Chicken and Cheese

Dearest Rachel –

I wonder if Yael remembers the two of us as the “chicken and cheese” father-and-son duo.

When I meet someone I consider knowledgeable about one topic or another – especially one that I may never see again – I feel the need to make an impression by asking a question that would challenge even them. Thanks to my habit of studying up on the sites I visit before arriving on various cruises, this happens a lot with our tour guides (although less so as I run out of time to prepare like this).

On our last trip to Israel, however, it was Daniel who posed the real stumper to her as our guide; it may have been due to the fact that he was still getting used to the whole idea of an entire nation eating kosher, whereas I’ve been here enough times to accept it as a matter of course. He asked her about the source of the injunction against combining meat and dairy; she confirmed that it had to do with the commandment in the Torah against boiling a young animal (I’m never sure if it was a kid or a calf – it might have been both, between the original in Exodus and the reiteration in Deuteronomy) in its mother’s milk (and why that specific action is a mystery in and of itself – I’ve seen claims that it might have been a pagan divination ritual). Since the eater might not be able to ascertain where their meat or milk was coming from, as to avoid the remote possibility of the two coming into contact in the first place, the kosher rules simply demanded that the Jews simply not eat meat and dairy together at all, going so far as to have separate tableware these days for one and the other.

Of course, these days, civilization has bred animals specifically for meat or dairy, so that this situation wouldn’t be an issue, if you considered it strictly from the initial injunction. Angus cows are not milked for consumption, for instance, nor are Jerseys or Guernseys prized for their meat. So the odds of one’s hamburger having any familial relation to the cheese one puts atop it are so remote as to border on the absurd; and yet, in order to stay within the guidelines of kosher, this is still verboten.

But the question Daniel posed to her went a step beyond even that – which, considering he doesn’t even eat hamburgers, sort of makes sense. Granted, it’s not like his preferred chicken sandwich suffers from not having cheese put on top of it – although without that option, a dish like chicken parmesan is literally off the table – but he found it curious that the two were kept separate as part of the overall diktat regarding kosher laws. After all, chicken – or any form of fowl, for that matter – aren’t mammals. There’s no danger of the meat coming in contact with it’s mother’s milk, since they don’t have any to give. In theory, the two could be combined and still be within the bounds of kosher laws, as promulgated in the instructions brought down from Mount Sinai so long ago, right?

Yael seemed amused by his question, even as she couldn’t definitively answer it. “That’s the sort of thing that the rabbis would debate over in the synagogues” back in the day, she replied. In the end, it was evidently decided that ‘meat is meat,’ and rather than carve out an exemption for poultry, it would just be easier to separate all meat (including fish, which goes a step further than the Catholics could bring themselves to do) from all dairy, just to be on the safe side.

Besides, the Jews were meant to live differently from those nations that surrounded them – and, through various means, were reminded not to mingle with those other people. Clothing couldn’t be made from two different sources (no cotton/polyester blends for them, not that polyester was a thing back in the days of Moses), plowing teams couldn’t use bovines and equines (which makes sense, in terms of getting straight and even rows; the strength imbalance would create bad furrows), all to illustrate to the Jews that they should not mix with the Gentiles, and learn their ways.

For those of us on the outside, it seems strange; as if God was being too literal when referring to His chosen as his “peculiar people.” And to a certain point, it didn’t achieve its ends; there’s the trope of the tempting ‘shiksa’ that every Jewish boy has to struggle to refuse, often with limited success. And the strangeness is compounded by the evangelical orders handed down by Christ to His followers; if a faith is true, it should be shared with the world, in order to make everyone possible right with God. The fact that they’re keeping God to themselves, when He “is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance,” seems selfish to the point of malevolence.

Then again, when the temptation of being just ‘like all the other nations’ is as overwhelming as it was in the days when Israel returned from Egypt to reclaim their inheritance in Canaan, evangelizing takes a back seat to defending one’s own faith and traditions. You can’t convince others to follow in your ways unless you’re faithfully doing so yourself already, and that didn’t solidify itself until such time as the Jews returned from their second captivity in Babylon and Persia.

But that’s just one opinion, and I understand that every Jew here has several of them, so it’s not a conundrum that’s likely to be resolved; not now, and not likely in my lifetime. Thank heavens I can have a cheeseburger, although not until such time as we get back home. For now, honey, just keep an eye on us, and wish us luck, as we’re going to need it.