"Meet Your Meat" and the Ethics of Animal Consumption

Watching an old episode of Parks and Recreation recently, I came across this short vignette which encapsulates the ethical challenges inherent in today's meat production industry. After inviting his employees to a barbecue, department boss Ron Swanson proceeds to introduce them to the pig that he intends to slaughter for lunch.

Ron says, "In my opinion, not enough people have looked their dinner in the eyes and considered the circle of life. This is your dinner. His name is Tom."

Their reactions are both priceless, and fully understandable. The very thought that they would kill and eat a cute, precocious pig repulses everyone in the crowd. Ron is finally forced to relent when he learns that doing so in public park would violate numerous laws and health codes.

Today, we're just like the people in this video: we of course want to eat the cute and cuddly animal, just as long as we don't see that it was an animal, that it bled, or that it was alive at all. We want our meat in clean, ready to prepare packages, devoid of all possible messiness. And we certainly don't want to think about how the animal was treated before someone, somewhere killed it for us.

I have been struggling with this ethical question lately.

I am by no means a vegetarian. I believe that God gave human beings the right to kill animals for necessary purposes including consumption and clothing. The very Torah scroll read in every synagogue around the world is written on an animal hide. Were it written on plain paper - no matter how fine and high-quality - it would not be kosher.

That being said, that same Torah demands that we take into account the treatment of those animals in life. The commandments prohibiting tza'ar ba'alei chayyim, require us to treat animals humanely, with care for their well-being. (see here, here, or just do a search on Google.) And it also seems clear that modern animal production - factory farming - fails to take the animal's well-being into account, and falls far short of the Torah standards - both for meat and poultry. I'm not basing this on the numerous studies, reports and articles written on the subject over the past many years. Rather, I base my opinion on common sense: have you personally seen the cows regularly used for milk nowadays, with udders so large they can barely stand? What about the massive chicken pens in which chickens are raised in great density? I'm sure that there are many more issues about which we have absolutely no idea - not because we can't know, but because we don't want to. (Did you know that in the United States, there are currently no laws whatsoever that regular the treatment of farm animals? That's pretty amazing to me, and tells me that as a society, we don't want to know. We don't want to think about the fact that the steak we're eating came from an animal, and someone had to raise, feed and kill that animal on our behalf before it arrived in a neat plastic package at the grocery store.)

It's therefore at least a bit gratifying that the Orthodox Union recently announced that it would no longer certify meat slaughtered with a method called "Shackle and Hoist". Essentially, this involved flipping the animal upside-down before it was slaughtered. While this is certainly a positive development, the OU doesn't get all the credit; the State of Israel does. According to the Times of Israel article, the OU issued it's new guidelines,

after Israel decided to ban the import of any meat slaughtered using the method, in which the animal is pulled into the air by its legs and then flipped onto the ground before being slaughtered....Israel’s agriculture department banned the method for imported meat last year and gave slaughterhouses, many of which also produce kosher meat sold to the US, until June 1, 2018, to comply. The Israeli policy said that slaughterhouses had to install rotating pens to turn the animal upside down, which is seen as more humane than using shackle and hoist.

So, animal activists lobbied Israeli bureaucrats to change Israeli food production regulations, which thus gave the OU the cover it needed to change its policy. This teaches us a number of important lessons:

• First of all, for many years the OU has claimed that it does not legislate on issues related to ethics, and that it only addresses the issue of whether a food is technically kosher. This new letter represents a sharp departure from this longstanding OU policy and opens the door to any number of other ethical issues. How indeed can we claim that food is kosher if the production of that food involved Torah violations? Theoretically, what if the OU learned that an animal producer was literally torturing animals in order to produce a special type of meat (a claim made by critics of goose-stomach-pumping to make fois-gras)? What if the OU discovered that a company it oversees was involved in systematic theft and corruption? Today, the OU can no longer look the other way. 
• This decision reinforces the centrality of the State of Israel in the Jewish world. Why did the OU wait for Israel to issue its new regulations? Did it feel that "shackle and hoist" is inhumane before Israel changed the regulations? Whatever the case, this should only encourage those involved in animal rights to focus even more strongly on the Israeli front, where there are people who are very receptive to these issues who we now know can make a difference not only in Israel, but in the kosher industry around the world.
• This new policy addresses only the very last seconds of the life of an animal. It in no way addresses many, many other ethical issues, such as how the animal was born, raised, farmed, fed and brought to slaughter. What is the role of the OU - and the Israeli government - in issues like these?

This entire issue of factory farming has been bothering me for a while now.

On one hand, I'm not a vegetarian, nor do I wish to become one. I eat meat - far less than I used to - but still quite a bit. How can a person (me) who considers Jewish teaching and halachah primary to the way that I live, ignore major halachot, simply because I don't see them before my very eyes - because I choose not to?

I actually agree with Ron Swanson. I think that you shouldn't eat meat if you've never seen one being slaughtered, at least once. In a way, I wish there were a way to go back to the way they did it years ago. You went to the market and bought a chicken, which you took to the shochet to slaughter for you. It was gross. It was labor intensive. It was definitely more expensive. But at least you knew that it was an animal, and wasn't raised on a factory farm in horrifying conditions.

I recently became aware of a brand of meat in Israel called Hai Bari - which claims that it is "the first and only food label in Israel that guarantees consumers that their meat and dairy products come from farms who implement the highest animal welfare standards." (This isn't what it seems either. It's actually a response of Golan farmers to the Israeli government opening the market to the import of foreign cattle. They decided that if they can't compete on price - which they can't - they can at least try to corner the "ethical" market, which is fine by me.)

Changing factory farming is a very tall order. Like the rest of the crowd in the "Parks and Rec" video clip, most people really don't want to "Meat their meat." They don't want to know.

But I, and others like me, do want to know - not the name of the chicken that I'm eating, but at least that it was raised humanely and ethically. And I'm willing to pay more for the privilege, even if that means eating less meat and chicken to do it. I'm sure that I'm not alone.

I'd like to see the OU, the government of Israel, and even the animal rights movement  join forces in finding and encouraging new ways to create ethical meat and poultry production. This would give the kosher-eating public the sense that the food their eating isn't just kosher technically, but ethically as well.

The Blinding Power of Money

The Babylonian Talmud relates a tale about the sage Rabbi Yishmael, who often sat in judgment on the local population.

"He had a sharecropper who would regularly bring him a basket of fruits as part of their financial agreement  each Friday. One week the sharecropper brought the basket on Thursday. "What is this?" the rabbi wondered. "I have a court appearance and I thought that once I was traveling, I would bring you the produce today." Rabbi Yishmael refused to accept the parcel, recused himself from sitting in judgment on the case and appointed two other judges in his place. During the give and take of the proceedings Rabbi Yishmael thought to himself, "If only [the sharecropper] would make this claim! If only he'd make that claim!" He then said, "Damn those who take bribes! If I – who refused to take the produce, and even if I had, it would have been my own money – am so influenced in judgment, how much more biased must be those who actually take bribes!"

Throughout the course of his campaign, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has attacked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for accepting lucrative speaking engagements as well as significant financial donations from a litany of sources, including major Wall Street financial institutions. Sanders has implied that the donations affected Mrs. Clinton's judgment and her ability to accurately assess and reign in the danger of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. Recently, Clinton lashed out at the attacks, insisting that the money had not affected her judgment in any way. “Anybody who knows me, who thinks they can influence me, name anything they’ve influenced me on. Just name one thing,” Clinton said at a televised CNN forum in New Hampshire.  At the Democratic debate last week, Clinton directly challenged the notion that she could be bought and bristled at the suggestion: "Time and time again, by innuendo, by insinuation, there is this attack that he is putting forth, which really comes down to -- you know, anybody who ever took donations or speaking fees from any interest group has to be bought. And I just absolutely reject that, Senator. And I really don't think these kinds of attacks by insinuation are worthy of you. And enough is enough. If you've got something to say, say it directly."

Is she right? Are Sanders' accusations an attack on her integrity? Do campaign donations bias a candidate?

The prohibition of accepting gifts appears twice in the Old Testament. "And you shall take no gift; for a gift blinds those that have sight, and perverts the words of the righteous." (Exodus 23:8). "You shall not pervert judgment…neither shall you take a gift; for a gift blinds the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous." According to the Bible gifts – money given to those in positions of power – does three things: It "blinds those that have sight", it "blinds the wise" and it "perverts the words of the righteous". We don't unduly influence the wicked; there's no need – they already have a warped sense of right and wrong. Rather, gifts affect people with "sight" - those who we would consider righteous and upstanding people, and prevent them from seeing what anyone else can plainly see. Accepting money specifically affects the righteous – decent, honest people with a proper sense of right and wrong – and prevents them from being truly objective.

Is Hillary correct? Are Bernie Sanders' accusations an attack on her character? Far from it. In fact, Sanders refused to attack her integrity, and has insisted that he respects her greatly. Rather, the Wall Street money she has taken has blinded her, and prevented a righteous woman from objectively seeing the true danger and power that Wall Street wields, even after the most recent round of legislation.

Did Mrs. Clinton fight hard to pass laws to reign in the banking system? Of course she did. But it's also impossible to know whether far stronger legislation would have been passed had Wall Street not paid tens of millions of dollars to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

We'll never know what would have been without those gifts, because we – all of us – have been blinded by them.

The Wisdom of Rav Shmuel Eliyahu Re Rav Moti Alon

The RZ press has written reams surrounding what it calls, "Parashat Rav Alon" - the Rav Alon "Story". The word "affair" fits better, but seems inappropriate. In Olam Katan, one of the weekly parshah sheets that magically appears in shuls throughout the country, Rav Shmuel Eliyahu responds to the painful events that transpired this past week. The following is a direct translation of what he wrote:

Whoever Says that David Sinned is Surely Mistaken
During one of the interviews regarding the "Rav Moti Alon Story" a reporter asked me: If you knew about this story before, why didn't you publicize it? The real answer is that the public doesn't need to know everything. It's not necessary for every person who tuned into the radio to judge whether Rav Alon sinned and how. We're speaking about a great, important rabbi. We're speaking about a man with a great many merits in Klal Yisrael. We're speaking about a man of education.
The gemara states: "Whoever says that David sinned can only be mistaken." One of the commentaries explains that David certainly erred in the story with Batsheva. This is why the prophet approached him with the story of the poor man's sheep. This is why he was punished so harshly. But you, the student - immerse in your own sins. Don't think that you're so ethical because you engage in the sins of King David. There are rabbis and judges appointed to that role. There is a "Takana" forum assigned this role. You - don't wonder about your rebbe. You can and must continue to recite Tehillim and to view King David as an exalted figure.
"With righteousness you shall judge your fellow man," certainly so when we're speaking about a man rich with such a great many merits. There are in the gemara (Shabbat 127b) fantastic stories about the fact that we must judge each person favorably, even when the facts seem so clear and solid. After the students of Rabbi Yehoshua judged him favorably in the story where he could have seen in an extremely negative light he says to them, "And you, just as you have judged me favorably, so too should God judge you favorably." The way you judge others reveals something about you.
Even regarding a sin that's "as clear as the sun" the Gemara says: "They taught in the house of Rabbi Yishmael: If you see a Talmid Chacham commit a sin at night, do not wonder about him during the day, for perhaps he repented. 'Perhaps' - you might think? Rather, 'certainly he repented!'" The gemara is speaking about someone whom you saw with certainty sin during the night - regarding this person Rabbi Yishmael asserted that he certainly repented. Not maybe. Where is this, and where is the story that the media so much enjoys engaging in, which if it happened, happened many years ago. Let us fulfill the words of Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Yishmael: "And you, just as you have judged the Rav meritoriously, so too should God just you favorably as well."



And here is the rest of it.

I Don't Have a Facebook Account

Usually, I like being at the front of a tech curve. I like technically oriented magazines, blogs, podcasts, etc. I designed my own website, and do all kinds of things with digital media. Despite all of this, I never opened a Facebook account (nor do I Tweet). I've been thinking about why not for a while, and I can now boil it down to a few reasons:

1. Time Wasting: The NY Times posted this article about kids swearing themselves off of Facebook and watching their grades (and real friendships) improve. I already blow a staggering amount of time on the Interwebs. (see above). I console myself by telling myself that at least some of it carries a redeeming Torah value. At least I hope so. I also spend too much time reading news, checking the weather - you name it. I'm pretty confident that this is not a phenomenon unique to me. But Facebook takes time-wasting to a whole new level. Now it's not just famous people that I'd have to keep up with, but everyone: my friends, their friends, and their friends. And their pictures. And fun videos that they've flagged. And articles they'There's an almost infinite amount of Facebook worthy material for me to peruse, and I don't have time for it.

Then there's Farmville, Mafia Wars and other social network games - which I am intentionally not linking to. These are incredibly addictive, viral, mind-blowingly-time-wasting game that suck people in and then get them to pay real money for online stuff. I actually think that these types of game border on evil. If you want to waste your own time, that's one thing. But creating a game that asks people to waste time along with you to suck them in - that's an ethically questionable practice. End Farmville rant.

2. Silliness, Minutia and Friends: The funny thing about "friends" on Facebook is that they're not really friends. They're more like acquaintances; people that you know casually and keep track of. I don't care what my friend had for lunch or whether his kid has a cold (sure, it's a pain to them, but do I really need to know?), but I would love a forum where I could talk with real friends about real things. Facebook isn't built for that. It's more about quick hits and short status updates - Twitter on steriods, 140 characters at a time. I probably could build a closed Facebook group for my close friends to discuss real things, but then I'd have to deal with issue #1 (see above).

3. Modesty: There's something inherently immodest about the whole idea of Facebook. I don't mean immodesty in the skirt-length way, but rather in a lifestyle kind of way. Facebook is about broadcasting my status - what I'm doing, thinking, eating, which video games I'm playing - for the world to know. It makes everyone a mini-celebrity. We promote ourselves, because my gripes about my kids' homework, or what we had for dinner must obviously be important news. But this very notion of celebrity runs against the principle of modesty. Modesty teaches us to live a proper life without broadcasting details to the world - the very opposite of the Facebook ideal.

We live in a world fascinated with celebrity. Everyone wants to be famous - either for gatecrashing the White House or planting sweet potatoes in their virtual garden. Judaism wants us to do the opposite: to lead real, meaningful lives in which we engage with and study Torah with our real friends, children, and families. And, when we do these real things, we don't tell anyone about them.
God knows. And that's more than enough.

An Ethical Quandary at the Drugstore

Rena and I were at a mall near Rechovot and we stopped in at the grocery store to buy some vitamins for the kids. As an aside, there are about a zillion brands of kosher vitamins for sale in Israel, in every possible form and size. It's truly amazing. In any case, I don't like to buy new vitamins until we've run out, but our local store stopped carrying our brand, so she walked in to check. When she got to the shelf she took one look at the product which was selling for 47 shekel and said, "Wow. It's way cheaper than where we buy it." (It was at the same chain.) Then we looked at the other boxes of the same product. 67 shekel - the normal price. Which brought us to our quandary.
Is it right to purchase a product when you know definitively that it was mis-tagged? We put it down, picked it up, and then put it down again. Then I had a bright idea: "Maybe the store has a policy that it only charges the price as marked?" Then, the price of the item is whatever the price tag says it is, and not what the store marks the price as?
So I brought the item to the checkout counter. The lady scanned it and immediately noticed the difference in prices. Without either of us saying a word to each other, she marked it down to 47 shekel. I paid and we left the store.
Which brings me to my question: Should I have pointed out the difference in price and paid the extra amount (or not bought the item)? Did I have to do so, or would that just have been the nice thing to do? I'm really not sure about this one.

Cell Phone Manners

During my senior year of high school, Rav Meir Schlessinger - then the Rosh Yeshiva of Sha'alvim came to visit, deliver a shiur and interview. During the middle of his shiur, the secretary knocked on the door to the Beit Midrash and interrupted. Someone was on the phone for the Rosh Yeshiva; could he come and take the call? Rav Meir refused. "I'm in the middle of a shiur," he said. He then turned to us and commented, "Why is it that people rush to answer the phone? Here I am, sitting in front of you, in person. Why would I interrupt that conversation in order to speak to someone over a wire (this was before cellphones) who's probably hundreds of miles away?"
The story made enough of an impression on me that I remember it even today. I mention it because the notion of telephone ethics, and especially cellphone ethics, have gotten totally out of control.
Two recent articles, from very different sources come to mind. The NY Times ran a piece about the "question" of cellphone use in business meetings. I think that the Times thinks its rude to check your email or the internet during a meeting, but I'm not sure. Personally, I think it depends on the meeting. If it's a one on one meeting, then I would say it's rude. If it's a meeting with tons of people sitting there while someone drones on, what else should they do? It's a sure-fire sign that people are bored. Maybe then it's not the cellphone surfers who are rude, but the speakers who won't stop talking. (I've been to many a meeting like that.) It's interesting to note that smartphone rudeness lost the Democrats control of the NY State Senate. The Times reported that,

Tom Golisano, a billionaire and power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.

Even in politics, sometimes politeness pays.
I saw a very different source on this issue this week as well. In this week's B'ahavah V'emunah, a parshah newsletter published by Machon Meir (one of the zillions), Rav Aviner writes about the numerous negatives of cellphone use. In addition to physical danger, car accidents, cost, inappropriate content and other cellphone drawbacks, Rav Aviner writes,

הסלולרי האמור לחבר בין אנשים בחברוּת נעימה, לא פעם פוגע בה, כאשר באמצע שיחת רעים מתנתק אדם מבן שיחו כדי להשיב לצלצול. זו שערוריה. יש בדיחה עצובה על זוג שיצא לבלות יחד בבית קפה, אך לא יכלו לנהל שיחה כי הבעל ישב מול רעייתו ועסק בשיחות בסלולרי. אשתו התרחקה ממנו כמה מטרים, טלפנה לבעלה, והסבירה לו שזו הדרך היחידה שנותרה לה כדי לשוחח אתו. הוא הדין כאשר האדם מדבר עם ריבונו של עולם בבית הכנסת. כמעט כל תפילה רואים אדם קם באמצע ויוצא לדבר, והוא אינו קצין תורן או רופא כונן. וכן כמעט כל תפילה מופרעת על ידי צלצול.

The cellphone that was intended to connect people in pleasant friendship, many times harms it instead, when in the middle of a friendly chat one person separates himself from the conversation to answer a call. That's an outrage! There's a sad joke about a couple that went out together for coffee, but they couldn't conduct a conversation becaues the husband sat opposite his wife taking cell calls. His wife moved a few feet away, called her husband, and explained to him that this was the only way she had left to speak with him. The same is true when a person speaks to the Master of the Universe in shul. During practically every tefillah we see someone get up in the middle of davening and leave to take a call - and he's not an officer [in the IDF] on duty or a doctor on call. Nearly every tefillah is interrupted by the ringing of phones.

I feel a little guilty. This morning during mussaf (the silent one) my phone rang. While I quickly silenced the phone, I stole a glance and saw that it was my house. The kids. (Rena's in the States.) After I finished - faster than usual, I left to call and see who was killing whom. Thankfully, all was well. But I had done precisely what Rav Aviner described.
I'm not sure what Rav Meir would have said. On the one hand, maybe I shouldn't have brought the phone to davening - or at least turned it off. On the other hand, I think it's probably better that I made it to shul at all.

Slavery, and Not the Egyptian Kind

I'm writing this post in response to a friend of mine here in Yad Binyamin. He's decided that he wants to buy himself a slave. From Darfur. He figures that he will undoubtedly be improving the quality (and probably length) of his slave's life. He can't just bring some random guy over from Darfur, because no government would ever allow random Darfurian immigrants like that. So the only solution is to buy the man as his personal slave.
Despite my protests - and trust me, I protest - he claims that my arguments about the immorality of slavery are at best self-serving. Who cares about the morals and ethics of owning another human being when a person's life is at stake? For all my objections (he's somewhat persistent), he argues that in the end, whose plan works in the best interest of the poor man from Darfur: his, which brings him to a life of servitude but good treatment in Israel, or mine, which leaves him at the mercy of the new Dictator (er, President - hailed by the Arab League and under indictment by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges) of Sudan?
He's been bugging me to post this "moral dilemma" for a while now - so here it is. If you can propose a convincing argument (comment) as to why he should not try and buy a Darfurian slave, where both parties benefit - I'd really appreciate it.