The Heathen's Guide to World Religions

Excerpt, Chapter One: Judaism, p. 34-35

The Origin of Kosher Laws

"Good laws have their origins in bad morals."  ~Ambrosius Macrobius

The synod at Jabna was also the beginning of universal Kosher Law. The idea of Kosher had existed before this, but Jabna was where the rabbis set it in stone that every generation of Jews from that time on should be subjected to boiled dough, stale breads, and potato pancakes. (It’s  amazing what people will eat when you tell them it’ll get them into Heaven.)

The word Kosher just means “fitting”, meaning fit for pious Jews to eat. There are Kosher laws about everything from menstrual blood to underwear, but I’ll use the example of Kosher food to explain where the Pharisees got their idea of Kosher from. You probably know something about Kosher foods... like those meals that the Jewish passengers get served first on airplanes while you’re waiting patiently for your microwaved veal. (I’m not being anti-Semitic there. People complain about this and, being the intrepid investigator I am, I asked the airline if the Kosher meals were always served first. Apparently Kosher meals are made separately and are packed on the plane last, which means they are always on top when the stewardess starts pulling the food out. It’s not a global Jewish hegemony bent on getting served first. It’s just the way things are loaded on the plane. Sorry to disappoint the conspiracy buffs out there.)

The entire Kosher concept was based on the idea that something somewhere had gone horribly wrong with the Covenant between Jehovah and the Jews. The Pharisees, being legalistic, decided that it had to be a legal problem. They reasoned that the people of Israel must have been having fun somewhere along the line, which of course broke some, if not all, of the laws in Leviticus. The question was, which laws were being broken?

The Pharisees in particular had been having absolutely no fun and so were abiding quite closely to the Laws of the Torah.  Still, their country had been smashed to crumbly bits of marble by the Romans, so they figured that the laws must not be being abided by strictly enough. At this point the rabbis applied a logic reserved only for devout clergyman and paranoid schizophrenics. For example, the Torah says not to boil a calf in its mother’s milk. Okay, said the Pharisees, we won’t do that. (Incidentally, the reason for this was that boiling the meat of a calf in its mother’s milk was part of a baal sacrifice. Jews were not allowed to do this because, well, they were Jews, not baal worshippers.)

So the Pharisees didn’t boil calves in milk from the calf’s mother. But Israel still fell. “So,” thought the Pharisees, “there’s something we’re doing wrong here. God, after all, could do no wrong. If there was a mistake, it had to be a human one.” The Pharisees then looked at this whole dilemma and thought. “Aha! The problem is that there are so damn many cows and calves out there that we have no idea which milk comes from which cow! Why, we could accidentally boil the calf in its mother’s milk, and we’d never know it!” (I suspect from the tale that the ancient Israelites considered meat boiled in milk to be something they might like to eat. Funny how times change...)

The Pharisees decided to call a moratorium on all meat boiled in any milk, just so they didn’t accidentally sin. Then they went a huge step further and thought, “Wait a minute... what if God’s an imbecile that can’t tell what we’re doing and thinks we’re boiling meat in milk when what we’re really doing is putting cheese on a burger? Why, we could lose God’s favor just because He saw milk products and meat products on the same plate! That’s it. No cheeseburgers.”

And so Kosher law was invented. The Pharisees proceeded to take every law in the Torah and made it as extreme as possible. The idea was not meant to reflect the spirit or intent of the laws of the Torah. Rather, it was supposed to set things up so that a Kosher Jew doesn’t even seem to come anywhere near anything that might in some abstract way be seen as being close to sinning— which is what the Kosher meals are about on the airplanes. You see, the last thing a Kosher Jew wants should the plane go down is to be caught eating a cheeseburger and be accused at the Pearly Gates of boiling a calf in its mother’s milk.

All of this stuff went into the Talmud as extra laws to make sure you kept the original laws. Then the Pharisees wrote down the Mishnas, which were commentaries on the extra laws which they had just set up to make sure you kept the original Laws. Then they gave all this to the Jewish world as sacred and authoritative text. This whole thing became known as The Talmudic code. It was basically a “How To Be A Good Pharisee-type Jew” handbook that kept the Pharisees’ version of Judaism alive when Israel was defunct as a nation. You’ll notice that I said “Pharisee-type Jew.” The ethics and beliefs of the Essenes, Zealots, and Sadducees were lost for good by this point. The few of them who survived the Roman assault couldn’t recruit and were assimilated by the Pharisaic tradition. The legalistic Pharisee philosophy became the only Judaism that existed through to the Enlightenment era in 1700, mainly because the Pharisees were the only sect with the presence of mind (or presence of head if you prefer) to write their stuff down and disseminate it. Throughout the Middle Ages, all the Jews that lived in Europe were Pharisidical. This means they were Zionists, legalistic, and determined to maintain the Covenant (contract) with Yahweh come hell or high water.  They got the hell part.