I would like to open with a joke. But it is one of those jokes that is hard to deliver so if I mess-up, please laugh anyways…!
Here is a little background to the joke (you can already see that it is a hard joke because I have to give background!). The Torah tells us three times לא תבשל גדי בחלב אמו - “Don’t cook a kid (the baby goat kind!) in its mother’s milk.” The rabbis derive more and more restrictions from each repetition of the command until they get to all of our current restrictions against mixing milk and meat.
So here is the joke. G-d calls Moshe into His office and says “Moshe, I have a new law that I want you to tell the people, “Don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” So Moshe says, “I get it. When you say “kid” you dont really just mean a baby goat you mean all animals. And when you say “mother” you dont really just mean its mother, but any mother and really all dairy.” So G-d says back, “Moshe, I will tell you a second time, ‘Don’t cook a Kid in its Mother’s milk.” Moshe says, “Oh, I get it. When you say ‘don’t cook’, you really mean don’t cook, don’t eat and just for safe measure we should wait 6 hours between milk and meat.” Now G-d starting to get upset says, “Moshe, let me say a third and final time, ‘don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” To which Moshe says, “Ok I get it now. You don’t want us to cook any animal with any dairy, you want us to wait between milk and meat and you also want us to have separate dishes and maybe even a separate dishwasher.”
At this point, G-d’s looks at Moshe in frustration, and says “Ok Moshe, you win. Have it your way!”
So that is the joke. But I think it is really more than a joke. At a certain level, it is a challenge to the entire corpus of Rabbinic Judaism. How do the rabbis get from one little verse (even if mentioned three times) all of the laws of Meat and Milk. I spent 6 months in yeshiva studying the details of all of the possible laws of meat and milk and how they are derived from one little verse.
To ask the question a different way, I always think about the 20 year old Jewish college student who is starting to rebel. He asks his parents, “why do I have to keep kosher? Even if I accept the Torah, so I won’t literally cook a kid in its mother’s milk, but I still want a cheeseburger”! How do we answer that rebellious 20 year old? What is so bad about mixing meat and milk and why are there so many extensions to the law?
So there are basically three answers to the question, 1.) the talmud, 2.) Maimonides and 3.) Rav Kook. The Talmud’s approach to “why is meat and milk so bad” is to basically to ignore the question. I dont think that in the entire Talmud or rabbinic literature you will find an answer to this question. It reminds me of my yeshiva days when after studying all of the details of a certain area of law someone would finally ask the “why” question. “Why do we do this?” The answer would often be in Yiddish (I will try not to butcher this!), “freg nisht far vos, uber vus” - “Don’t ask “why” only “what”. In other words, we should only be concerned with “what” and “how” to act not “why we do what we do”. This is certainly an approach but it probably will not work on your 20 year old questioning young adult.
So we turn to Maimonides (12th century). Maimonides, in explaining the prohibition against meat and milk, tells us that “in my opinion not improbable that .... idolatry had something to do with it. Perhaps such food was eaten at one of the ceremonies of their cult or at their festivals.” (Guide for the Perplexed 3:48).
Maimonides idea might be interesting from an historical perspective and Abarbanel even tells us that in his time (15th century Spain) there were still Pagans who ate meat and milk as part of pagan worship. But I ask you, will this work on your 20 year old? Try telling him not to eat a cheeseburger because thousands of years ago people mixed meat and milk in pagan worship. I dont think it will work.
There is one other idea that Maimonides mentions. He says that in addition to the idolatrous overtones of meat and milk, “it is undoubtedly very gross food.”
I object to this reason! I am going to make an admission right here in front of the Holy Ark! I crave cheeseburgers! I have never had one but I crave them! Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, a young woman came to convert. She was totally observant. She kept shabbat, Kashruth and she even went to the Mikvah every month. I asked her, “why do you need to convert, you are 100% jewish.” She told me that she was doing genealogical research and she discovered that her great grandmother was not Jewish. She had simply married her great grandfather and nobody asked any questions. She lived like a jew and everyone thought she was Jewish. This means that the young woman’s grandmother and mother were not jewish and she was not jewish. I, of course, converted her with two other rabbis.
However, the experience made me ask a question. What would happen if I did genealogical research and I discovered that I was not halakhically Jewish. Would I convert? G-d would have no expectations that I convert. I could keep the 7 Noahide laws, be a good person and not be jewish. After thinking about the question (a lot!), I decided that I would convert. After all, I love judaism. I love torah, my family and everything else. I also need to be jewish for my job! But even though I would convert, I would give myself 24 hours! And during those 24 hours I would have every cheeseburger imaginable and oysters, shrimp, bacon and everything else. Then I would convert!
So Maimonides idea that cheeseburgers are gross wouldn’t work on me and I am sure it will not work on our theoretical 20 year old.
So I now turn to an idea from Rav Kook (1st Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine in the early 20th century). Rav Kook is really expanding on a statement from Nachmanides (13th century Spain). Rav Kook (in On Vegetarianism and Peace) opens with what should be an obvious statement about (cow’s or goat’s) milk that I never thought of before.
יסוד מציאות החלב בשדי האם החיה לא למען יוכל הוא בחזקתו לעשוק אותו לעצמו, כ"א למען תוכל להניק את ילדה הרך
“The purpose of the milk... is not for Humans with strength to take it (or exploit it) for ourselves, rather for the mother to nurse her child.”
In Rav Kook’s thought, everything has a purpose, even milk, and it is not for us but for the baby animal. This idea would almost push us more to veganism but I digress. So he continues…
הגדי הרך לא יעמוד לפי ערך מוסרו השפל להתרפק גם הוא על אהבת אמו ולשמח גם הוא בזיו החיים, כ"א ישחט ויהיה לאכלה לקבת האדם הזוללה לנפשו הנשפלת האומרת "אוכלה בשר".
“The goat is not going to live to its potential (my loose translation) but will rather be slaughtered and be food for man’s lowly stomach which says ‘Give me meat!’”
You can hear Rav Kook making fun of meat consumption. Rav kook now says, “what will be with the leftover milk, now that you have slaughtered the intended drinker of that milk? You will cook the kid in the mother’s milk. You will take the very substance which was supposed to nurture this animal and you will cook it in that substance. To this, the Torah and the voice of G-d screams out “Don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” Nachmanides says that it would be cruel to do this.
Very powerful. But why do we have to expand it to not cooking any meat with any milk, separate dishes and the entire corpus of laws of meat and milk which really govern every day of our lives? The answer is because if we only refrained from cooking a kid in its mother’s milk, we would never think about it. But the expanded version of the halakha turns an abstract value into a real spiritual daily practice. It takes the lofty ideas of Parshat Yitro (the thunder and lightning, the 10 commandments, the revelation at Sinai) and makes them real and particular and something we encounter all of the time. This is what all of Halakha is about. Take the laws of kosher. Why do we eat? In Judaism, we eat in order to have strength to serve G-d to be better parents and friends. We eat so that we can be grateful for the wonderful tastes and smells. The laws of Kashruth, the laws of blessings are all designed to make this value real and practical in our daily lives. Think about shabbat. We can talk about the value of rest on shabbat. But if we don’t make it real with the 39 melachot (categories of work) and all of the details, it will just be an idea. Halakaha makes it real. It allows us to take the ordinary moments and make them holy. So if we separate our meat and milk dishes and wait 6 hours but it is just a burden then it won’t really make us better. But if every time we have a halakhic question about kosher, we think of Rav Kook; If when we go to a business lunch and we order the salad (and don’t even eat the onions - a different discussion!) and we think about the little goat and what it means to eat in a selfish way versus a spiritual way, then we are elevating our daily lives. This is the whole point of Jewish practice.
So I am not ashamed to say that I crave cheeseburgers (and shrimp and bacon!). And if I found out that I was not Jewish, I would probably give myself 24 hours! But then I would go back to all of the rules.
i hope that I will remember and I hope that we can all remember that when we follow these rules they are meant to elevate and enhance our lives. I dont know if even Rav kook’s approach will satisfy the 20 year old. But I know that it could enhance our own practice and if our 20 year olds see us practicing these laws with more meaning; If they see that following Torah makes us more sensitive and better people then they will consider making it part of their own lives as well.
Shabbat Shalom!
