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by Dianna Hughes on November 3rd, 2004

Dianna Hughes

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What is the religious significance of the Jewish "kosher" dietary laws?

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  • by Too Much Time On My Hands on April 26th, 2005

    Too Much Time On My Hands

    As another answer states, observant Jews follow kosher laws "because God said so" in the Old Testament. I won't repeat what has already been said well, but I will mention that I heard a different account of why chicken and milk cannot be mixed even though chickens don't give milk.

    As a chicken parmesan-loving, non-Jewish girl trying to respect the practices of the kosher-keeping Jew I love, I have often been frustrated by this rule and demanded explanations! My boyfriend, who has a Talmudic reference to explain EVERYTHING, told me that two rabbis once debated this issue. One rabbi said that chicken/dairy combinations were okay because chickens don't give milk, and thus you can't risk boiling a chicken in its mothers milk. The other rabbi argued that, while this may be true, well-intentioned Jews could confuse chicken with other types of meat. They could accidentally break the milk-meat law by mistakenly thinking they were eating chicken, when they might actually be eating the flesh of a mammal that should not be combined with dairy. And the concept of "better safe than sorry" won out, and chicken was added to the list of meats that can't be eaten with milk products. However, as my boyfriend was quick to reassure me, tradition has established some sort of compromise where chicken/dairy is forbidden now but will be allowed in the afterlife! I'm no Talmudic scholar and I can't provide a reference, but I share this story because (a) I like it and (b) I think this "better safe than sorry" philosophy explains a lot of now-standard practices that might not have originally been in the Torah, as well as the debates that Orthodox Jewish scholars are famous for having over seemingly minute details. An example of the former is the fact that Orthodox Jews who keep kosher will keep entirely separate and labeled sets of dishes/silverware for meat-based meals and dairy-based meals. This eliminates the risk that the two will ever come into contact, even accidentally.

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