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Taken out of context

It’s painful for an observant Jew to see how Jewish law is exploited in a superficial manner for false stringencies, for futile strictness, and for ridiculous inventions

I don’t eat kitniyot (legumes) on Passover. I don’t eat soy oil, canola oil, beans, or anything else that my family has not eaten on Passover for 600-700 years. The truth is that not eating kitniyot never bothered me. Jewish custom is law, and I don’t ask too many questions. I just don’t eat kitniyot, and that’s all.

 

I am disciplined on other issues besides kitniyot. When it’s an actual issue of Jewish law, I don’t look for leniencies. But even a benighted conservative like me had a fit this year when I saw the following on a bag of plastic spoons in the grocery store: “Kosher for Passover - The entire production and packaging process was done with special attention to Passover cleanliness, and there was supervision to ensure that workers were not eating during production and packaging.”

 

The symbol of the Edah Haharedit was on that package, and on plastic wrap, bleach, shampoo, and other products that no dog alive would eat, and would die right on the spot if he did.

 

Now with the holiday behind us, let’s place this on our kosher table. There’s an enormous pile, getting bigger all the time, of products that don’t need a kashrut certificate, even during Passover. Too often it’s not an issue of Jewish law, but of foolishness. Spoons produced by workers who were not eating chametz? Sheer nonsense, quackery, bending of Jewish law. And desecration of God’s name.

 

There’s a great deal of exploitation and petty cheating in the commercial market. What do I care? But it’s painful for an observant Jew to see how Jewish law is exploited in a superficial manner for false stringencies, for futile strictness, and for ridiculous inventions.

 

Hundreds of thousands of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox have stopped thinking and become slaves to the culture of kosher brands. They want the kashrut certification of the Badatz or the Hatam Sofer on every product, completely irrespective of kashrut. When masses of people buy only products with Badatz certification, kashrut businesses that sell their unnecessary certification to factories and businesses that don’t even need it, thrive.

 

In the name of fear and ignorance and in the guise of meticulous religious observance, the consumer buys a “kosher” product. The manufacturer orders supervision, and the supervisors give their certification. Jewish custom is a deal.

 

Strictly kosher

That’s all Okay, no? No, not at all. Everyone gains in this non-food chain, right? No. The Torah loses. Because once they start issuing kashrut certification for products that don’t need it, they cause disdain for real kashrut. When consumers see that everything is commercialized and everything has Badatz kashrut certification, then they also begin to fear that perhaps kashrut certification is not a serious issue. Admit it: Even the most strict of the strcitly Orthodox ridicule the abundance of types of kashrut certification. They laugh and they pay, they ridicule and they buy.

 

Let’s return for a moment to kitniyot. The annual argument on kitniyot did not come up this year because the burden of kitniyot is too heavy for the people of Israel who come from Plonsk. It erupted with renewed intensity because many religious people see how more and more stringencies pile up every year, more types of kashrut, and more types of kashrut certification that have been taken out of context.

 

A religious person who knows how to ask ponders out loud if this is not exactly how the prohibition on kitniyot for Ashkenazim came about: First it was kitniyot, then anything that looked like kitniyot, and then anything derived from kitniyot, and soon it will be anything that has more than three of the letters in kitniyot.

 

We already have kosher plastic spoons, bleach with Badatz kashrut certification, glatt kosher plastic wrap, parve cellphones, and glatt kosher buses. One person makes a small change in order to be meticulous in his observance, and immediately kashrut dealers come and flood us with a murky wave of grotesque, worthless kashrut certifications. A religious person is liable to suspect, Heaven forbid, that even the issue of kitniyot is simply petty, and that perhaps it is easy to be lenient on the issue.

 


פרסום ראשון: 04.11.07, 16:19
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