Pig: The Other Jewish Meat?
By Leonard Fein
For all the explosion in the availability and sales of kosher food products here in the United States in recent years, American Jews remain fundamentally unfundamental when it comes to kashrut. Set aside the punctilious, those who genuinely seek to follow the detailed laws, and you come upon a staggering variety of kosher styles. Pork no, anything else yes, and bacon isn't really pork; clams, crabs, oysters and mussels no, shrimp and lobster yes; lobster yes, but only on Martha's Vineyard. And so forth. Still, the least common denominator is surely pork, more familiarly knows as chazzer, a word so noxious that it has over time become onomatopoeic. Breathes there a Jewish soul so dead that, egg rolls, maybe spare ribs, likely bacon aside, can tolerate the notion of PIG with equanimity?
So it is viscerally unsettling to encounter in Israel placid pig-eaters, people who by now are so accustomed to the forbidden food that they no longer experience the frisson of sin as they chew away. True, we've known all along of "white meat," the euphemism here for pork products, known that kibbutzim raise pigs (and it isn't for the Arab population), that a growing number of restaurants sell it, that the large number of secular Jews are equal-opportunity violaters of traditional precepts. (Note, please: There's a widespread misconception that a majority of Israel's Jews are secular. Not so. While a minority are fully Orthodox, a majority define themselves as "traditional" and take the tradition and its commandments seriously, if not literally or proactively.)
Take, for example (but remember that anecdotes are not evidence), my friend M., a woman in her 50s who was raised in an assimilated family in Belgium and somehow made her way to Israel, where she has lived now since her late teens, where she has raised three lovely children, where she has "discovered" via her husband and his parents gefilte fish and Pesach melodies and sundry other Jewishisms. The other day, we were discussing garlic. (A sign of the times? The peace process, the state budget, the Supreme Court decision on torture - and yes, garlic.) I boasted of my chicken-in-forty-cloves-of-garlic recipe; she countered with her pig 'n garlic something or other, I having tuned out the minute she spoke the dreadful word.
M's sister is a ba'alat t'shuvah, an all-the-way Orthodox mother of nine; there is no contact between the two. Her own children have embarked on splendid careers, one a senior civil servant, one a professor of philosophy, the third on the verge of a breakthrough in film-making. M and her husband live well, care mightily about the quality of life in Israel and include in "quality of life" the moral element, the nation's culture and its values. They have no doubt at all that they are Jews, part of and therefore responsible for the welfare of the Jewish people. By any reasonable measure, they have contributed substantially to the Jewish state.
And they cannot fathom the twisted accommodations to kashrut of America's Jews, save to suppose that we who live in a "foreign land" must go out of our way to create the links that are here so natural. (If they knew how sausage is made, they might suggest that it's sausage links we concoct.)
Who's right? Our way is intellectually preposterous, but intellectual rigor is not the only criterion against which behavior may be assessed. Their way is plainly noxious to the visitor, but the visitor's sensibilities cannot govern local behavior. Indeed, "right" and "wrong" have no place in the discussion, save as the discussion is about classical religious requirements - in which case, of course, we're both quite wrong.
No, the question all this raises is the more confusing question of how, a generation or two from now, these two great communities of Jews, Israel's and America's, will understand each other. How, and even if. It is possible, but not likely, that just as M discovered gefilte fish, her grandchildren will discover no-pork. (Or, more like American Jews, no-pork with an asterisk to cover the various exceptions.) It is possible, but not likely, that American Jews will shed their instinctive and largely sentimental antipathy to chazzer; now bacon, then ribs, then pork chops, all the way to suckling pig. (Explained away, no doubt, as the old joke has it, as just another way to serve baked apple.)
The cultural and scientific elites of the two communities have much in common: an interest in world affairs, participation as producers and consumers of high culture, growing at-homeness on the Web, and so forth. But the Jewish commonality that was an easy assumption yesterday becomes tenuous today, the more so as in America the old wall between enlightenment and religion is increasingly breached, on the way to becoming a relic.
That, among other reasons, is why it matters so much that the still-fledgling Conservative and Reform movements in Israel, as well as the growing number of efforts to "return to the sources," to insist that Judaism is too important to be left to the literalists, to end the state-sponsored hijacking of Judaism by one faction of Jews, are so important. Somehow, M - or, more likely, her grandchildren - must come to understand that their refusal to eat pork, even if that refusal is as inconsistent as our own, is not a concession to Jewish law, but an expression of Jewish solidarity.
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