This time of year, without exception, my workflow begins to change and my inbox and phone are taken over by people asking Pesach questions. I think I am asked to provide more halakhic guidance in the weeks before Pesach than at any other time of the year.
Do canned tomatoes need special KLP certification? Do I need to kasher my coffee maker for Pesach? How do I kasher my dishwasher for Pesach? (How to kasher a dishwasher is included in the guidelines that are emailed to every member of the shul each year and I know I will get at least five people asking me about that in the next three weeks). I’m invited to the seder at my Great Aunt Millie’s home and the seder will begin two hours before sunset. How can I observe the mitzvot of the seder that can only be done at night? My grandparents, where we go every year for Pesach have a strictly kosher kitchen but they do not observe any of the restrictions on how to serve hot food on Shabbat. What should I do? My in-laws are Sephardic and we are spending Pesach with them. Can I eat kitniot in their home? My non-Jewish relatives are joining us for Pesach. How can we include them in our holiday celebration?
Many of the most common questions that I am asked circle around issues of observing mitzvot with integrity while living in a complex world and maintaining relationships with integrity with individuals that do not share all of our commitments. These questions seem very contemporary and they seem very new but they are actually quite ancient.
In Parashat Shimini the Torah introduces the laws of kashrut for the first time. We are told the rules for kosher animals (chews its cud and has split hooves), we are told the rules for kosher fish (fins and scales) and we are told lists of non kosher birds.. Like nearly every mitzvah, as it is presented in the Torah, everything is clear and straightforward and the Torah demands nothing from us other than obedience.
But as soon as we leave the world of the Torah and enter the world of Hazal, the sages, questions pop up: what exactly is a tahmas? What is a yanshuf? The Talmud records some simanim, signs that birds are kosher or non kosher (does it have an extra toe in back, does its korkavan – gizzard – have a lining that can be peeled by hand), but over the centuries we doubted our ability to eat birds unless we were able to verify an ancient and authentic tradition that this type of bird had been eaten. In place of the Torah’s clear and certain guidance, we make do with heuristics and cautious avoidance of new and exotic birds.
The task of observing kashrut, or any other commitment, in a complicated world of uncertainty is the focus of the Mishnaic tractate “Demai” which I am learning together with our son Akiva as part of the Mishnah Yomit cycle. Mishnah Yomit, or the daily Mishnah project is a younger sibling of daf yomi. Participants study just two mishnayot each day, a task that can take as little as 5 or 6 minutes, and if they keep on that cycle, will complete the entire Mishnah in less than six years. I think I’ve learned parts of Demai before but I did not remember it being this interesting!
Demai is a rabbinic concept to describe produce that has a doubt hanging over it: we don’t know if all of the requisite tithes have been separated and given to the priests or levi’im. Where does this doubt come from? In the times of the tena’im, the earliest generations of Talmudic sages, many or most Jews did not observe the Torah’s mitzvot of tithing in a conscientious way. The Mishanh explains how Jews who did care about these mitzvot could nonetheless purchase and sell food even with the knowledge that the other party to the transaction did not care about tithing carefully. Someone might work for an employer and not trust him to separate tithes from the food provided to the employees for their lunch break. Someone might rent a field, as a sharecropper, from a landlord and be concerned that the landlord won’t tithe the produce handed over as rental payments. Brothers could inherit an estate and have to divide their property with siblings whom they do not trust to observe these mitzvot. The rabbis gave us tools to maintain our commitments to meticulous observance of mitzvot while living in a world surrounded by others who don’t share those commitments. They taught us how to be principled without being aloof. They taught us how to be part of a larger community without sacrificing the values and idealism that make us special.
Daf Yomi completed the first chapter of Masechet Yevamot this week. The chapter ended with an extended analysis of the great dispute between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. Hillel and Shamai and the scholastic movements that they founded disagreed about dozens or hundreds of questions of Jewish law. Nonetheless, the Talmud tells us, they intermarried between one another and gladly accepted children from the other school as marriage partners for their own children. The Talmud questions how this could be given that one of the disputes between Hillel and Shammai concerned the eligibility of certain people for marriage. One answer that is presented is that they just communicated honestly about their backgrounds to allow the other to make informed decisions.
I find that so powerful. There are compromises that are worth making for the sake of a relationship. There are compromises that are worth making for the sake of living in a complicated and diverse world that is filled with uncertainty. But, more often, we can figure out a way to live up to our commitments and to foster and reinforce a diverse community through being transparent about our values and our needs and our choices. When men and women of good will look one another in the eye and share their needs and commitments with honesty, it is usually quite easy to find a pragmatic solution to whatever divides them.
This is the spirit that animates the shul’s Kashrut Guidelines You can find them on the shul website under the “Local Jewish Resources” button. You can find copies on the table in the lobby. The “community standards” kashrut document is based on the principle that hosting Shabbat and holiday meals is the birthright of every Jew and it is the job of every shul to provide the guidance needed so that anyone in this community can feel comfortable offering and accepting an offer of hospitality. If your home is strictly kosher you can serve food you made yourself. If your home is not, you can serve food made elsewhere. But everyone in our community can be a host and everyone can be a guest. Because our community is so diverse, and because we have so much respect for the basic fact that each one of us is on a journey and the pace of that journey and the path that it follows has to be unique and authentic to each one of us, the “community standards” for Kashrut can provide a common framework for a community to grow.
I’ve spoken before about the years when our family lived in Princeton, just a few blocks from a hospital with a well-regarded inpatient eating-disorders unit. There were always Orthodox patients there and their families frequently came to Princeton to visit their children, especially over Shabbat when the hospital encouraged patients to participate in group therapy sessions with their parents. Many of the families who visited Princeton came from Hasidic or other Haredi communities. They explained their particular religious commitments to us and it was obvious, to them at least, that they would bring their own food with them to Princeton, which we heated alongside our food on our platta, and served on our dishes to these guests. I didn’t feel judged because our Hassidic guests ate their own food. I didn’t experience those meals as a breakdown of the ability of kashrut to unite Jews. I experienced it as a success of sorts. Our common commitment to mitzvot, to Shabbat, and to supporting very sick Jews who were hospitalized for a serious condition, gave us a framework in which people with very different perspectives from very different places could eat alongside one another in support of some very vulnerable and very sick individuals.
Of course the indispensable ingredients to hospitality are hosts and guests. After two years in which nobody wanted to visit and nobody was available to host guests in their homes, we now have a sustained and growing interest in hospitality within our community. There are students considering right now if they wish to move to Lakeview for the next stage of their education. There are professionals passing through Chicago for work who are looking to spend Shabbat in a shul community. There are individuals already living here who are new to Jewish observance who are so eager to experience an authentic Shabbat in a Jewish home.
Perhaps most importantly, there are dozens of Jews who have moved to Lakeview over the past two years (some of you here now are Jews who have moved to Lakeview over the past two years). I encourage all of you to think about your comfort inviting people you don’t know into your homes and being hosted by others whom you don’t know well. We have thousands of years of guidance on how to form communities that contain people who are very different from one another. And we have a Kashrut Policy that helps us convene over food to learn about all of our other differences. Each thing we do not know about someone else is a new fact about them to discover, every difference is an added facet of our community that reflects a unique Divine light.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 