What Do You Mean, You Can't Eat In My Home?: A Guide To How Newly Observant Jews And Their Less-Observant Relatives Can Still Get Along

Book by Jaffe Azriela

Why is food such a big deal?

So much of Judaism, both religious and secular, is focused around the kitchen table and the stomach that you may have heard the following joke:

How can you sum up many Jewish holidays in four sentences?

1.They tried to kill us.

2.They failed.

3.We won.

4.Let’s eat!

Name the Jewish holiday and the first thing that comes to mind is food. Chanukah—latkes; Rosh Hashanah—apples and honey; Pesach—matzoh brei; Purim—hamentashen; Shabbos—gefilte fish and kugel. Even some secular Jews refer to themselves with pride as “bagel and lox” Jews; they have shunned any form of religiosity, but they display their ethnic pride through what they consider one of the best parts of being a Jew—the food!

Food is often at the center of a family’s life together, and anything that threatens a family’s ability to eat together is seen as tearing apart the fabric of family life. Telling your mother you can’t eat the food she has lovingly prepared for you in her kitchen may devastate the woman who has been feeding you from the day you were born.

It is estimated that only 10 percent of American Jews keep kosher today—all Orthodox Jews, some Conservative Jews, and a smaller percentage of Reform and Reconstructionist Jews. Even within that 10 percent, there are varying levels of kashrus observance in and out of the home. If your family’s level of kashrus observance is not identical to yours and you don’t take the time to prepare your family for your kashrus requirements, you will encounter dismay and confusion when you attempt to eat together.

Let’s start by helping your family understand the philosophical underpinnings of keeping kosher. You will have to be able to explain to your family why you keep kosher and what keeping kosher actually entails. Your family may have only a cursory knowledge of kashrus and may hold some negative assumptions, which may lead to misunderstandings that can fuel unnecessary arguments. This can be especially tricky if your family does keep kosher, but not the same way that you do. So let’s try to answer the first basic question.

Why keep Kosher? How some nonobservant Jews view Kashrus

Many nonobservant Jews will acknowledge that, if they go back enough generations, they will come upon an ancestor who kept kosher. They will usually give one or more of the following explanations for why they do not believe it is necessary to continue this practice:

·Keeping kosher is no longer necessary or practical in modern-day, assimilated America.

·Keeping kosher separates observant Jews from nonobservant family members, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. It also makes them appear elitist, i.e., too good to eat the food of a decent fellow Jew or of anyone else with a clean kitchen and a good heart.

·The laws of kashrus were probably invented to protect Jews from unsanitary food preparation practices, but this is no longer necessary in today’s highly regulated food-processing environment.

·Kosher food is expensive, and buying and preparing it is inconvenient. Keeping kosher unnecessarily limits what kinds of food can be consumed in a country where we are fortunate enough to enjoy a high standard of living and in a world where we have a bountiful variety of foods from which to choose.

·Keeping kosher makes it nearly impossible to go out to eat, unless you happen to live in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where there are kosher restaurants.

·Keeping kosher creates big headaches at family gatherings and celebrations, when the focus should be on enjoying oneself and not on worrying about whether the hot dogs are kosher.

·If God is the master of the universe, it doesn’t make sense that He would care about whether a piece of cheese touches a hamburger.

During the course of a conversation about kashrus with nonobservant family members, you may hear some of the following:

·“What about respecting your parents and your family? Isn’t that more important than keeping kosher?”

·“What could be nonkosher about a leaf of lettuce? Let’s not get silly about this!”

·“My chicken-soup pot has only had chicken and vegetables in it! It’s never even seen a pork chop!”

·“Will anything I do ever be good enough for you?”

·“Just because you want to keep kosher, does everyone else in the family have to be like you?”

·“I haven’t been kosher a day in my life and God hasn’t struck me down yet.”

·“This is just the beginning. Next week you’re going to grow side curls and a long beard and look like one of those Hasidim from Brooklyn.”

You may also encounter family members of varying degrees of observance who feel that they do keep kosher. But their standards of kashrus are, for whatever reason, not the same as yours. In which case you may hear some of the following:

·“I’ve kept kosher longer than you’ve been alive!”

·“Uncle Harvey is kosher and he eats in our house!”

·“If it doesn’t say ‘pure vegetable oil’ on the label, I won’t bring it into the house. Why isn’t that kosher enough for you?”

A good thing to keep in mind is that many family objections reflect the fear that you have made religion, including keeping kosher, more important than caring about your family. This is something you will want to address whenever you think it has become an issue for your family.

So, why do observant Jews keep the laws of kashrus? Here’s one way of explaining it.

Why keep kosher? how the observant Jew views Kashrus

Although your relatives may believe that this is a very complex subject, and of course in some ways it is, here’s the bottom-line answer to this question that really explains it best: “Because God told us to.” For family members who want to understand more about this, we’ll expand that thought with a bit more detail.

The observant Jew believes that Torah is the word of God, transmitted—at first directly, and then via Moses—by God to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai more than 3,300 years ago. If you believe in the divinity of God and in the revelation at Mount Sinai, you are obligated to follow the laws contained within the Torah for all eternity, as the Torah itself dictates.

Unless they are atheists or agnostics, most Jews believe that some sort of divine “being” or “essence” was responsible for creating the world. The primary difference between traditionally Torah-observant Jews and Jews who are not traditionally observant is in the degree to which each believes in the Torah as the blueprint for how you must (not “should” or “might want to”) live your life.

If the Torah is the revealed word of God, and your goal in life is to live according to the way that God has outlined for you in His “book,” everything contained in that book must be taken seriously—the parts that tell you to honor your parents and not commit adultery, and the parts that tell you which animals are okay to eat and which are not. Is it sometimes hard to understand exactly what the Torah is trying to say to us? Yes, of course. Must we then rely on people who are steeped in Torah knowledge to help us understand what the Torah means and how it applies to us in today’s world? Yes, certainly. But this is the key point that is difficult for many nonobservant family members to understand: For the observant Jew, any debate on the importance of kashrus—or any other laws and precepts for that matter—is pointless. The only meaningful question is, “Did God give us the Torah?” If the absolute, undeniable answer to this question is “Yes!” then it is utterly logical for such a person to be completely committed to keeping kosher. It has absolutely nothing to do with how much you do or don’t love the nonobservant members of your family.

On a personal note

Early on in my marriage to my husband Stephen (we’ve now been married for twelve years), when I begrudgingly agreed to keep a kosher home, I still ate nonkosher food outside of the home and fought like heck the concept that an all-knowing, all-powerful being could be watching to see whether or not a pork chop touched my lips—and if indeed He saw such a thing, that He would care. Having been on more than my share of diets over the years, this felt like just another diet that I was trying to keep for the sake of peace in my home.

For the purposes of family harmony, as I explained in detail in my book Two Jews Can Still Be a Mixed Marriage, Stephen and I settled on keeping an “almost” strictly kosher home, which meant that I sometimes purchased foods that did not have actual kosher certification as long as they did not contain any actual nonkosher ingredients. I learned about keeping separate sets of dishes for meat and dairy, keeping separate sets for Passover use, and keeping meat and dairy products separate. I purchased my meat only from a kosher butcher and my children were raised kosher from birth, so they never knew what a cheeseburger tasted like.

For a number of years I kept kosher for several reasons, none of them really having to do with “because God said so.” Aside from accommodating my husband’s wishes as to how he wanted our home to be run and our children to be educated, ...