Passover, a time to embrace compassion for animals |
Farm animals are integral to the Torah reading read on the intermediate Sabbath of Passover. Exodus 34 refers prominently to the Decalogue which notes (in Exodus 20) that farm animals, like their owners, must rest fully during the Sabbath; the oxen and donkey are even mentioned together in one heartbeat with one’s wife or slave as likely targets of coveting, or likely to be obsessively desired by others. Furthermore, in-as-much as the Israelites are warned not to join Moses who alone is to scale Mt. Sinai to receive the Law, ‘’the flocks and herds” similarly must not be allowed to graze “before that mount”; in short, the Torah positions both humans and animals on an equal footing in the realm of adherence to God’s word.
The same Torah reading cites anew the prohibition against the mixing of meat and dairy which according to the Rabbis encompasses the eating and cooking of any such admixture, as well as benefitting from it otherwise. My new book, Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible (Wipf and Stock Publishers) cites the classical commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra, who relates this prohibition to a symbolic show of sensitivity to the mother bovine. Her maternal milk and her offspring’s flesh commingled into a culinary dish would constitute a morally disturbing situation.
In his German Bible translation of 1534, Martin Luther focused on the kid; it was still a suckling — too young to forfeit its life for a meal. Philo, too — whom I also quote in Taming the Beast — views this practice with revulsion, calling it “a callous and perverse disposition that is irreverent and lacks all feeling of compassion.’’ All in all, this meat-dairy admixture was designated to contain and minimize the exclusively-human proclivity for cruelty. Hence, Rav Kook’s assertion that the prohibition effectively reminds us that maternal milk of a livestock animal has only one purpose — nourishing the tender child, “her beloved,” just like the purpose is of one’s very mother’s milk. Indeed, as meat symbolizes death while milk symbolizes life, their mixture — as Taming the Beast explains the Torah prohibition against it – is to thwart any culinary enjoyment from it.
If you too seek to promote the cause of compassion for innocent animals, kindly recommend this book to your libraries and newspapers (to review it).
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