I bring up the following topic because it is Rivka Cohen’s Bat Mitzvah and Rivka comes from a famous family who feeds us just about every week.

Rikva is the daughter of Cohen’s Cuisine, that is, Albert and Marla Cohen who are superb members of our Shabbat community. I have known them from my first days at HEA: they had just gotten married and were looking for their place in the Jewish community and they found us and we have been the beneficiaries. We love the Cohens and celebrate with them and Rivka today.

So I feel it appropriate today to talk about food. In particular, I want to speak about chickens. I have been dreaming about chickens, lately. Let me tell you why.

Many of us in the last year began thinking about our food and where it comes from. There is a growing and active Jewish Food movement in our country today. Young people are becoming more focused on the food they eat and where it comes from. They are, in fact, demanding that we look at the food industry to see what it says about us, about our connection to the environment and our connections, most importantly, to animals.

I gave a book review some months ago. The book I reviewed is entitled Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. He’s a Jewish author, an excellent writer and now, a vegetarian. He tries to tell us why. Most books written about food today are responses to Michael Pollan’s books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. I read both books and they changed me. Our natural food chain is broken. Farmers used to grow crops and raise animals, harvest them and eat them and there was certain equilibrium in the environment and in the world. The laws of kashrut were created in and for such a world. My assistant Joyce Perlmutter remembers as a girl her mother purchasing a chicken from a local farmer, giving it to her to walk over to the “schochet” and then bringing the carcass back home for her mother to pluck , soak, salt, cook and serve on the Shabbes dinner table.

Now, chickens are raised and housed by the millions, slaughtered in factory lines. Now Jewish mothers pick up their chickens in the aisles of King Soopers or East Side Kosher, all packaged and ready to cook. And they are inexpensive, about $3 a pound. This is really cheap when you consider how much work our grandmothers put into getting a chicken onto the dinner table.

To my mind, there is a problem here. Packages of chicken have misled us. They have fooled us in a way. I have eaten chicken and beef my whole life and I honestly never thought over much about the fact that I was eating the muscle of what was once a living and breathing creature. I knew that that was the case; I just never thought about it.

On the other hand, I have spoken about kashrut and kosher slaughter for the last 25 years. A shochet uses a knife, a “chalaf,” razor sharp with no nicks, so as not to pull the skin of the animal and hurt it. A swift stroke of the knife, no pain, humane, kosher. And the “shochet” needs to be a sensitive and loving soul who recognizes and is even pained a bit by the life he takes. Yet I had never seen kosher slaughter. What do the animals really go through in this process? Do they experience fear? Do they feel pain?

I wanted to find out. So, about twenty of us went up to a farm north of Commerce City and slaughtered and dressed 50 chickens with our own hands. Bob Goldman was our leader. Bob and I had talked a year ago about personally experiencing kosher slaughter. We thought it would be easiest to begin with chickens. One day we will witness the slaughter of bigger animals: goats, sheep and cows. But we thought we’d start with chickens. It took us a year to figure out how to do it and we finally made it happen this past Sunday.

The chickens we harvested grew up in a reasonably sized shed.

Our chickens were 12 weeks old. They had room to walk which made them smaller and their meat tougher than mass produced chickens. We picked them up, one by one, in their shed, tied their feet together, and held them gently upside down which calmed them. They seemed pretty content as we held them. I didn’t sense any fear in them. We brought them over to Hersh Brenner, a trained “shochet,” and he made the cut. The chicken’s wings began to flap, because, I imagine, it sensed its breathing was disrupted. The blood drained out as did its life in a few seconds. Holding the chicken, you could feel this process unfold. I now know why our tradition says that the life of an animal is in its blood. As the blood flowed out, the chicken relaxed and then it was still. We then had to dress the chicken which was hard work. Non-kosher chickens are scalded in boiling water after slaughter so the feathers essentially fall off. Kosher chickens cannot be scalded; they must have the feathers plucked, entrails removed, soaked in water and then salted. The plucking is incredibly time consuming and difficult. We skinned the animals so as not to have to pluck. That was very difficult as well. Tammy and I came home with ten fresh chickens. After the experience, I didn’t exactly expect that we would eat these chickens any time soon.

I am not a vegetarian, nor do I expect to be. Jewish tradition understands our natural human craving for meat. It also seems to indicate that eating meat is a compromise, of sorts. When the world was perfect (ie. in the Garden of Eden), mankind ate only fruits and vegetables as it says: “every herb yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree yielding fruit (Gen 1:29). With the descent of Noah into perfidy, God provided for the eating of animals, but the number of permitted animals was severely limited and the slaughtering of those animals, carefully prescribed. And one could not eat the blood, which was understood to be the life force of the animal given to that animal by God. Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the great theological luminaries in the early 20th Century believed that “the enlightened man of the future [will] shun the eating of meat as an act of compassion for animal life….After Adam’s disobedience, when man disclosed his low moral state, God compromised and allowed him to be a meat eater. But on reaching his true spiritual maturing he was to return to his original innocence” (Bokser, p. 22-23). In fact, believed Rav Kook, when the world is perfected, there will be no more carnivores as even the lion and the lamb will lie down together. There will be no more killing of any sort.

But, of course, we are far from a perfect world.

I think we all learned something about killing, this past Sunday. We all experienced what it felt like to have the life flow out of an animal. We witnessed a “shochet” who did his work with piety, humility and exacting care. We all experienced how difficult and slow the process is in taking animal life and preparing it for our own consumption. It was a deliberate process, a process limited and specific and intentional. It was hard to do.

That, I think, is the point of kashrut. If we care about the life of a simple animal, then will we not care all the more so, about the highest form of life on earth, human life?

So what about the chickens we now have in our freezer? I was somewhat relieved that the first night of Shavuot limited us to milchigs. But I was determined to cook up one of our chickens for the second night of Shavuot when meat is permitted. Kivi and I prepared the chicken, by smothering it with all kinds of spices and bread crumbs –buried it, more like, to disguise it. I didn’t want it to look like a chicken. I served it up on the dinner table and Tammy and I looked at it and looked at each other and we couldn’t eat it. Just couldn’t do it.

I don’t know what this means, just yet. We have 9 other chickens in our freezer and I will not let them go to waste. Typically at our Shabbat dinner table, my family of six can consume at least the parts of four chickens. I now know what it takes to kill and prepare four chickens. What will we serve next Friday night? Probably…..chicken.

We will continue with this project. I encourage everyone to join us, at least once, to see what we truly mean by kashrut. To see what it really means to eat animals. To understand what it really means to be a Jew who cares about life, all life.
Rabbi Bruce Dollin