A swinish provocation
How would the public react if meat stores sold dogs or monkeys? Many people would probably object on the grounds that it offends animal lovers. Is it more legitimate to offend people on the basis of nationality or religion?
After billionaire Arcady Gaydamak paid 80 percent above the market price for Tiv Taam, the only non-kosher supermarket chain in Israel, he revealed some of his business plans in interviews with the media.
Asked about rumors that Tiv Taam would be kosher, he replied, “We will definitely not sell pork because I appreciate the fact that in a Jewish state, where there is a large Muslim minority, selling pork is a provocation.” When asked if his decision was coordinated with Tiv Taam managers, he noted, “We’ll switch it for meat appropriate for the Jewish public.”
Gaydamak is correct that selling pork in a Jewish state with a large Muslim minority is a provocation. The truth is that from a Jewish-religious perspective, pork is no more prohibited than rabbit or camel meat, but in the history of the Jewish people pork was an anti-Jewish symbol, and anti-Semites used it to attack Jews, to mock them and their worldview. For the entire Jewish people, pork became the symbol of impurity. It’s no wonder that selling pork in Israel is different from selling other non-kosher products.
Selling pork in public offends not only Jews, but also Muslims, since they are also forbidden to eat pork. How would the public respond if dogs or monkeys were sold in meat stores? No doubt many people would be opposed on the grounds that it offended animal lovers. Is offending sensibilities based on religion or nationality more legitimate?
Furthermore, think what the response would be if a factory produced ties, ribbons, and shirts with … swastikas! Would people not scream bloody murder? Would they not complain of lack of sensitivity, of offending victims of the Holocaust and trampling our national honor? Who would dare claim that the financial gain of a thriving factory justifies offending the public?
Obligation to national culture
It’s important to remember that the 1962 law prohibiting the raising of pigs is an expression of our religious identity no less than of our national identity. The law prohibiting the raising of pigs and the marketing of pig meat has a religious aspect along with the national-cultural aspect. Issues involving the public domain and the Jewish people’s national-cultural existence are intertwined with daily Jewish existence, and cannot be separated.
Every citizen has the complete right to decide what he puts on his plate. It’s his right to think and be as he wishes. Nevertheless, a nation has an obligation to live according to its national culture as it has developed over the generations. This is the essence of national culture. And even those who believe that religious coercion is bad feel deep inside themselves, in their Jewish hearts, that this is something else.
A symbol for entire Jewish people
Pork is a historic symbol, a Jewish-national ethos that the Jewish people in general see as significant, and its roots go back to most ancient times. Our forefathers’ Jewish ethos of not raising and not eating pork, and cooperation — with the goal of preserving a Jewish way of life and a Jewish spiritual life for hundreds of years of wandering and persecution — that ethos is an important part of the fabric of one collective ethos by which we are distinguished, and one standard on which to depend in the Jewish state today.The Jewish state maintains the Jewish ethos, which is expressed, inter alia, in its Jewish symbols and its official holidays, which go according to the Hebrew calendar. Giving permission to sell pork means giving up one of the symbols that maintains the ethos of the Jewish state, and it is impossible not to conclude from that that the public nature of the selling of pork in recent years endangers the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state.
It’s a good thing that Gaydamak is there to put us Israelis in our appropriate place in Jewish history.
The author is involved in Jewish education and research on Judaism.
