The Spiritual Purpose of Dietary Restrictions
Everything in God’s creation serves a purpose, and it is our task to effect the fulfillment of that purpose. Although in many cases, this requires our active initiative—e.g. through fulfilling an active commandment with the entity or otherwise using it for a Godly purpose—in other cases, it requires us to be passive—e.g., through fulfilling a passive commandment with the entity or otherwise avoiding it. But even when God commands us to avoid something, we still thereby elevate it.
God commands us not to consume non-kosher animals since they originate in the realm of spirituality that is beyond our ability to elevate through eating. In their case, we elevate them by fulfilling God’s commandment to abstain from eating them. In addition, these animals can be elevated directly and actively by using them for purposes other than eating. For example, when a donkey or horse transports a person to perform a commandment, it, too, is infused with holiness. By utilizing everything in our lives for fulfilling our Divine mission, we sanctify all aspects of reality with which Divine providence has put us in contact.
Split feet and rumination also allude to the two general phases of our elevation of the physical world: The feet, as mentioned, signify our primary, active engagement in physical life, through which we elevate the material world out of its materiality by harnessing it for holy purposes. Rumination, in contrast, signifies the secondary, more subtle refinement of the physical world that we have elevated, by which we assimilate it (“digest it”) into the realm of pure, Divine spirituality. In other words, the primary elevation is the negation of the negative aspects of physicality, while the secondary refinement is its positive transformation into holiness.
Both of these phases should be double—just as a kosher animal’s feet are split into two and it digests its food twice. Every step we take in elevating the physical world should be taken with a mind toward our next step in elevating the physical world, indicating that our goals in this regard are unlimited; our aim is to elevate the entire physical world, in accordance with God’s intention in its creation. Similarly, every morsel of the physical world that we “digest,” i.e., refine into spirituality, should be refined on a higher level, for since God is infinite, the ascent into Divine consciousness is likewise infinite.
