Near a prairie dotted with cattle and green with soy beans, barley, corn and oats, two bearded Hasidic men dressed in black pray outside a slaughterhouse here that is managed by an evangelical Christian.
What brought these men together could easily have kept them apart: religion.
The two Hasidim oversee shehitah, the Jewish ritual slaughtering of meat according to the Book of Leviticus. The meat is then shipped to Wise Organic Pastures, a kosher food company in Brooklyn owned by Issac Wiesenfeld and his family. When Mr. Wiesenfeld sought an organic processor that used humane methods five years ago, he found Scott Lively, who was just beginning Dakota Beef, now one of the largest organic meat processors in the country.
Mr. Lively adheres to a diet he believes Jesus followed. Like Mr. Wiesenfeld, he says the Bible prescribes that he use organic methods to respect the earth, treat his workers decently and treat the cattle that enter his slaughterhouse as humanely as possible.
“We learn everything from the Old Testament,” Mr. Lively said, “from keeping kosher to responsible capitalism.”
A lot of kosher (kashrut) regulation is not based on the Bible, but rather on Judaic tradition.
For example, keeping one set of dishes and cooking utensils for dairy and another from meat (some ultra orthodox go even further, to the point of having two refrigerators for separation, for example) stems from the admonition: “you will not boil the meat of a calf in the milk of it’s mother”. Judaic tradition pondered this and said, “in order to avoid breaking this law, since we don’t know the origin of all meat and all dairy, we will keep meat and dairy separate from one another at all times.”
Another kosher tradition says not to eat the meat from the hind leg of the cow because Jacob had his leg injured in the sciatic nerve when wrestling the angel of the Lord. Thus that part of the body (animal or human) is sacred because “it was touched by the LORD” and can only be eaten if the sciatic nerve is removed (a very time-consuming process, therefore rarely done, and thus rarely eaten).
Nope, not at all. In fact, Hebrew National franks are some of the best on the market. Just sometimes it (tradition) can go overboard. Which was probably why Jesus tried to bring it back on track with the warning that one should be more aware of what comes out of a persons heart then what goes into the stomach. 🙂
No, I see no problem with “Mr. Lively … says the Bible prescribes that he use organic methods to respect the earth, treat his workers decently and treat the cattle that enter his slaughterhouse as humanely as possible.” In fact, I applaud and respect him for this, and wish more people in the meat business would follow suit.
But I’m not giving up sirloin based on Judaic tradition rather than the Bible. I’d need a better reason than that.
By the way, a good treatise on Kosher and Jewish tradition in general can be found in Herman Wouk’s “This is my G-d”. Excellent work on Judaism by a Jewish author.