Departures

He punched the number. “Genetic Enterprises, Dr. Delahanty’s office,” a woman said. He asked to speak to Dr. Delahanty. “May I ask who’s calling?” the secretary said. When he gave his name, she answered, “One moment. I’ll connect you.”

“Oh, Rabbi Kaplan. Thanks for returning my call.” Delahanty sounded young and earnest. If he was a practical joker, he was first-rate.

Kaplan said, “My wife tells me you were inquiring about the possibility of, uh, pork being acceptable under Jewish dietary law.”

“Yes, that’s right. You see-”

Kaplan cut him off. “I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Leviticus 11:3 and 11:7 are the relevant passages. Here, let me give you the exact wording.” He reached for the Bible on the night-stand. “ ‘Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.’ And again, ‘And the swine, because he parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, but cheweth not the cud, be is unclean to you.’ The fourteenth chapter of Deuteronomy repeats the same prohibitions. So I really don’t see how-”

It was Delahanty’s turn to interrupt. “Forgive me, Rabbi Kaplan, but I do know that under normal circumstances Jews are not supposed to eat pork. Let me tell you about Lionel, though.”

“Lionel?” Kaplan echoed, confused.

“Yes. This would have been easier if you’d caught the news last night. Lionel is a pig who chews his cud… Are you there, Rabbi Kaplan?”

“I’m here,” Kaplan said after a long pause. “I think you’d better tell me more.” He felt a headache coming on.

“The easiest thing to do would have been to say that pigs is pigs, whether they chew their cuds or not. That would have been that,” Ruth said when he finally got off the phone with Delahanty and, still wearing a bemused look, explained the dilemma to her.

“Simplest, yes, but would it have been right?” Kaplan said, shaking his head. “It goes against everything I’ve been brought up with to say ‘kosher’ and ‘pig’ in the same sentence. But if a pig has a cloven hoof and chews its cud, doesn’t it meet the criteria the Bible sets for permitted beasts?”

“It meets the criteria for trouble,” his wife said practically. “If you start saying pork is kosher, you’d best thank God there’s no Jewish Inquisition, because if there were, it would burn you at the stake.”

“At the chop, actually,” said Kaplan, who had a weakness for bad puns.

Ruth did not groan, as he had hoped she would. She set her hands on her hips, saying, “I’m serious, Aaron. Do you want to make yourself a laughingstock for the congregation, to say nothing of other rabbis?”

“Of course not.” Just the same, he winced as he imagined the headlines: “Only in Los Angeles.” “Rabbi Kaplan’s Favorite Ham Recipes.” A caption under a picture of a pig: “Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish.” Oh, he was opening a can of worms, and no mistake.

But it was such a pretty problem. Kaplan had been a rabbi going on twenty years now: a teacher, a counselor, a preacher, a social worker, sometimes even a scholar. Not since his student days, though, had he had a chance to be a theologian.

His wife recognized his faraway stare, and it alarmed her. She chose a question close to the issue at hand: “Aaron, have you ever tasted pork?”

As she had intended, that snapped him out of his reverie. He looked at her in surprise. He was Conservative, not Orthodox; he did not pretend to observe all the minutiae of dietary law. Pork, however, was something else. It was like asking if he had ever been unfaithful-exactly like that, he thought uncomfortably.

“Once,” he admitted. “I was eighteen, in my senior year in high school, and out to do anything my father didn’t want me to do. And so, one morning I stopped for breakfast with some friends, and I ordered bacon and eggs.”

“Was it good?”

“You know, I really don’t remember.” He supposed that was like a lot of infidelity, too-he had been too nervous to enjoy it. “What’s all this about?”

“If you decide this meat could somehow be kosher, I was just wondering how you were going to react when people said you did it because you liked pork yourself and wanted an excuse to eat it.”

“That’s ridi-” he began, and then stopped. It was not ridiculous, even in the twenty-first century. It might very well be one of the kinder things Orthodox rabbis would say. They would, he thought with a curiously mixed metaphor, crucify him if he had anything at all good to say about pigs. The only thing they could not do was excommunicate him; Judaism didn’t work that way. It was something of a relief, but not much.

Ruth was still watching him. “You’re going ahead with this.”

“You know me too well.” He sighed. “I’m going to investigate it, anyhow.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”