Staying Real in Israel
Home of
"The Marty Roberts Show"

It is SUCH a pain in the tush (butt) for a Jew to keep kosher…the Jewish dietary laws mandated by the Torah. So many yummy foods that a Jew may not eat…seafood, bacon, not to mention cheeseburgers and meat with a creamy French sauce.

Non-Kosher Food...Tasty, But Dangerous for the Jewish Soul

Then there’s all the trouble you have to go through to make sure that your meat is slaughtered properly, even if it IS of a kosher species, and that, of course, makes it much more expensive. Now, once you have your properly slaughtered kosher meat, you’ve got to go through the long process of ridding it of blood…salting and on and on. And do NOT get me started on liver…hardly worth the trouble required by the Torah to prepare just to enjoy a little chopped liver.

Oh, yeah, and then, since Jewish dietary law forbids mixing milk and meat, you have to have two sets of everything…dishes, utensils, pots, pans, dishwashers, sinks…talk about burdensome! Not to mention that you have to wait six hours after eating meat before you can eat a dairy product. What, am I expected to go around with a stopwatch? What did they do before every watch had a digital timer on board? And it sure would be nice if I could eat in any old restaurant that my non-Jewish or non-religiously observant friends choose for our night out, or that required attendance business lunch.

So, why bother? Why do I, just because I was born Jewish, have to jump through all these hoops just to have a little nosh? And don’t give me that “health” answer…no pork because of trichinosis centuries ago, it’s more healthy, yadda yadda yadda…none of which is true OR the reason we Jews have to keep kosher.

Bottom line is…Jews have to observe the dietary laws of kashrut (kosher) because G-d said to…period…
But if maybe this is not enough for you, my thinking friends, there is a whole world of spiritual reasons, none of which make any rational sense, as to why a Jew may not eat certain foods or certain mixtures of foods, and on and on with the minutiae of kashrut…their is something special about the Jewish “Soul”, or Spirit, that which turns our body from a lifeless blob of flesh into a living, talking, thinking human being…This special Soul is damaged by taking in non-kosher food. Non-kosher food is spiritually unhealthy for a Jewish Soul…but there is absolutely NO way that you can understand this on a rational level.

I did, however, run into something interesting as I was studying the Torah reading for this Sabbath, the portion of Shemini, where, among other topics, the basis for the Jewish dietary laws is laid out.

On the verse that tells us, “these are the living things that you may eat”, the medieval Torah commentator, Rashi explains the following…To what can this idea be compared? (the idea of dietary laws that limit and proscribe what a Jew may or may not eat and how)

Rashi says, it is like a doctor who tells a sick person to go ahead and eat whatever he wants…it doesn’t matter anyway…your case is hopeless…nothing can save you anyway, so you might as well enjoy it while you can…as opposed to the OTHER sick person, who DOES have hope of being saved…cured of his illness…HE is ordered by the same doctor to partake of a strictly controlled diet, only eating certain foods and mixtures of foods, consuming certain special medicines and avoiding at all cost other, harmful foods…all in the interest of restoring and preserving good health…

Jewish dietary laws…kosher…Mandatory universal Jewish health insurance…THAT is how G-d is insuring the spiritual health of his Chosen People, the Jews…

Food for thought…