasing chickens very cheaply at a few cents on the dollar, and “selling” them to practitioners for a lot of money.

In another interview she quoted prices as $18 and $36 at some center -- unaware that these are normal amounts Jews give to charity.  Jewish fundraisers always ask for donations in multiples of 18,   Even those of us who use money instead often give $18 -- so that is not seen as exhorbitant in our culture.  I would prefer everyone just give the money and skip the chicken slaughter, but I am not offended by it being used as a fundraiser and certainly not for asking $18.  And, we should note, not all kapporos centers charge this much.

Besides, Davis get money off this issue, too.  By her own admission in her newsletter (Poultry Press, Winter 2014 issue, p. 12), she spent $23,532 on the anti-kapporos campaign in 2014.  If she has the funds to do this, then she, too, is making money off kapporos --  through her sensationalist tactics.  This figure came at the end of an anti-kapporos article, and right below it there was a plea for funds.  My bet is, kapporos is one of her best sources of income for her org, because it is so easy to arouse public opinion with graphic photos and inflammatory rhetoric.  So the pot calls the kettle black...

She then ended with:

(For the record, I am not Jewish or religious. I grew up in a family that attended the Methodist Church down the street from us, but religion never influenced me as a worldview. No religion even if proven “true” would reconcile me in the slightest to the way things are.)

Note that she would not accept any religion even if it were true.   A rather odd statement if she is really interested in truth, but that is certainly her privilege.  However, with an attitude like that, she is never, ever going to make any kind of impact on religious people.   She has certainly turned me off -- and I am against using chickens.  But if forced to choose between her antagonism and my faith, I choose Hasidism.  And so, I shall continue to educate my people about why we should use money and not chickens, but henceforth I'll do it without Karen Davis.

*   *  *

To learn how you can be effective in this campaign, get my new book, just out on June 4:  Kapporos Then and Now: Toward a More Compassionate Tradition available on Lulu.com.  Neither a vegetarian manifesto nor a "Torah-True" religious tract, I approach the issue as a combination of theologian, cultural anthropologist, and participatory journalist, offering numerous reasons why using money is a better option today -- but also critiquing both sides for both their strong and weak points.  WARNING:  Whether you are for or against using chickens as Kapporos, this book requires an open mind to read. 

Vegetarianism leads to terrorism, says Rabbi Eliezer Melamed

Refuting this absurd claim...

On June 8, 2014, the Israel National News published a follow-up article by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed entitled The Significance of Eating Meat, in answer to criticisms of his previous article on May 26, Vegetarianism for Moral Reasons.  As I pointed out in my rebuttal on this blog, the first article was actually an attack on the entire vegetarian movement.   As is the second article.   Rabbi Melamed believes it is morally wrong to teach vegetarianism.  In his latest article, he goes even further, linking the vegetarian movement with supporting terrorism.  In his mind, being kind to animals leads to cruelty to people.  In order to understand his basis for this bizarre claim, we must first take a foray into Jewish mysticism.

"Raising holy sparks" and eating meat

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed,
head of the Har Bracha
yeshiva in Israel

In The Significance of Eating Meat, he opens with a long kabbalistic explanation of the concept of "raising holy sparks" through eating meat  to effect a tikkun, or cosmic repair of the universe.  This is pretty standard Jewish mystical thought, so I won't go into it here, except to say that he misses two crucial points:  1) the process is cumulative, not self-perpetuating, and 2) it is individualized, that is, each person is born to raise particular "sparks" and not others.

This implies that, as more and more sparks are raised and the process nears completion,  there will be fewer and fewer people assigned by "heaven" to raised sparks in meat.  This may well account for the rise in vegetarianism in recent years.  It may also account for the rampant cruelty in the meat industry.  Could it be that there are no longer any holy sparks in meat, and what is left is only negative energy (klippot)?

Rabbi Melamed would strongly disagree with this stance.  He feels that  it is still necessary for humans to eat meat ("extremely vital for man" in his words), in order to complete the tikkun.   By preaching vegetarianism, he says, the activists are impeding the whole process of repairing the universe -- which puts them on the side of wickedness in his eyes.  "Accordingly," he states, "at the present stage of time, individuals can conduct themselves with an additional measure of piety and not eat meat, but they must refrain from preaching vegetarianism, so as not to harm the primary effort of tikkun olam (repairing the universe.)"  

This is an argument I have heard before.  So much so, that I posted a video on this topic  on YouTube.  (There is also a dialogue with me on "raising sparks" and vegetarianism in Professor Richard Schwartz's 2010 book, Who Stole My Religion?  The entire interview can be downloaded for free at this link.)   Ironically, this argument has the same sort of apocalyptic energy as the Christian fundamentalists who claim the Jews are impeding the "Second Coming" by refusing to convert to Christianity.  It's pretty hard to reason with somebody who thinks you are out to destroy the universe.

 Who is qualified to say what is cruel?

Rabbi Melamed then goes on to discuss what he calls "allegations of cruelty in the meat industry."  He does acknowledge the possibility of such cruelties, but severely limits who can determine what is or is not cruel:

"Indeed, if it becomes clear that in a certain place, animals are treated with immense cruelty, it is proper to instruct people not to purchase the meat. However, this matter must be clarified by Torah scholars who are knowledgeable and familiar with raising animals and the laws of shechita (ritual slaughtering), [to be sure he is not referring to a mistaken understanding of the shechita itself, ed.]. But someone who is not familiar with raising animals lacks the criterion required to determine what exactly excessive cruelty is."

OK, I can go along with that -- in any type of decision-making, it is important to consult with experts.  And it is true that some people define kosher slaughter itself as cruelty.  (We should note here that even PETA has affirmed that, when done properly, it is humane.)  But what about the conditions on the farm before slaughter?  Or the conditions under which animals are transported to the slaughterhouse?  Who, in his opinion, are the experts to determine whether these things are cruel?

He defines them as "Torah scholars who are knowledgeable with raising animals and the laws of shechita [kosher slaughtering.]"  That narrows it down to his own circle of colleagues.  Given this definition, he apparently puts no trust whatsoever in secular animal scientists who might have valid opinions about what does or does not constitute cruelty, since they are not Torah scholars.  Forget about consulting animal behavioral scientists like Temple Grandin (who, by the way, has upheld kosher slaughter -- but not the often inhumane conditions prior to it.)   And since experts in shechita are most likely meat eaters who are connected to the kosher meat industry in one way or another, this becomes a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.

But don't consult any animal rights people...

In the Haredi [rigidly Orthodox] world that this rabbi lives in, science is not well-regarded anyway, so it comes as no surprise that he writes off secular researchers with a few taps of the keyboard.  That's bad enough.  But he goes even further about whom he would disqualify as an "expert":

"And certainly, animal rights activists should not be relied on in this matter, seeing as they are exactly the ones to whom the argument of morality is addressed, for they have confused and obscured the boundaries of morality, turning an act of divrei chassidut (an additional measure of piety i.e. vegetarianism) into an absolute requirement, and in consequence, come to despise the foundations of morality, and offend their friends who do eat meat. And thus, their practice of vegetarianism has no sensitivity to it whatsoever, but rather, arrogance and wickedness."

So now we know that this really is an attack on the vegetarian movement and not just my own paranoia.  He repeats his allegations from his first article, namely, his belief that  teaching vegetarianism leads people to "despise the foundations of morality."   What he apparently means by that is that it is "moral" to be doing tikkun olam by eating meat, and "immoral" to refuse to eat meat.  Nowhere does he discuss other ways that one might help with repairing the universe.

Nor does he say how he would react to a vegetarian activist who is also  a Torah scholar and who knows about raising animals.  Presumably the supposed "arrogance and wickedness" of such a person would, in Rabbi Melamed's mind, overrule any expertise he might have.   Or he would probably rely on the principle of going with the majority -- who, in his circles, would be meat-eaters.  Either way, vegetarians have no voice, period.

Be a vegetarian -- but shut up about it?

It comes as no surprise to me that a Haredi rabbi would discount the opinions of anyone who is not also a Haredi rabbi.  This happens all the time.  But what really sticks out here is how he feels vegetarian activists "offend their friends who do eat meat" and therefore, in his eyes, their vegetarianism "has no sensitivity whatsoever" but rather is full of "arrogance, wickedness."  I find myself wondering if this whole diatribe might have been triggered by some vegetarian guest who came out of the closet and "offended" Rabbi Melamed at the Sabbath table by not eating the meat.  He certainly does seem to have a lot of emotional energy invested in the issue.

It may well be true that standing up for a cause -- any cause -- might "offend" your friends and neighbors.  That is the nature of protest.   Segregationists in the American South were so "offended" by the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s that they beat up, jailed, and sometimes even lynched the protesters.  But in the long run, the Civil Rights activists were proven right, even if they were at first in the minority.  Being in the majority does not always mean you are on the right side.

Yes, it is true that some segments of the vegetarian movement do act in self-righteous and arrogant ways.  In fact, I myself have sometimes been offended by the more extreme elements in the movement, as well as blatant ignorance about Jews and Judaism.  (Read more...)  A great deal of my activist energy lately has gone into educating gentiles about Jews -- and not just the vegetarians, either.  But this does not invalidate the movement itself.   As they say, ignorance is curable.

Unfortunately, it is the extremists who always get the media coverage.  Then the whole movement is judged by the actions of a few.  But this is the case with just about any movement you can name.  Every group has its extremists.  [One of whom is Rabbi Melamed himself for his own political cause -- more on that below.]  But does that mean we should never speak out against animal cruelty because it might offend somebody?  Does that mean we should all just shut up and sit on our hands and say nothing?  Isn't that what people did during the Holocaust?   Remember all those "good Germans" who did not speak out against cruelty toward Jews for fear of offending their neighbors -- or worse?

Apparently Rabbi Melamed does think exactly that way, because earlier in the article, in a section called "The Place of Vegetarians," he does acknowledge that "there are individuals whose delicate, moral sensitivities touch their hearts deeply and thus refrain from eating meat, and most certainly they avoid offending others who do eat meat."  (I am not sure how he determines this.  Does he personally know any of these inoffensive vegetarians?  How would he meet them if, as he says, they should not talk about vegetarianism?)  Thus he presents vegetarianism as a mystical stance that one might adopt for onesself, but not one that a person should try to teach to others.  So it would seem that as long as we keep quiet and "know our place" he has no objections to individuals being a vegetarians -- just don't talk about it with anybody, lest you offend your meat-eating listeners.  (On the other hand, he has no problem offending vegetarians with accusations of arrogance and -- get this -- terrorism!  Read on...)

Linking vegetarianism with terrorism -- OY VEY!

However, "offending" people is not the real agenda for Rabbi Melamed's vehemence against vegetarians.  His attack is based in Israeli politics, because in the next paragraph he goes on to say:

"Here in Israel, quite a few vegetarian activists support the terrorist organizations of the P.L.O. and Hamas, while at the same time, claiming that the settlers are the biggest culprits, hindering peace of the world.  Incidentally, this type of evil is the most serious and dangerous, because it wraps itself in the guise of righteousness.  In the same way that some of the greatest villains in history took pride in their compassion for animals."

Here he takes of the velvet gloves and swings with both fists.  Read that paragraph again.  Rabbi  Melamed is claiming that teaching vegetarianism will lead to people to support terrorism!  He really believes this!  A patently absurd assumption that turns psychology on its head.   Kindness to animals does not lead to violence towards humans.  The opposite is true: cruelty to animals leads to cruelty toward humans.

One of the first signs of a developing psychopath is a tendency toward torturing animals.  Part of the initiation into Hitler's Death's Head SS squads was to be given a dog to raise and train, then be ordered to shoot it.  The purpose being, to teach the young soldiers to follow orders and have no compassion whatsoever, nor even for their friends.    It was not kindness to the dogs that hardened their hearts; it was the act of betraying those dogs in order to be accepted into the group.   The same kind of callous behavior can be seen in gang initiations today.

Hitler was NOT a vegetarian!

No doubt Rabbi Melamed would counter with the claim that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian.  Hitler is most likely one of those "greatest villains in history" that his article refers to.   The rabbi apparently believes in the classical example of false logic (I actually saw this in a math book once):  "Hitler was evil.  Hitler was a vegetarian.  Therefore all vegetarians are evil."

But, false logic aside,  Hitler was neither a vegetarian nor an animal rights activist.  Although he sometimes refrained from eating meat because of problems with flatulence, he was also fond of liver dumplings, sausage, and roast pigeon.  When he came to power, he outlawed all the vegetarian organizations in the Reich.  Film footage of Hitler and his dog show the dog cowering in fear.  And Hitler absolutely hated cats -- probably because you can't bully them around the way you can a dog.  When deciding how he would commit suicide if captured, he tested the cyanide on his own dog first.   So he was hardly a man who had compassion for animals, not even his own pets.  Yet this urban legend about Hitler's supposed vegetarianism  continues to circulate, sucking in gullible people like Rabbi Melamed.

Vegetarianism does NOT cause terrorism

In fact, I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of terrorists eat meat.  I certainly have not heard of any Al Qaeda videos advocating vegetarianism!   True, there are some vegetarians -- as well as many, many avid meat-eaters -- who advocate negotiating with the Palestinians for a two-state solution to the conflict.  And since Hamas and the PLO are now the elected governments in the West Bank and Gaza, any treaty signed would have to include them, whether you consider them terrorists or not.  As Moshe Dayan said decades ago, you do not make peace by talking to your friends.  You have to talk with your enemies.  And you have to be willing to hear both sides.  There are many cases in history where the bitterest of enemies  sat down and made peace.  And most of them were carnivores.

This I believe, is the rabbi's true reason for attacking the vegetarian movement: he hates the very idea a Palestinian state, and by extension he opposes anybody -- vegetarian or not -- who advocates a two-state solution.  As I explained in my previous article, Rabbi Melamed is a disciple of the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, founder of the Gush Emunim settlement movement in Israel.   Although Gush Emunim as a political party is now defunct, their philosophy lives on in the settler movement itself.  They believe that the Jews have a God-given right to "greater Israel," that all Arabs are evil and out to kill the Jews, and that Israel should not give back one single inch of the land captured in the 1967 war.  Anybody who disagrees with this extreme stance is labeled a heretic and a traitor.  Or worse.

Rabbi Melamed is certainly entitled to his political opinions.  But scapegoating the vegetarian movement makes no logical sense.  In his mind, cause and effect have become strangely warped.  He seems to think that people become vegetarians, then go off and join "terrorist" groups.  But this rarely happens in the real world.  Most of the time, people first become involved in various political and peace movements (whether they are "terrorists" is beyond the scope of this article) and only later do they begin to develop any sensitivity to animals -- if at all.   To claim that vegetarianism leads to terrorism is simply not true. 

2005 cartoon lampooning "Homeland Security"

Refuting Rabbi Eliezer Melamed's attack on the vegetarian movement

On Monday, May 26, 2014, the Israel National News printed an article by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed  entitled Judaism: Vegetarianism for Moral Reasons.   This title is misleading, however, because it turns out that Rabbi Melamed is against encouraging vegetarianism for moral reasons.  His reasoning is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of why everyone should be required to take a course in basic logic before putting fingers to keyboard.

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed,
head of the Har Bracha
yeshiva in Israel

The article begins, not with vegetarianism, but with an argument from the book of Numbers about why every Jew should join the Israeli army.  This is hardly surprising coming from this rabbi, given that he is a disciple of the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, founder of the Gush Emunim settlement movement in Israel. In other words, Rabbi Melamed is a radical right-wing activist.  Were this the only content of his article, I would not be bothering to write this blog post, except maybe to refute his militaristic interpretation of the Jewish holiday of Lag B'Omer (see below.)*

However, right in the middle of this discussion about Jewish armies, he makes a switch to vegetarianism.  He begins with the usual story of how Eden was vegetarian, but after the Fall both humans and animals degenerated into killing and eating each other.  Then comes Noah, the Flood, etc.  All pretty standard theology until we get to this:

 "Up until the generation of the Flood, people could receive all their nutritional needs from plants. After the sin and the collapse of all systems of nature – plants were no longer sufficient for a person, and therefore, God allowed Noah and his sons to eat the flesh of cattle, birds, animals and fish. In other words, the moral decline of the world created a completely new eco-environment in which the consumption of meat is necessary." 

Here is where I take issue.  Given the huge number of perfectly healthy vegetarians and vegans in the world today, it can hardly be argued that plants are "no longer sufficient for a person" or that "the consumption of meat is necessary."  It may be true that in past generations, when the principles of balanced nutrition were less understood, it was more difficult to be both vegetarian and healthy, but this was due to lack of knowledge and, in some cases, lack of year-round access to fresh vegetables -- not to the impossibility of living on a plant-based diet.

The good rabbi also does not seem to be bothered by the horrible conditions in today's factory farms.  On the contrary:  He seems to think this benefits the animals, and that we are somehow protecting them and doing them a big favor by raising them for meat:

"In the present situation, if we stop eating meat, it is not clear that it would benefit those species we normally eat, because if we do not continue raising and growing them for consumption, their numbers among other animals will decrease sharply. At present, they breed under human supervision, but if all the animals and chickens were let loose, within a short time, very few would be left."

Not only does Rabbi Melamed need a course in logic, he would also benefit from some basic ecology.  His argument might hold true in the case of factory farm chickens who have spent their whole lives crammed in cages and have no idea how to survive in the wild.  But feral chickens in many places on earth are doing just fine.  My own free-run flock is in no danger of dying out.  The opposite is true:  I have hens who keep sneaking off to raise broods of chicks in the woods.  (I eat eggs but not meat.)

Stopping meat consumption would mean that there might be fewer chickens in the world than the billions that are raised for slaughter each year, but that is an artificially inflated number to begin with.  If chickens were released (or maybe sent to sanctuaries to live out their lives) and the mass production stopped, their numbers would eventually adjust to the natural population that is supposed to be in the ecosystem.  And those that do survive would be a whole lot happier.

Rabbi Melamed then goes on to argue that not only is meat-eating "necessary," it is, in his opinion, morally wrong to encourage people to be vegetarians.  And here we find the strangest case of false logic that I have seen in a long time.  He states:

"Moreover, if we are overly concerned about educating towards compassion and love for animals, instead of helping them, we would destroy ethical relations between human beings, because people whose sense of morality is not fully developed could think to themselves: “Since in any event, we aren’t warned about killing animals and eating them, we can also kill people who stand in our way, and maybe even eat their flesh.” And there would be other evil individuals who would focus all their good qualities towards animals – because ultimately, every wicked person possesses a spark of conscience and compassion. But after silencing their conscience, they could steal, exploit, and kill people without any ethical dilemma, because in their hearts, they take pride in the great mercifulness they show towards their pets."  

As bizarre as this argument may seem, I have heard it before -- in connection with the Holocaust.  People using it like to point to Hitler's supposed vegetarianism (for the record, he was not a vegetarian  -- read more here) and then say, "See?  Hitler was a vegetarian and he certainly was not moral."  They also like to point to Nazis who loved their dogs while at the same time hating and killing Jews.  This was true in some cases -- but let's not confuse cause and effect.  Loving a dog (or any other animal) does not lead to cruelty toward humans.  People who split their consciences like this are in a state of denial, disassociation, or even psychosis, but loving the dog did not cause this.  For that matter, such Nazis also loved their families -- so are we to say nobody should love their children because it might lead to mass murder?

Rabbi Melamed then goes on to say:

"Therefore, as long as murder and cruelty remain in the world, people should not be encouraged to refrain from eating meat. One might say that as long as people have a desire to eat meat, it is a sign that we have not yet reached the ethical stage in which it is morally important to refrain from eating meat." 

By this circular logic, we would never try to improve ourselves or overcome our base desires.  We would all just keep on justifying our bad behavior by reasoning that if we are doing it, then it must be what we are supposed to be doing.  So where would it end?  Shall we say that as long as people have a desire to make war, it is morally wrong to try to make peace?  Or as long as people want to buy slaves, we should not try to end slavery?  Try telling that to the parents of those girls who were recently kidnapped in Nigeria.

However, Rabbi Melamed inadvertently provides a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, namely, that "as long as people have a desire to eat meat" they are not morally advanced enough to cease eating it.  (This must be the case with Rabbi Melamed himself, since, as far as I know, he is not a vegetarian nor does he express any desire to become one.)  By his own logic, the reverse must also be true:  if a person does lose his or her taste for meat and no longer desires to eat it, then it must be a sign that he or she is now morally advanced and should consider becoming a vegetarian.  As more and more people are doing every day.

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*Regarding Lag B'Omer, he states that the custom of shooting arrows on Lag B’Omer alludes to preparing for the establishment of a Jewish army.  This completely turns the story on its head.  The custom originated during the Roman period when it was forbidden to teach Torah.  So the rabbis would pretend they were taking the boys out to target practice as a ruse to fool the Roman soldiers.  Rather like the story of the Hanukkah dreydel, where toys and games were used as a ruse to cover teaching Torah.  I have never, until now, heard of anybody attaching a theme of military training to the archery story.

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UPDATE, June 20, 2014:  On June 8, 2014, the Israel National News published a follow-up article by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed entitled The Significance of Eating Meat, in answer to criticisms of his previous article on May 26, Vegetarianism for Moral Reasons.   In this latest article, he goes even further, linking the vegetarian movement with supporting terrorism.  In his mind, being kind to animals leads to cruelty to people.  Read my latest response, Vegetarianism Leads to Terrorism, says Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, in which I refute this absurd claim.