Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism

Studies and New Directions

Jacob Ari Labendz, Shmuly Yanklowitz, Jacob Ari Labendz, Shmuly Yanklowitz

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438473628
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

In recent decades, as more Jews have adopted plant-based lifestyles, Jewish vegan and vegetarian movements have become increasingly prominent. This book explores the intellectual, religious, and historical roots of veganism and vegetarianism among Jews and presents compelling new directions in Jewish thought, ethics, and foodways. The contributors, including scholars, rabbis, and activists, explore how Judaism has inspired Jews to eschew animal products and how such choices, even when not directly inspired by Judaism, have enriched and helped define Jewishness. Individually, and as a collection, the chapters in this book provide an opportunity to meditate on what may make veganism and vegetarianism particularly Jewish, as well as the potential distinctiveness of Jewish veganism and vegetarianism. The authors also examine the connections between Jewish veganism and vegetarianism and other movements, while calling attention to divisions among Jewish vegans and vegetarians, to the specific challenges of fusing Jewishness and a plant-based lifestyle, and to the resistance Jewish vegans and vegetarians can face from parts of the Jewish community. The book's various perspectives represent the cultural, theological, and ideological diversity among Jews invested in such conversations and introduce prominent debates within their movements.

Part One Studies

1The Slipperiness of Animal Suffering

Revisiting the Talmud’s Classic Treatment

BETH A. BERKOWITZ

THE RACCOON IN THE KITCHEN

The landlord of a Brooklyn apartment building dismissed their complaints when the tenant couple, Will and Malya, told him about the crying they could hear inside their walls. But Will and Malya could not tolerate the strange whimpers they heard at night, so they took matters into their own hands. One night when the crying was particularly bad, Will moved the stove, where the cries seemed loudest, and started to hack away at the wall with a hammer. Malya began to video-record Will as he knelt down behind the stove, wanting to capture whatever was going to happen. Will hammered and hammered until he had made a hole a little larger than the size of his hand. While Malya filmed, Will put on a rubber kitchen glove and plunged his hand into the dark space behind the wall. His gloved hand emerged out of the hole clasping a baby raccoon, like a rabbit being pulled out of a magician’s hat. Will’s first instinct was, for some reason, to bring the shocked raccoon to the bathroom mirror so that the two of them could look at their reflection. He moved on to the bathtub, apparently to wash off the raccoon from the drywall dust, but that is when Malya stops the video. The posted YouTube video went viral, bringing CBS News and local fame to the Brooklyn couple.1 The odd juxtaposition of forest critter and urban kitchen, the couple’s quirky Brooklyn vibe, and the adorable baby raccoon must have been what drew people to the story.

A reader of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation may find it strange when, a little ways into the book, the author gives extended treatment to the question of whether animals are capable of suffering.2 Watching the video of Will and Malya, one wonders how anyone could doubt the capacity of animals to suffer. Yet even with this couple, who were so moved by an animal’s suffering that they were compelled to break through their kitchen wall, one finds signs of doubt: the landlord who could not be bothered to answer their calls and the joking of the news anchors, who when they wrap up the story, laughingly remark that the outcome could have been different: “That sucker could have come out angry.” One of the anchors pretends to be a scary raccoon baring his claws.

A fine line distinguishes responses to this story. If the cry of the raccoon had instead been the squeak of a rat, the couple might have called the exterminator instead of hacking through the wall. If the raccoon had died immediately when she fell from her family’s den in the roof (which is what happened, it turns out), the couple would have been disgusted by the stench of her decaying corpse rather than moved by her crying.3 But this baby raccoon, with her black bandit mask already visible and her tiny paws splayed out on the kitchen glove, got a new home in the woods of upstate New York, where the wildlife service relocated her. Her suffering touched the lives of Will, Malya, and the many viewers who gasped, along with Malya, when the raccoon emerged from behind the wall. In the end, if one follows the comments on YouTube, it was Will’s bushy beard and shirtless chest that drew more attention than anything else.

As a major concern motivating veganism and vegetarianism, animal suffering is this chapter’s interest, along with the complexity of human responses to it. In some cases, that suffering activates empathy, and in other cases, that suffering is ignored, denied, feared, or ridiculed. The same instance of suffering more often than not invokes conflicting responses, as was the case for the raccoon in Will and Malya’s kitchen. To better understand why so many people are not vegan or vegetarian and do not consider becoming so, despite their sometimes love for animals, this chapter seeks a perspective on animal suffering that can make sense of those conflicting responses. It seeks a perspective that can help us understand why the same people who delight in the baby raccoon in the kitchen would be quick to exterminate a rat, or how the off-color remarks about Will’s bare chest coexist with the compassion that the couple and their video viewers had for the critter stuck in the wall.

The argument of this chapter is that the Babylonian Talmud offers such a perspective. In the Talmudic passage I examine, the classic treatment of animal suffering in Bava Metzia 32a–33a, the Talmud’s concern is to get at the complexity of human responses to animal suffering. The case addressed in this passage is the animal struggling beneath his burden found in Exodus 23:5 and Deuteronomy 22:4. Like the raccoon stuck in the wall—is it pet or pest? cute critter or nasty intruder?—the burdened pack animal is subject to double viewing. The pack animal on one hand evokes empathy, since we all know what it feels like to be too tired to continue with a difficult task. On the other hand, he or she may be viewed as little more than the Iron Age version of a pick-up truck broken down by the side of the road. The Talmud plays with the double character of the burdened animal to highlight the contradictions regarding animal suffering in the inherited sources. The suffering of the exhausted pack animal could not be more clearly in view, even more so than it was for Will and Malya, who could hear but not see the helpless raccoon. But is the suffering of the animal really the problem? To what extent does animal suffering—in a scenario where an animal is, to all eyes, doing just that—matter at all? Are the Bible and the Mishnah concerned with that suffering or not? These are the questions posed by the Talmud.

This chapter starts with Peter Singer and his critics to frame the problem of animal suffering. I first consider the insufficiencies in Singer’s rationalist utilitarianism that have been pointed out, especially by his feminist readers, since that critique paves the way for understanding the Talmud’s discourse. I proceed to the biblical and early rabbinic laws that treat a scenario where an ox or donkey has collapsed under his burden, considering whether animal suffering motivates these laws and, if so, in what way and to what extent. I cover some of the highlights of the Talmudic passage. I am particularly interested in how the Talmud offers several testing grounds for animal suffering: the financial interests of the Jewish animal owner, the relationship of the Jewish animal owner to non-Jews, and the relationship of the Jewish animal owner to fellow Jews. These testing grounds help the Talmud’s editors highlight the complexities of animal suffering by showing all the forces that might compete with or eclipse it. My goal is to show how in the eyes of the Talmud framers, and still for us, animal suffering can seem so real, it can exert such a powerful demand on us, but at the same time, when looked at in the same events with the same eyes, can also seem trivial or invisible.

PETER SINGER AND HIS CRITICS

Animal suffering was at the heart of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. For Singer, animal suffering was the factor that allowed one to speak of animals as having interests that could be recognized and was the phenomenon that animal liberation movements could dedicate themselves to eliminating. Animals might not be able to voice or reflect on their suffering in the same way humans do, but they could experience it in a way that, in Singer’s example of a schoolboy kicking a rock, the rock cannot. Singer brought new prominence to a line from utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”4

The problems in Singer’s arguments are already evident in the line he pulls from Bentham, which implies that despite the fact that animals can neither reason nor talk, their suffering qualifies them for equal consideration (which he distinguishes from equal treatment—granting a pig’s interest in not being caged makes sense in a way that granting a pig the right to vote does not). Ethologist pioneers like Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff, and Frans de Waal, now joined by many a Nova special and Animal Planet, have shown that animals exercise a great deal of reason and speech, particularly if we broaden our conceptualizations of those things to include the kinds of which other species are capable. Research shows that other species are in fact much better than humans at certain kinds of communication or cognitive processing. For animal liberationist thinkers today, the question is neither can animals suffer, nor can they reason, nor can they talk, but how does the fact that animals can clearly do all these things change how we should conceptualize the moral demands they make on us and how we think about ourselves as one species among many.

Animal ethicists in the utilitarian tradition have tried to correct the problems in Singer’s approach to animal suffering.5 Other philosophers, questioning the utilitarian principle that advocates the most pleasure for the most sentient creatures, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction: Considering Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism
• Part One: Studies
• Part Two: New Directions
• Report: Jewish Vegan and Vegetarian Movements in North America
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover