This week’s Torah portion commands us to swear off cheeseburgers. Well not exactly. It was the rabbis that created the prohibition against mixing meat and milk products, but the foundation of the matter is indeed found in the Torah. Parshat Ki Tissa contains one of three instances in which the Bible warns us not to boil a kid in its mother’s milk.
To understand the rationale behind the “cheeseburger clause,” we may have to go back to the Book of Genesis. When Jacob, upon re-entering the Land of Israel after a prolonged absence, is brought word that his brother Esau is rapidly approaching accompanied by a band of 400 armed men, he is “greatly afraid and distressed”. The Torah records his apprehension in a heart-rending prayer in which he turns to God and begs to be delivered “from the hand of Esau … lest he come and smite me, the mother with the children”. Our forefather’s greatest fear is that mother and child be killed together.
Another biblical source that highlights the same underlying sensitivity is found in the prophet Hoshea. In describing the horrors and wanton destruction brought about by war, he depicts it as a time “when the mothers were dashed to pieces with their young”.
The Bible is keenly concerned to avoid the terrible tragedy feared by Ya’acov and described by Hoshea, and its spreads forth its mercy not only upon human beings but upon animals as well. The Book of Leviticus warns “whether it be a cow or a ewe, you shall not kill it and its young both in one day”. In addition, the Book of Deuteronomy warns against plucking a mother bird from her nest together with her young. Rather we are commanded to send away the mother bird guarding her nest before one takes the eggs or the chicks. If you must take the young, then the mother bird is to be spared.
The illustrious Maimonides pinpoints the focus of the Torah’s concern in both these cases on the suffering of the mother, who is forced to witness the demise of her progeny: He explains in his Guide to the Perplexed that “the prohibition of slaughtering the mother and her offspring on the same day is a safeguard, lest one come to kill the offspring in front of its mother”. Similarly, in the case of the commandment to send away the mother bird guarding her nest before one takes the eggs or the chicks, he writes, “by doing so, her anguish is minimized when the eggs and chicks are taken away”.
However, Maimonides’ predecessor, the exegete and philosopher Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra, takes a slightly different tack. The objective, he seems to opine, is not so much to limit the emotional pain experienced by the mother bird as it is to prevent the development of moral callousness in the hearts and psyches of human beings.
That being the case, he connects the prohibition in this week’s Torah reading against seething a calf in its mother’s milk to this commandment concerning the mother bird. Both, as well as the prohibition against slaughtering the mother and its young on the same day, are fences against human cruelty. What could be more symbolic of the worst sort of cruelty than to take the mother’s milk that was created to nurture and nourish the young animal, and to use it as an instrument of the youngster’s destruction? What greater perversion could there be of the beneficent ways of the merciful God? As such, this precept comes to uplift and to sensitize, serving as another bulwark against the malignant cancer of callousness that is so likely to spread in the human soul as we engage in the slaughter of animals and the preparation of their flesh for our food.
No wonder, then, that our tradition built once fence after another, mandating the complete separation of meat and milk, in an effort to keep us forever distant from the cruelty of heart that would turn life giving milk into an agent of death. Yes indeed, there is much more to the great American cheeseburger than meets the eye.
Avraham
Pronounced: AHVR-rah-ham, Origin: Hebrew, Abraham in the Torah, considered the first Jew.
Torah
Pronunced: TORE-uh, Origin: Hebrew, the Five Books of Moses.
