Vegetarianism and Judaism

Shalom! I am Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg. This video is about Judaism and Vegetarianism, your holy eating. So that is story is vegetarianism concourage by Judaism? Some would say yes. Is it required? No. What is the background about it? But first in the bible, Adam and Eve are vegetarians. Ten generations later according to the Torah, Noah is given a permission to eat meat after having been cooked up in the art with all that flesh, but God specifically says, you cannot eat blood. And the idea seems clearly that human being should not be too comfortable with blood because nobody would shed blood. And ten generations after that, Abraham comes around and he gets all kind of extra restrictions that the Jewish people still have in the form of dietary rules. Including, we can not just kill whatever we want. Only certain things can be killed for eating. The blood is to be drained, the insides have to be checked for disease, the meat and milk are not are be able to eaten together. You cannot hunt anything, you cannot trap anything. The only thing that you can eat or something that is killed a humanely quickly by people who are trained to do so. Now, what it is mean about vegetarianism? Having a permission to eat meat, it is something that we should or we should not do. But some Jews would say especially in [Foreign Language] in holidays slaughtered to be more appropriate and to be more dignified and to better honor god, we should have meat. But that maybe, something that reflects back on the many centuries when Jews could not afford to have meat and very few people have meat, there was a very huge luxury on the Sabbath. They however people eat meat constantly and fish and chicken and so that is the story? Well, there is a concept in Judaism that is called “mimmi sharad haddim” which means kinds of going above the law. The minimum is the law that you can always seek a higher ground. And many what I review as I do that eating a mostly or all vegetarian diet would be in that category with going beyond the law for a necessary matter, or for spiritually higher level of holy your eating. And why is that? Well, first it is important to know that the great Jewish mystics by or larger vegetarians and any of them believe the animals have souls. And for people that have close experience what they beloved dog for example, it might be possible to think the animals has soul. And certainly the difference between us and chimpanzees and purposes of certain other animals is not that great. In fact there was an interesting at the Torah before about some zoobing so excited that the elephant was able to recognize itself on the mirror. And then the other Torah on the paper said well that is interesting that we are happy to be off and can pass our test. But how many test the elephant would loge than we pass? So there was notion among at least the Jewish mystics that in some of the great modern Jews are grew up cork of Israel before became a state that vegetarianism is a higher level of religious observance. But today there is even perhaps and more important reason, for vegetarianism, and that is the environment. If you compare the amount of energy in resource of the takes to make pound of meat versus one pound of tofu, it is unbelievable. And so, for people who cut back a little bit there are lot on meat consumption, you are really helping the environment and conserving energy, not to mention the pocket. And so for those reasons, it seems to me that there is a definite mandatory is value in keeping vegetarian. Now, there are even higher levels on that, for example, my wife is basically a vegetarian but she says that when we only buy and we show by happy eggs, range free eggs, eggs or the chickens are able to be my feather that it can cap him the bad system but able to run free. Other people who eat only vigan foods, where they would not eat any food that comes from animals, when there are other still will only eat things that grow on trees like fooditarians and then others who wound not pick anything off the tree but only eat things that are already on the ground. She is always loved as a people trying to preserve life in a various ways. But it comes down to the minimum which is for Jew keeping kosher which is to tell own restrictions and disciplining ourselves and creating ethical eating and ethical lifestyle and love of life to a higher madrigal, a higher level which we would view as strict vegetarianism or liberal vegetarianism. Hope this helps clarify there is issue related Jewish eating and vegetarianism.