What's Kosher in a Complex World?

“These are the instructions concerning animals, birds, all living creatures that move in water, and all creatures that swarm on earth, for distinguishing between the unclean and the clean, between the living things that may be eaten and the living things that may not be consumed.” (Leviticus 11:46-47)

By legacy, by history – by divine decree, if you like – we are a people of discernment. 

Our tradition gives us such binary categories as pure and impure, permitted and forbidden, obligatory and optional, sacred and quotidian, kosher and not kosher. 

Our heritage for centuries has trained us to match our actions to our best ascertainment of the facts in front of us and the value-concepts at stake.  That sensibility and approach to life persists very strongly even among Jews who do not consider themselves religious. And for those of us who do live Judaism spiritually, our people’s well-honed practices of discerning encourage a broadening of traditional categories to encompass new concerns.  

“The atom bomb, kosher or treyf?” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is said to have asked a classroom full of rabbinical students at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in the 1960s. 

If we are meant to be a people of discernment, that does not mean we are meant to be a people of simplicism. 

In the past several days I have found myself going to bat for students who have wished to express concern and even opposition regarding certain fateful Israeli policy decisions, as a legitimate part of the conversation of our Israel-connected Jewish community at Harvard; and I have written to the City Council of Cambridge in opposition to a boycott and divestment resolution proposed by anti-Israel groups in the wider world, and I have urged our student leaders to make their voices heard along with me. 

In both instances, I have drawn inspiration and insight from the late Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, of blessed memory, who led the Harvard Hillel community from 1958 through 1990 and lived here among us for many more years. 

Rabbi Gold was a complex character – and complexity is not a flaw.  One year, in a High Holiday sermon at Harvard, he taught “that what Israel needs from us most is not more criticism but loyal support.”  In another year he proclaimed, “Now it is our turn to help Israel repudiate its mistakes and recover the path to peace and dignity.” One year: “Let us hope and pray that our love of Zion will not lead to a disregard of the complex geo-political realities of the Middle East,” and then another year: “By the time my visit to Israel was coming to an end, I had perceived an Israel beyond conflicts and problems.”  Throughout it all, this was a man whose commitment to Israel was never in doubt, and who influenced countless Jewish lives in his long career at Harvard. 

If Jewish tradition is full of binary categories, Talmudic argument often is drawn to the cases and questions that challenge determinations of black and white, up and down.  If the topic is day and night, you can count on our Sages of blessed memory to be fascinated with dawn and twilight, the interstitial moments, the ambiguous times.  Our Talmud even invents an animal, the “koi” by name, with mixed characteristics of livestock and of predator, just for argument’s sake.  

Commitment to complex cases and complicated conversations does not mean being wishy-washy in principle, or forsaking our tradition’s audacious notion that right and wrong are very real – it only (‘only!’) means that our steps and considerations in any given moment may well fail to be boring, to say the very least. 

Our Torah teaches us to believe that decisions of life and death, blessing and curse, are set before us, and charges us, “therefore choose life!” (Deuteronomy 30:19).  Choosing life – real life, life with people, with one another, with our Jewish commitments and passions and values and concerns, life for our community in America and for the land that bears our people’s ancient name – that is our work, and it is holy; it is the very opposite of opting out.    

Below is what I have written to all the members of the Cambridge City Council this week – shared here with blessings of Shabbat Shalom.

 

Dear City Council Member McGovern,

As a Jewish Chaplain at Harvard University, I will welcome an opportunity to meet with you to discuss the boycott resolution against Hewlett Packard and against Israel proposed for consideration by the Council.

Especially as the proposal of this resolution seems to come from students and the academic quarter, I will be glad to discuss with you the array of constituencies and voices that exist on campus, and why whatever position one holds regarding the Israeli-Palestinian situation and a desired outcome tactics of boycott and alienation that single out Israel among all countries of the Middle East are manifestly ineffective, inflammatory, and counter-productive they make a terrible impression of anti-Semitic prejudice on the part of local government, and are dreadfully damaging with regard to the good will and the atmosphere of the City.

Such proposals and resolutions generally amount to a shouting match among local interest groups; they have only a harmful effect with regard to the conflict in the Middle East itself; and such side-shows completely overlook the positive work toward peace that can be accomplished from places that have strong and active ties with Israel, as the Cambridge and Harvard communities do.

Parents around the country will hear from their children at Harvard what Cambridge does and decides, and the good name of this City stands to suffer or to flourish correspondingly. I will be very glad to think with you about constructive approaches to these important issues.

Respectfully,

Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg, Ph.D., Executive Director and Harvard Chaplain

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