Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel
I've had several Muslim friends try to convince me that they conveniently hate bacon. I'm not saying you're a liar, but I've never met a Jewish or Muslim person that actually admits to loving bacon, and that somehow seems wrong to me. Oh, have you tried kosher shrimp? It's made of Alaska Pollock fish (insert polish joke here). Supposedly, it's a reasonable approximation. I'm sure with the right sweet and sour sauce or garlic and butter concoction, you could be brought back to shrimp nirvana.
Delving back into Kashrut for just a minute, the question of why is what interests me. Is it really just "this is the common interpretation and I trust G-d", or is it something more like a test of obedience or self-control?
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First of all, I have-- alas!-- met plenty of Jews who admit they love bacon. Most of them don't appear to be willing to give it up. But to respond slightly to your observation, I have noted that among those I know who have tried and disliked it, or at least not liked it enough to mind giving it up, all of them-- myself included-- were raised in kosher households, and not permitted to eat nonkosher food at the houses of friends. I wonder if part of the glory of bacon is that its fans have been socialized to know that it is delicious. I mean, if it is given to kids as a treat, or otherwise becomes a childhood favorite, the bond is likely to last into adulthood for emotional as well as flavor-based reasons. And by the same token, if one never is given the chance to taste it as a child, or is told that it is a yummy treat, one simply never forms the subconscious associations with it.
In any case, I have tried the faux shrimp made with pollock, and they're not bad. I sometimes use them to make mock seafood chowders. I would readily concur that they are more like shrimp than soy bacon is like bacon. But they don't taste like shrimp. Not really. I have done everything to them I can think of, and they are tasty, but they just don't have the smoothness of texture, the innate butteriness, the fresh brininess, of real fresh shrimp.
I think there are a lot of reasons for why people keep kosher. For a lot of Jews who do, it really is as simple as "God told us to." Others have various reasons of their own, most IMO rather hazy and vague. And there are some who take a literalist Kabbalist stance that nonkosher foods convey spiritual impurities. I'm never satisfied with simple answers, and I am also not a textual literalist, or a believer in direct Divine authorship of the Torah. I may be something of a Kabbalist, but I have no evidence that nonkosher foods convey such spiritual impurities. So for me, the Kabbalist answer is out, and it's less that I am satisfied to believe "God told us to, end of story," and more that I don't know what the Real Reasons are, since God has not revealed them; or if this is part of something that a prophet misunderstood, and God intended something else for us, there is nothing to suggest an alternate understanding to me. Therefore, to me it makes sense to take it on faith unless there is an overwhelming reason not to. And since there are a number of other issues in halakhah that I find in need of radical answers and sweeping changes, I feel that it behooves me to pick my battles. For example, I am intent on using a radical halakhic methodology to resolve the problem of gay acceptance in Jewish society; and that seems reasonable to me, because it makes a change to relieve the daily suffering of many others. But what would be gained by attempting to rewrite the halakhot of kashrut in order to permit the eating of foods explicitly banned in the Torah (a very radical change, well-nigh impossible to achieve)? I would get to eat shrimp again. Some other people would get to eat bacon again. Very pleasant, no doubt, but a disproportionately minor problem to go to such monumental and dramatic lengths to resolve. Much better, IMO, to save the effort for more serious issues.
Because in the end, who is hurt by my not eating shrimp or bacon? Nobody. What negative energy is generated by my not eating shrimp or bacon? None, as far as I can tell. Would anyone be hurt by my eating shrimp or bacon? Not directly, but it would be yet another wedge to drive into the divides between the Jewish people vis-a-vis halakhic disagreements. Would my eating shrimp or bacon generate negative energy? It seems unlikely, but then again, the Torah says God wishes us not to, and in my mode of understanding, the "reason" for commandments without apparent reason is that God wishes us not to do things that generate negative energy between ourselves, or between ourselves and the world, or between ourselves and God, and somehow God or the prophets who wrote the Torah believed that doing or not doing X thing would generate said negative energy. Perhaps the Torah is wrong in the matter of kashrut, but what reasons do I have for not going with the Torah as a matter of first recourse, rather than going against it as a matter of first recourse? Only a love of shrimp. And that, IMO, is a pretty poor reason.
Which, I suppose, still boils down to faith. But it's not, IMO, a blind or unreasoned faith, within its own parameters.
There are those liberal Jews, especially amongst the Reform, who keep kosher because they see it as a hallmark of identity: keeping kosher is something that Jews do. Therefore I will keep kosher to solidify my identity as a Jew. I respect that, but for me, that is insufficient. Likewise, Reconstructionists occasionally keep kosher because they see Judaism as a patchwork of folkways, and kashrut is the peculiar folkway of foods and eating dictated by our culture. Needless to say, I don't see that as sufficient, either. But that's because, as they will do, they have left God and Torah out of the equation, and as an observant Jew, I cannot see such things save in terms of God and Torah.