KASHRUS — THE ULTIMATE SOUL-FOOD

Freely adapted from an article by Esther Moldauer originally published in the January — February 1983 issue of “The Jewish Woman’s Outlook” (Vol. III / No. 2). Unfortunately, the magazine is no longer published.

This essay has been scrutinised by Rabbi Daniel Fabian MA of Berlin, Germany, a highly-qualified microbiologist, to whom many thanks are due. Even though the actual wording is not his choice, the essay has benefited from his sensible advice and guidance concerning the scientific data in this article. If there are any mistakes, they are not his.

For thousands of years, Jews have loyally accepted the Torah and lived by its Mitzvos, often even without understanding why. Now, in the challenging and wonderful days in which we are living, that which has been concealed is gradually emerging into the light.

“Chukkim” — "חוקים" is the name that has traditionally been given to those Mitzvos which relate to those things of the world of nature which are subordinate to man, such as earth, plant and animal life, and one’s own body, mind, spirit and environment. Because of man’s ignorance and the concealment of knowledge from him, these “Chukkim” were viewed by many as laws which are beyond man’s capacity to understand. For some people who did not acknowledge the Divine wisdom in all Mitzvos, it was only a slippery step for them to wrongly assert that if no reason is given for a Mitzvah, it meant that there was no reason. Today, we’re uncovering different layers of meaning to the Mitzvos of HaShem that are remarkably consistent with the world that He has created.

Kashrus is a “Chok” — "חוק" and while it is our duty to observe this Mitzvah even without understanding it, contemporary science is helping to make some aspects of this Mitzvah more comprehensible. The Rambam says that whatever is possible for a person to do to find the reason for “Chukkim” he should do and this has been the challenge that has occupied the author for many years.

The quality we call character, that colander through which emotions and behaviour are strained, allowing certain ones to pass through and others to remain unexpressed, is difficult to explain. Is it produced by heredity or environment? (Rather like that old chestnut, “Nature or Nurture?”) Or is there perhaps something more about both heredity and environment that we have not understood till now? But whether it is formed by nature or by nurture, there is no doubt that character is also moulded through behavioural training and reinforcement. When we stood at Mount Sinai, we promised, "נעשה ונשמע" — “we shall do and we will hear,” that is, first we will do and then we will try to understand what we are doing. Keeping to this promise, in this order, has certainly been a major influence in making us into the People we are.

In much the same vein, it is recognized today that positive or negative emotions are major contributing factors to behaviour. A man filled with fear will attempt to control his immediate environment, and even other people’s environment, or, conversely, live the life of a cringing coward. A man in pain may attempt to inflict pain on others to indulge his self-pity, which cripples his function as a member of society. A man filled with rage might destroy everything that gets in his way, often destroying himself along with his victim.

The question is, can these emotions and their resulting behaviours be passed on to the next generation? Dr E. Roy John of New York Medical College has been collecting memory evidence for over 25 years. He says that when animals are taught certain tasks, patterns of brain waves flicker through their brains. As a task is learned better and better, the brain waves become stronger and stronger. Then, when the animal is made to remember the task, the identical brain waves flicker through its brain. This idea is compounded by the work of Donald Heb of McGill University who showed that when a habit pattern is established, actual new cell assemblies are formed in the brain that make the repetition of the habitual behaviour easier and which inhibit behaviour which goes against the new habit pattern. With this we can better appreciate why “the performance of a Mitzvah (a good deed) leads to the performance of another Mitzvah and an Avayroh (a transgression) leads to another Avayroh.”

As said, emotions can effect changes in the behaviour of an individual. But emotions can even create or alter patterns of behaviour in an individual and when those patterns are reinforced, those changes in behaviour can become permanent. These patterns of behaviour, in turn, can physically change the person. (For example, a scared person hunches over and tries to hide himself; eventually he walks with a bowed back and he assumes a frightened, stooping posture, which in time can become permanent.) What has not been so clearly understood before is the fact that under certain circumstances these behavioural and emotional patterns produce permanent changes not only in the individual concerned, but they can produce genetic alterations, that is, they can change future generations, too.

The major source of nourishment for an unborn child is his mother’s blood. All the nutrients necessary to sustain the life of the unborn child are delivered through the mother’s blood. Research by nutrition scientist Paul M. Newberne of M.I.T. shows that the entire immune system of a person can be irreparably damaged by a protein deficiency during the pregnancy of his mother. A lack of Vitamin B12 lowers resistance to illness in the offspring and a slight deficiency of any part of the B-complex often results in underdeveloped thymuses, spleens and lymph nodes. Viral disease, exposure to certain chemicals or the use of drugs in pregnancy may produce birth defects in the unborn child. The conduit of cause and effect is the mother’s blood through which the unborn child is nourished and sustained for nine months.

According to the Kabbalah, the esoteric teachings of Judaism, “Nefesh” is the animal soul, the life-force, which is common to all life. Its faculties include the attributes of imagination, memory, intelligence and will. Rabbi Mosheh Chaim Luzzatto says that the Nefesh, initially transferred at the time of conception, is reinforced by the blood and is subject to degradation or elevation during the entire lifetime of the organism. The mother’s blood transfers to the unborn child far more than vitamins, proteins, viruses and chemicals. Those are just the physical, material components. The mother’s blood is, in fact, the physical messenger of a whole range of invisible influences and effects, including also things spiritual. Everything that the unborn child needs, spiritual as well as physical, is transferred into it through the mother’s blood. To the unborn child, the mother’s blood is truly, "דם הנפש", that is, “the blood [that delivers everything] into the unborn Nefesh.”

The Torah, in Vayikroh 7 : 27, commands, “Any person that eats any blood shall be cut off from his people.” But this is not so much a threat as an effect — the Torah warns that eating blood has a deleterious effect upon the one who eats it. In Devorrim, 12 : 23, the Torah says, “[You may eat meat] but be strong not to eat the blood because the blood is the animal life-force and you shall not eat the animal life-force with the meat.” In Shmos 22 : 30, the Torah commands us not to eat the meat that has been torn off an animal in the field [by a predator] nor may we eat the meat of any animal that died of itself or was killed [unless it was slaughtered by a valid Shechitah]. One reason for all this is quite clear. To the Torah-observant Jew, the blood is the medium through which is delivered all those influences and effects that make the Nefesh of the creature, the blood is the conveyor, the messenger, to the Nefesh (possibly in much the same way that the scientist today, too, speaks of “messenger RNA,” the servant of DNA, the genetic code). And the Torah warns that anyone who eats blood, which is this messenger medium, will be “cut off from his people” and will suffer permanent damage, physical and spiritual.

A century ago, the scientific community was engaged in a great controversy over whether or not characteristics which were acquired during the course of the lifetime of a person or an animal could be transmitted to succeeding generations. There was then a creeping atheism in the world, fuelled by that scientific community which put forward various “theories” which said that species could arise accidentally and randomly and that there was no need to give credit to a Superior Being for the creation of everything — or anything. The new science taught that there was no longer any moral imperative imposed by G-d the Creator; there was no duty, no responsibility. Of course, it was easier to accept Darwin’s nonsense because it left man without restrictions on his behaviour or morality. Whatever one did had no effect on anyone except oneself, which meant that humanity was now governed by a relative morality — that is, anything goes. The idea of “what I do concerns only me” led to an almost totally hedonistic world in which personal pleasure became the sole criterion of behaviour — with the disastrous results that we are experiencing today. But true science has shown that Darwin’s theories are full of holes. There has never been discovered a pattern of continually changing species and never has it been seen anywhere that one kind of creature, say a fish, changes into another kind of creature, say a dog. The so-called “fossil record” (if there is such a thing) shows only the sudden explosive appearances of highly complex creatures for which we have never been able to find ancestors. Additionally, almost all astronomers and scientists have at last come round to the idea that the world began in one explosive “big bang” that can only be explained by Creation — and Creation means Creator. Creation, of course, stands in stark contrast and vehemently contradicts the opposing “theory” that pure accident and random, chance mutations gave rise to the millions of existing species of living creatures — all supposedly coming about by themselves, from nothing. Empirical evidence shows that nothing happens by itself and that beyond those minor changes and adaptations which are built-in to all living creatures, nothing “evolves” into anything else. Creation rejects utterly the notion that man is nothing more than an animal or the insulting nonsense that man evolved from apes. Creation proclaims the simple, sane truth that anything that exists is a testimony that Somebody brought it into existence. That “Somebody” we call G-d.

So, even though most thinking people who have managed to break free from the propaganda now generally acknowledge that the evolution of species is a myth and a lie — but what about those changes that arise in some creatures, either through the creature’s lifestyle or its environment? What about those changes, including in man himself, that come about through the emotions and behaviour, and which, as we have seen, can effect a change in the person — can those changes be passed on to succeeding generations?

At this point it might be interesting to introduce here a curious and perhaps controversial item. It should be pointed out that some people do not consider what follows as serious science and indeed treat it as a tall story and a bit of a joke. (But people often do that when a new or revolutionary idea comes along, not knowing what to make of it all.) Nevertheless, it is told here, even at the risk of raising a smile, because the claimed results seem to fit in with generally observed facts and, even if the mechanics as described do not seem to make sense scientifically speaking, it is all rather consistent with the general theme of this essay. Maybe, in the fullness of time, how these things actually work will become better understood. So here goes:

Back in 1953, an experimental psychologist, Dr James V. McConnell of the University of Michigan, began experimenting with planarian worms. Using chemical shock, he first trained a group of these worms to run a maze. Then, when they were trained, he ground them up into “wormburger” and fed them to a group of untrained worms. Using another group of untrained worms as a control group, again using chemical shock, he proceeded to train both groups to run the maze. The group that ate the trained wormburger learned the maze in a few tries. The other group took as many months to learn this task as had the original group. Then, instead of using wormburger, McConnell extracted RNA from his trained worms and injected it into untrained worms. The same results obtained: worms injected with the RNA of trained worms learned the new task very quickly. They remembered. Then, working with other researchers over a period of 20 years, he used rats and trained them not only in maze-running but in shock-avoidance. The rats injected with the RNA of trained rats knew when to expect the shock after one or two exposures. Other experimenters followed up the work. Fjerdingstad used goldfish. Georges Ungar used rats, goldfish and canaries. He called the RNA that he extracted and injected, “memory molecules” and while he got results, he had no idea why.

While one faction claimed that memory transfer was chemical in basis and the other claimed that it was electro-physiological, the fact remained that both camps of researchers accepted the fact of memory transfer from one organism to another and all accepted that RNA was involved in some way. It remained for the molecular biologists to find the molecular pattern. Again, it must be stressed that the results that are claimed for these experiments have not been verified — but there definitely seems to be something afoot!

The socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson says that altruism is genetic since it is of no value to an individual and exists only for the perpetuation and benefit of the species as a whole, sometimes, indeed, to the point of being detrimental to the individual. Now, unless we are told, we cannot know precisely HaShem’s purpose in commanding us His Mitzvos. Nevertheless, it is clear that one of the side-benefits of the Mitzvos of the Torah is the ultimate good of the human species and indeed we can see that altruism is built in to the Mitzvos of the Torah and the laws of Judaism. Additionally, it makes good sense and is altogether consistent that the Torah should mandate that our food animals should be hard-wired to function the same way as we ourselves function and it appears that as a result, altruism has become a pronounced characteristic of the Jewish People.

The central dogma of molecular biology provides that the flow of information in all living systems is from DNA to RNA to protein. However, work by Howard M. Temin has shown that cancer-causing viruses have produced a reverse flow, that is, from RNA to DNA. He showed that these viruses contain an enzymic property capable of forming DNA. Then experiments in point mutations led to the discovery of “jumping genes” — DNA that leaves one place and is found in another. The genome is unstable and in a constant state of flux.

So, in the light of these things, and supposing the results are genuine even if we don’t know how they come about, let’s see how the Torah’s laws of Kashrus protect us. First, we are bidden not to eat certain specified animals, fish, insects and birds whose genetic code is thereby decreed by the Torah to be unsuitable for a Torah Jew. We eat only those animals which not only are considered by the Torah to be domesticated but naturally usually live in groups, herds, schools or flocks. (Having said that, we rely on the Torah to inform us which specific animals we may eat — we cannot categorize or define by ourselves which animals are domesticated or herded animals.) Next, we are forbidden to eat animals that have died of themselves (that is, probably in pain) or animals that were killed by other animals (typically in a death struggle, in a fight, in pain). In fact, as noted above, we are forbidden to eat animals that were killed in any way other than by Shechitah.

One of the Mitzvos of the Torah is the commandment, repeated a number of times, that we are not to eat blood. While the Jewish People are commanded 613 Mitzvos, non-Jews have only the Seven No’achide Laws. These Laws were commanded by G-d after the Great Flood, to No’ach and his family and all their descendants, that is, to all humanity, for all time, and they are: not to blaspheme the Name of G-d; the prohibition against any idolatry which excludes G-d; the prohibition against unlawful killing; the prohibition against immorality; the prohibition against stealing; the prohibition against eating meat torn from a live creature and the command to establish institutions of law and order to enforce these No’achide Laws themselves. In reality, these are seven main categories of laws and of course, these No’achide Laws are included in the 613 Mitzvos that are incumbent upon the Jewish People.

Included in the No’achide prohibition against homicide, there is also the warning concerning an animal that kills a human. The context is important. Immediately after the Flood, permission was granted to man to slaughter living creatures for food, but only on condition that the life of the creature has ended before its meat is eaten and that the blood of the creature is not eaten with the meat. At the same time, it is reiterated that the unlawful killing of humans is forbidden and the warning is given that G-d will avenge the unlawful killing of any human, whether by man or by animal. Indeed, the duty is laid upon human beings to bring to justice and to punish the unlawful killing of any human, whether by man or by beast. About this the Ramban comments: G-d says, “Not only will I demand an accounting from any human being for the killing of another human, but I will demand an accounting also from any animal for the killing of any human.” However, says the Ramban, because an animal does not have any moral sense that justifies punishment or reward, I wonder if this vengeance from an animal can be meant literally. Nevertheless, it appears that it is indeed by the King’s decree that any animal that kills a human shall be killed. It being a decree of the King will explain the verse in the Torah which applies also to non-Jew No’achides as well as to Jews, that, “The killer ox shall be stoned, its meat shall not be eaten.” Now, surely this cannot be in the way of a fine for the killer ox’s owner because the same rule holds true even of a wild or ownerless ox. And it can’t be a punishment for the ox because the ox has no moral sense.

As said, another of these No’achide Laws is the command not to eat a limb severed from a live creature. Although this Mitzvah seems to have as its purpose to promote kindness and to train us not to be cruel, which it undoubtedly does, there is bound to be another side-benefit. Consider the following: The prohibition against eating the severed limb, together with the prohibition against eating blood, result in our being prevented from ingesting the meat of an animal with its blood, with its life-force, its Nefesh. We can now well understand the prohibition against ingesting this Nefesh, filled as it is with the memory of the cruel, maiming experience of the animal. In much the same way, regarding the ox that has killed a human being, the Torah commands, “The ox shall be stoned and neither shall its meat be eaten” and this, too, is quite consistent with what has been said, namely, an ox that is a killer is bound to transmit its dangerous trait to anyone who eats its meat. It seems that the Torah wants to avoid the effect of ingesting the meat of a predatory animal, bird or fish, that the seeds of its predatory nature shall not be planted in the future generations of those that eat their meat and that this nature, to be activated, needs only a refresher of the experience to take root. The Nefesh of an apathetic pig, for instance, will produce in the human eaters of its meat potentially apathetic people. G-d Almighty, the Creator of Man and the One Who knows the psyche of all the peoples and folks that He has called into existence and especially knows what will negatively affect His Chosen People, has legislated that repeatedly eating pig-meat will make it very difficult for a Jewish eater to get up early in the morning to davven, to learn, to work, to exert efforts on behalf of others, to produce or do anything worthwhile. He knows that eating the meat of an animal that was killed painfully or cruelly will perpetuate in its eater the memory of the pain, the trauma, of the experience of death. Eating the meat of a creature killed in fear has the effect that that fearfulness continues in its eater, too. Eating the meat and ingesting the Nefesh of anything forbidden or for a Jewish person to take into himself or herself foods or substances that are prohibited by the Torah somehow promote in the person who eats it a negative character trait. It somehow plants a predilection towards conduct or behaviour which the Torah says is not good.

Another example: to eat meat with milk, which the Torah forbids, signifies a lack of sensitivity and compassion for the pain of a mother whose young is seethed in its mother’s milk and could very well result in the eater a quality of callousness. Eating foods forbidden by the Torah are bound to prevent the eater from becoming a Torah Jew and are liable to make it harder for him or her to live a life that is consonant with Torah. But remember, it is not only the ingestion of food that affects the person. The repetition of behaviour too, either Torah-negative or Torah-positive, greatly heightens the predisposition to continue on that path, either for the bad or for the good.

Food remains in the body for up to four days. If more of that food is ingested within those four days, the effect of that food can be permanent. And as just said, the repetition of behaviour, too, reinforces that behaviour and helps to promote permanent character traits.

But it is not only in the person concerned that these modifications of character happen. Future generations are affected, too. That is, our own acquired, habitual behaviour can cause changes in our children’s behaviour, too. Conversely, if we do not develop the optimum capacity for doing the Mitzvos through habitually correct behaviour, we cause thereby that our children will find it that much more difficult to comply with Torah, too. If we are keen and enthusiastic about our Torah duties, this becomes the pattern of behaviour in our children, too. As Rabbi Moshe Cordevero said long ago: “The moral disposition of the parents has an influence on the future characteristics of the children.” Much of this is known today to behavioural scientists: maybe what we are seeing now is how it is that these things come about.

The Laws of Kashrus were given to us. We are expected to use our minds, our bodies and our souls to maintain the correct balance of all the energies and influences and physical properties of creation, to bring cooperation and harmony to it all; to develop a well-balanced and cooperative society in which each person has a rôle which benefits all. Eating only those foods which encourage this type of behaviour and avoiding those which are antithetical to it makes it easier to be a Torah Jew.

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