About eighteen months ago a small boutique bakery opened steps away from the shul where I worked at the time. I thought it would be a perfect win-win opportunity if the bakery would agree to kosher supervision and so even before the bakery opened for business, I sought out the owner, introduced myself as the rabbi of the shul around the corner, and asked if he was interested in my providing supervision of his bakery. I painted a picture of many kiddushes in shul featuring his baked goods and I told him about all the children in our community with birthday parties in need of cakes.
The baker was extremely interested, I was very encouraged, I was a hero in the eyes of my children, and I began imagining strolling down to the bakery after Shacharit each morning for a pastry and a cup of coffee…maybe I’d even set up shop and take my morning meetings there.
I went back to the bakery for a follow up meeting with the owner to move our plan forward. And he then asked me, “just how Orthodox are you?”
“Why do you ask?” I responded.
“I wanted to know if you were extremely Orthodox and if it would therefore be a problem that I have someone who comes in on weekends and bakes pastries with bacon.”
When the baker called me “extremely Orthodox” for not eating pastries baked with bacon, I had a flashback to a series of Shabbatot, more than ten years earlier, when we lived and worked in Princeton, just a few steps from a hospital with a nationally recognized inpatient eating disorders unit with a disproportionate number of Orthodox patients. For a period of several years, Sara and I hosted Shomer Shabbat families who came to Princeton to visit their children and take part in family therapy sessions which were typically scheduled for Saturday. As the patients progressed on their path to recovery, they were encouraged to leave the hospital for meals which is how we came to host many families from Lakewood and Toronto and Monsey for Shabbat lunch together with their children.
At the time, hosting Shabbat meals was a core job responsibility of our work on campus and we hosted our students and other Princeton community members at the same meals as these visiting families, but these families showed up in our home on Friday afternoon with their suitcases and with their own food. “We’re a bit Hassidish,” one mother said to Sara as she set up her food next to ours on the platte. “We’re not,” Sara responded when she made sure our refrigerator could fit food for two complete Shabbat meals.
I’ve long said that “everyone has a frum cousin, or you are the frum cousin.” So too, everyone should have an experience of being “extremely Orthodox” because some bakery ingredient crosses a red line, and the experience of being “not Hassidish” and accommodating someone with different expectations of Kashrut.
How is it that different Jewish practices emerged? Why are multiple opinions, machloket, and diverse practices found at the very earliest stages of halakhic writing? The Mishnah, I am told, is the only ancient religious text found anywhere on Earth that preserves and highlights multiple opinions about core elements of observance. If the Torah was given to us at Sinai by one God, how is it that there are so many different ways of responding to that covenant of Sinai?
To summarize a vast literature, Sefer HaKabbalah, a twelfth century book that explains the history of rabbinic tradition, claims that there are no halakhic disputes about basic obligations but only about details. So everyone agrees that there is an obligation to recite the Shema in the evening and in the morning, and the dispute recorded in the very first Mishnah is a dispute about when precisely in the evening and morning the Shema should be recited.
Rambam, Maimonides, disagrees with this approach and claims that there is no dispute about any of the obligations that were explicitly transmitted from God to Moshe and that all halakhic disputes are confined to topics that are derived from rabbinic explication and midrash. Since human reason is diverse and subjective and often imperfect, it stands to reason that when we apply our human reason to the task of midrash and try to make sense of the Torah, we will not all come to the same conclusion.
For Ritva, the great thirteenth century Talmudic scholar from Seville, there is no right or wrong answer to any halakhic question until the sages of a given generation decide through deliberation and voting. This is the tradition that informs Rabbi Nissim of Gerona, known as the Ran, in his Drasha for Parashat Shoftim when he explains the verse in our parasha:
כִּ֣י יִפָּלֵא֩ מִמְּךָ֨ דָבָ֜ר לַמִּשְׁפָּ֗ט בֵּֽין־דָּ֨ם ׀ לְדָ֜ם בֵּֽין־דִּ֣ין לְדִ֗ין וּבֵ֥ין נֶ֙גַע֙ לָנֶ֔גַע דִּבְרֵ֥י רִיבֹ֖ת בִּשְׁעָרֶ֑יךָ וְקַמְתָּ֣ וְעָלִ֔יתָ אֶ֨ל־הַמָּק֔וֹם אֲשֶׁ֥ר יִבְחַ֛ר יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ בּֽוֹ׃
וּבָאתָ֗ אֶל־הַכֹּהֲנִים֙ הַלְוִיִּ֔ם וְאֶ֨ל־הַשֹּׁפֵ֔ט אֲשֶׁ֥ר יִהְיֶ֖ה בַּיָּמִ֣ים הָהֵ֑ם וְדָרַשְׁתָּ֙ וְהִגִּ֣ידוּ לְךָ֔ אֵ֖ת דְּבַ֥ר הַמִּשְׁפָּֽט׃
וְעָשִׂ֗יתָ עַל־פִּ֤י הַדָּבָר֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר יַגִּ֣ידֽוּ לְךָ֔ מִן־הַמָּק֣וֹם הַה֔וּא אֲשֶׁ֖ר יִבְחַ֣ר יְהֹוָ֑ה וְשָׁמַרְתָּ֣ לַעֲשׂ֔וֹת כְּכֹ֖ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר יוֹרֽוּךָ׃
עַל־פִּ֨י הַתּוֹרָ֜ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר יוֹר֗וּךָ וְעַל־הַמִּשְׁפָּ֛ט אֲשֶׁר־יֹאמְר֥וּ לְךָ֖ תַּעֲשֶׂ֑ה לֹ֣א תָס֗וּר מִן־הַדָּבָ֛ר אֲשֶׁר־יַגִּ֥ידֽוּ לְךָ֖ יָמִ֥ין וּשְׂמֹֽאל׃
“If a case is too baffling for you to decide, be it a controversy over homicide, civil law, or assault—matters of dispute in your courts—you shall promptly repair to the place that the LORD your God will have chosen,
and appear before the levitical priests, or the magistrate in charge at the time, and present your problem. When they have announced to you the verdict in the case,
you shall carry out the verdict that is announced to you from that place that the LORD chose, observing scrupulously all their instructions to you.
You shall act in accordance with the instructions given to you and the ruling handed down to you; you must not deviate from the verdict that they announce to you either to the right or to the left.”
For Ran, as some of us studied together at se’udah shlishit last week, there is an objective answer from God’s point of view to every halakhic question, but our primary religious obligation is to follow the decision that is made by the Sanhedrin, the high rabbinic court, sitting in judgment on the Temple Mount. Whatever harm may come to us from eating something that God considers to be not kosher, is less harmful than our entire way of life falling apart if we don’t obey the instructions of the Sanhedrin.
Except, the Sanhedrin ceased to function in this idealized way very early in rabbinic history. The Talmud records that the students of Hillel and Shamai did not adequately serve their teachers and the Torah became like two Torot.
Why was it impossible for the Sanhedrin to eliminate disputes during the generation of the students of Hillel and Shamai? Why couldn’t questions continue to be resolved by majority vote? One explanation is that the students of Hillel and Shamai organized themselves into schools “Beit Hillel” and “Beit Shamai” and those schools functioned in a partisan way when the Sanhedrin tried to evaluate a question. The outcome of every vote was known in advance just by looking around the room and seeing if the students of Hillel or the students of Shamai held the majority on that particular day. How could any question be considered settled if its preliminary answer emerged through such a flawed deliberation.
But in the dawn of the modern age scholars came to celebrate machloket and diverse opinions, not as evidence of a breakdown in the system, but as evidence of the sublime nature of revelation.
Rabbi Shlomo Luria, the 16th century eastern European halakhic scholar known as Maharshal drew upon mystical traditions and explained that the Torah was revealed in 49 distinct channels of Divine energy which were then understood by the unique subjectivity of every Jewish soul who was present at Sinai. Therefore, from the very beginning there were hundreds of thousands times 49 distinct ways to comprehend revelation.
Rabbi Aryeh Leib Heller, most famous for his commentary to Shulhan Arukh called the Ketzot, made the logical conclusion that if God intended to give the Torah to human beings than God must have intended for human beings to put that Torah into practice through the prism of our human subjectivity. Writing at the dawn of the 20th century in one of my favorite passages of rabbinic writing, Rabbi Yehiel Mikhel Epstein, in his introduction to his encyclopedia of halakhah known as Arukh HaShulhan, explains that since the Torah is referred to as “shirah” a song, then it has some of the characteristics of music, among them the capacity for multiple voices to create, not a cacophony, but a symphonic harmony. This, he writes, is the “tiferet” the splendor, of Torah, that it is made more beautiful by mahloket and diversity as the multitude of voices form an infinite harmony.
And yet, we all still need to find a way to live together. If we don’t come to some agreement about the identities of the species the Torah tells us are non-kosher birds, how can we eat in one another’s home? Three times the Torah says “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” If we don’t agree what that means, how can we avoid this prohibition which is important enough to be repeated three times in the Torah. The holiday of Shavuot occurs after we count 49 days “m’macharat ha’Shabbat.” Does that mean that we count starting on the first Sunday after Pesach “m’macharat ha’Shabbat” or does the Torah refer to the yom tov of Pesach as “Shabbat” in this instance? If we can’t agree on the normative meaning of that verse, we won’t be able to celebrate Shavuot together. And so it is, with just about every corner of Jewish life and mitzvah observance.
The history of Jewish law is a recurring pattern of condensation and codification, followed by an explosion of creative commentary and disagreement, which then generates the need for another round of condensation and codification. So the Mishnah generates the Gemara which generates the codes of the rishonim which gave rise to the commentaries of the acharonim, which are now being codified and organized in handbooks that are being published on every imaginable topic of Jewish life.
In order to live together, we need to come to some common understandings, not because they are true, with a capital T in the eyes of God, not because they are procedurally true having been voted on by the Sanhedrin setting in the Chamber of Hewn Stone on Har HaBayit, but because they are conventional and allow us to live together and eat together and merge our families and share a life of community.
This is the spirit with which I would like to introduce Community Kashrut guidelines for Ohev Sholom. The intention is not to create guidelines on what it means to keep kosher. What guideline could capture that for a community as diverse as this one? They are not intended to be normative descriptions of the best way to keep kosher, but to be an objective reference point to enable and encourage hospitality. They are guidelines for Hachnasat Orchim at least as much as they are guidelines for Kashrut.
This is such a hospitable community. The warmth with which we have been welcomed has been so overwhelming to us. You’ve been so nice to my family that it has aroused the suspicions of my children, one of whom asked me, “why are they being so nice to us; what are they trying to hide?”
And in the context of our grateful acceptance of your own generous and warm welcome, we’ve surprised some of you by our eagerness to eat food cooked in your homes and to be your guests for Shabbat meals.
Indeed, an informal and utterly unscientific poll that I conducted of members of the Rabbinical Council of America listserv yesterday revealed to me that the vast majority of the rabbis who wrote back to my inquiry have policies against eating at the homes of members of the congregations that they serve. The replies of my colleagues were fraught. “There has been so much trauma in the community around these issues” one rabbi wrote to me. Another shared “When I had a pulpit, I never did. Too many pitfalls.” A rabbi whom I know and admire very much wrote to me that he had assumed that everyone in his community observed kashrut just as he did since the community shared a common commitment to observance and shared common backgrounds. When he learned the truth, he stopped eating in other people’s homes and shifted the culture of the congregation towards only sending catered shivah meals. One rabbi wrote to me about growing up in a community where his parents were among the only observant households attending their Orthodox shul. Rather than risk offending anyone, they refused to accept all invitations. And so as not to create the possibility of any reciprocity, they extended almost no invitations to others. It is so beautiful to see how far this rabbi’s parents went to avoid offending anyone. But it is also so sad that caring about Shabbat and Kashrut led to social isolation.
I believe that hosting a Shabbat or holiday meal is the birthright of every Jew. And providing the education and knowledge to host a Shabbat and holiday meal is the religious responsibility of every shul. Of course, every one of us is on a journey of religious growth and the pace and scope of that journey and its destination must be authentic to each one of us. When the shul shares guidelines for kashrut in the context of Shabbat hospitality, it will do so, not with any expectation that there is one right way to observe mitzvot. We will share those documents with the hope that members of this community can engage in open conversations around a common reference point so that they can explain their needs with clarity. As in so many other areas of communal life, transparency is the key. With a common reference point, people can say “here is where I deviate from this set of guidelines” and then guests can make their own informed decisions. Halakhah does not have to be a wall that divides people. It can be a common denominator to enable Jews who practice Judaism very differently to form a unified community and it can be a jumping off point so that we can learn from one another and discuss our differences..
Sara and I are so eager to live in a community with a robust culture of hospitality. The relationships that are forged around a Shabbat table are unique and the community that emerges from a network of those relationships is strong. We treasured the bonds that were formed, even when our guests brought their own Hassidish food with them to our home. And we still feel so close to the families in Chicago who always catered meals when they invited us to their homes after deciding that their own standards were going to remain different from the community kashrut document, and deciding to host us anyway Right now my entire family is investing a lot of time and energy into unpacking our belongings and purchasing the furniture we need to set up our home because we are so excited to have the opportunity to host you all in our home. And I am so interested in learning from you about additional ways we can encourage a culture of hospitality within the shul.
The Torah’s first models of hospitality are Avraham and Rivka; each in their own right serve as important models for how we behave towards guests. They each welcome guests with alacrity and enthusiasm. And they each make sure that guests are not just welcomed indoors, but are also invited inside to eat. As we will hear from the Torah in just a few weeks, the fate of the Jewish people hinges on those moments of hospitality. Where would we be as a people without their model of hachnasat orchim? Our very identity is built upon it. The detailed mitzvot of the Torah were never meant to impede that hachnasat orchim. The multitude of voices in our tradition of halakhic debates and discussion does indeed create a harmonious chorus. And the melody that emerges needs to be one of kindness and communication, friendship and welcome.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 