Departures

“I sort of have to,” he said, but he was talking to her back. Sighing again, he went into his study. His books would not argue with him. He went first, as would anyone unraveling a problem of Jewish law, to the Shulkhan Arukh, the Ready Table of Joseph Karo. Published in 1564, it was still basic almost five centuries later, and its commentators reached to modem times.

Chapter 46 sounded promising: “Laws Concerning Forbidden Food.” He turned to it in some hope. It had nothing to do with pork, but dealt with meat and milk dishes; with eating food prepared by Gentiles or from utensils used by Gentiles; with wormy fruit, vegetables, and fish. Karo, reasonably enough, had never entertained the prospect of a pig that chewed its cud, nor had the rabbis who came after him.

Kaplan did find a reference to swine in Chapter 5, “Laws Regarding the Cleanliness of the Place for Holy Purposes.” There Karo remarked, “The mouth of a swine is considered like a chamber pot, for the reason that it pecks at excrement.”

The rabbi frowned. In modem times, pigs were no more filthy than any other domestic animals. Perplexed, he got down the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides’ great twelfth-century effort to reconcile religion and science. He found the reference to pork in Chapter 48 of Part III:

“I maintain that the food which is forbidden by the Law is unwholesome. There is nothing among the forbidden kinds of food whose injurious character is doubted, except pork, and fat. But also in these cases the doubt is not justified. For pork contains more moisture than necessary, and too much of superfluous matter. The principal reason why the Law forbids swine’s flesh is to be found in the circumstance that its habits and its food are very dirty and loathsome. It has already been pointed out how emphatically the Law enjoins the removal of the sight of loathsome objects, even in the field and in the camp; how much more objectionable is such sight in towns. But if it were allowed to eat swine’s flesh, the streets and houses would be more dirty than any cesspool, as may be seen at present in the country of the Franks. The saying of our Sages is well known: ‘The mouth of a swine is as dirty as dung itself.’ “

Again, the medical argument that swine’s flesh was inherently dirty: a physician himself, Maimonides would naturally reason thus. And again, it did not necessarily apply now, or indeed even in Maimonides’ day; chickens hardly had cleanlier habits than pigs. The quotation from the Talmud was in the same vein, if of even weightier authority than Maimonides.

Who else had spoken of the pig? He thought of one source, and pulled a well-thumbed book from a shelf apart from the religious tomes. As usual, Ambrose Bierce had a word for it: “Hog, n. A bird remarkable for the catholicity of its appetite and serving to illustrate that of ours. Among the Mahometans and Jews, the hog is not in favor as an article of diet, but is respected for the delicacy of its habits, the beauty of its plumage and the melody of its voice…”

Smiling, he put the Devil’s Dictionary away. Bierce’s mordant wit helped put things in perspective. He was certain his predicament would have amused the old cynic immensely, and perhaps inspired a fresh verse or two from that worthy bard, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.

At that, the mythical Father Jape might have sympathized with Kaplan. In Bierce’s time, Catholics refrained from eating meat on Fridays. Somehow the Catholic Church had survived when the prohibition was lifted.

But the ban against pork was centuries older than Christianity itself. And Judaism, unlike Christianity these last seventeen centuries, was mostly a minority religion, all too often a persecuted one. Jewish dietary laws expressed and emphasized the separateness of the Jews of the Diaspora from the peoples among whom they lived. Because they helped Jews maintain their cohesion, they became emotionally ingrained in believers; that was why even the thought of modifying them brought such a wrench with it.

And yet, he thought, Judaism always retained a certain flexibility other faiths lacked. In the Middle Ages, Jewish thought never accepted Aristotelian science as part and parcel of the tenets of the faith as the Church had-and therefore never had to go through a painful repudiation when Renaissance scientists showed that Aristotle did not, after all, know everything.

Adaptation to a changing world had been going on ever since. Among the observant in both Israel and the United States, a common item was a switch that could be set in advance to turn electrical appliances on and off on the Sabbath, when kindling a light was forbidden.