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A review by lpm100
The Kosher Pig: And Other Curiosities of Modern Jewish Life by Richard J. Israel
funny
informative
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
"The Kosher Pig."
5/5 stars
"An economy of words to express great ideas."
*******
Of the book:
-159 pages; 20 essays
-≈8pps/essay
-Needn't be read in order
**
This author was a very interesting, insightful and thoughtful person (who was incidentally a rabbi). In his lifetime, he was an avid runner, as well as a beekeeper in addition to all of his rabbinic duties.
He puts me in mind of what Andy Rooney would sound like if he tried to write on Jewish topics.
Or, maybe Bob Newhart.
He gets in and out in 159 pages, and, based on his own words that is what you would expect. (p.49-"Verbosity and bluffing are usually part of the same package. Inadequate preparation is one of the most frequent reasons people talk too long. It is usually more work to be brief.")
These essays are essentially his greatest hits over about a 30-year period and published in many different sources.
And to be clear: the content of this book is from 30 years ago - - and it was a different world then. The author is a ba'al teshuva to the Conservative movement--way back in the days when it was an ongoing movement. (It has shrunk to about 300 people these days; it seems like there are more Samaritans in the world than there are Conservative / Masorti Jews.)
This book is dated by the author's suggesting (in the context of recommending a prayer book) that "High on the list should be the Hertz prayer book, because of its rich content. It has another advantage [of being bilingual]." And this was way before Artscroll had taken over the world (p.37): we have a single dusty old edition of Hertz and the Soncino Chumash floating around in my Modern Orthodox shul--and almost certainly not a single copy in any of the other dozens of Haredi shuls around here.
But, even though the author has been dead for 23 years as of the time of this review..... I would say that his advice on giving a D'var Torah is the backbone of the book, and makes this particular book worth keeping for my own children. (There are many other good reasons to keep the book, but that in particular put it over the top.)
Strange But True ("Kosher Pig") questions that the rabbi has had to field:
1. One of his parishioners is a married non-Jewish woman and is having an affair with a married Jewish man. She wonders if he should not sleep with her when she is having her period.
2. Should a Jewish lesbian with a Jewish lover go to mikvah?
3. Should a woman with a yeast infection go home for a passover, since all yeast is forbidden at that time?
4. An orthodox Rabbi made a serious pass at a woman, and she wonders if she will have to go to the mikvah before she has an affair with him.
Other quotes:
1. (p.34): "They're not searching for what is absolutely true, at least not anymore. Maybe they did once, but by now they have either decided that they are not ever going to get answers to Big Questions, which they have accordingly stopped asking, or (more probably) they have forgotten what the questions were.
2. (p.53): "The standard Hasidic commentaries usually leave me cold as well, particularly if they explain the human and divine psyche in terms of the Sefirot, the Kabbalistic system.... I never like the way they dissolve the text and dehistoricize it to make it mean something altogether different from what it says.
3. (p.131): "it was impossible to participate in the games without paying one's respects to the gods of the Greek pantheon. Today's ritual of carrying the Olympic torch is a vestigial relic of the Greek torch races in which fire was brought from one god's sacred altar to another."
4. (p.115): "1 lb of Honey is the life's work of about 900 bees. They have had to fly distance which is equivalent to many times around the world in order to gather it. Experiencing that fact makes it impossible for me to deal casually with my honey. It is not an exaggeration to say that I find it a holy product."
5. (p.151): "My home synagogue was one of the last holdouts of radical Reform Judaism. Major Services were held only on Sunday mornings. Jewish holidays were not observed on the dates they fell according to the Jewish calendar, but instead, on the nearest Sunday."
6. (p.152): "Our family regularly celebrated holidays, though hardly in what could be called traditional fashion. Bread was not served during Passover, but there was no reason to remove the bacon from the house. We celebrated Hanukkah.... But we gave presents for Xmas and even had a tree for a few years."
7.(p.154): "An apikorus, a knowledgeable atheist who rejects the tradition, gets a kind of grudging respect in Judaism. A mere ignoramus gets none."
8. (ibid): "'Cut it out, will you! Let's get the goddamn prayers written already.' at that instant, I definitively discovered that I was not in a place of Torah, but rather in a sophisticated trade school."
9. (p.41): "Teaching is the best way to learn."
Second Order Thoughts:
1. (p.84). The author makes an observation about the Jewish prohibition on non-jewish wine. It is interesting that the original prohibition was also on non-jewish bread and oil. And those things are now ignored. It's not such a hard step to imagine ignoring the prohibition on non-Jewish wine.
The Italqim drank non-Jewish wine for many centuries.
Also, if the point is to not drink with non-Jewish people, that can also be short-circuited by the fact that you CAN drink beer and liquor with then.
2. Because the books that this author mentions (Soncino; Hertz), are so obscure and so far out of date, it might be enough for my kids to just pick them up and resurrect the arguments contained therein, since no one has read them in current times.
3. "We will not know in which way we will serve Hashem until we get there." (Shemot, 10:3)
One or two quotes from each chapter:
1. The Kosher Pig. (See "kosher pig" questions.)
2. The Late Jewish People. "I am told that black people, when speaking among themselves, May refer to Colored People's Time, and in some circles even talk about Old Colored People's Time (i.e., African time, which is a bit later than Ordinary Colored People's Time.)
3. Speed Davening. "Prayer is a curious business. There are no results that can be guaranteed in advance, or even in retrospect."
4. Torah and Telephones. "He believed that Torah could be seen in all of the new devices that affected 19th century life. From a train, one could learn that because of one second a person can miss everything. From a telegraph, that every word is counted and charged. From the telephone, that what we say here is heard there."
5. How to Survive Your Synagogue. "You may be flirting with Jewish observance, but it doesn't quite make sense to you yet. Or it makes a little sense, but you would like it to make a lot more sense for all the trouble it causes you." /"People who want to talk sit in the back rows. People who really want to daven sit forward. If you sit very far back you will probably only hear talk about the stock market or ball games.
6. How to give a D'var Torah. "There is a kind of person, often inexperienced, for whom making other Jews angry is a source of joy."/"Ramban's ideas are often wonderful, but he is very verbose and sometimes you can die waiting to get to them. A taste for him has to be cultivated."
7. Hospitality Should Be Practiced Religiously. "Every now and then we get a few duds--guests who pretend that they are visiting anthropologists come to watch our quaint Oriental rites."
8. On Baldness and the Jewish Problem. "Others, unable to keep them in place, whose kippa'ot are seldom on on their heads but always on their minds develop a kippah tic, forever reaching up to put the little rascal back in place."
9. Jewish Haute Cuisine/Kosher in the Clouds. "When I started observing the kosher food rules, I viewed my decision to do so as a very private one, something between me and the Holy One. It did not occur to me that if you want to keep kosher at 30,000 ft, a lot of other people are involved as well."/"Now, you really have to have a religious mandate or a very specialized taste for bland brisket to enjoy kosher food on an airplane, because that is all you are likely to get."
10. Fast Food. "This may be hard to believe after one is 20 or so hours into a fast, but most healthy adults can survive well over a month without eating."
11. Why Jewish Wine Tastes Terrible. "When Jews start to worry about a subject, they worry a lot."/"Perhaps one of the reasons there have been so few Jewish alcoholics until recent years is that for generations, the only wine Jews had to drink tasted awful. It is hard to develop a taste for wine if one is limited to Jewish wine."
12. Memorable Weddings. "The rowdiest wedding I ever officiated at was one where the groom's mother punched out the bride's mother over a derogatory remark the bride's mother made about the father of the groom."
13. Washing the Dead. "I had never really thought that being dead and healthy at the same time was one of the available options. It seemed to me that if you are dead, you are definitely not healthy." AND "After the washing, Gorelick puts some egg white mixed with a little vinegar on the eyes, under the nose, on the nipples and groin. I remember that it had to do with some complicated Kabbalistic doctrines of birth and death."
14. The Spurious Kaddish. "He wasn't introducing me, he was giving my eulogy, and a fake eulogy at that."
15. Bees and Bee-ing. "Even though the Roman conquest was cruel, the Romans did bring with them those gentle Italian honey bees we use to this day."/"after the Roman conquest, the Jewish attitude to bees changes. Rabbinic literature begins to discuss systematic bookkeeping, controlling swarms and the crushing of combs to remove honey."
16. Jews and Wasps. "Bees eat only sweet things. Wasps can be interested in sweets, but they like meat and fats even more."/"..... Bait and switch technique. A splendid plate of food is placed outside of the sukkah so that the wasps can eat the decoy food and ignore what is on the inside. Unfortunately, the wasps never seem to know which plate is intended specially for them. They just divide up forces and enjoy."
17. Judaism and Jogging. "Within the gymnasium, there was a considerable amount of sexual activity. Heterosexuality was coming to the classical Greek mind, a moderately dull option available to any run of the mill animal. Homosexuality was the uniquely human act, the bit of culture and civilization that could be added to ordinary sex..... Pederasty was a commonplace feature of the gymnasium."
18. The Piece of Pork. "By this time, it was a huge piece of ham they had fed the rabbi's dog. By the third day, it was practically a whole suckling pig. Each time they retold the story in my presence to other men in the firehouse, both the piece of pork, and Giggles gusto in eating it had grown."
19. Hives and Blisters. "Want to come I foolishly opened a hive shortly after a rainstorm. When they can't earn a living, bees become very irritable. Within 30 seconds, I have 60 stings on each ankle."/"some months ago, I ran my third 50-mile race. It took more than 9 hours...."
20. You Can't Do It All On One Foot. "I did not find the idea of chosenness to be a self-aggrandizing embarrassment. I took it to mean that the Jew still has a role to play in Gd's plan for the resolution of history. I see no great intellectual scandal in assuming that Gd wants to work out history through particular peoples as opposed to all of humanity together. One makes as much or as little sense as the other."/"The question of the divinity of the law would just have to wait."
*******
New Vocabulary:
(cutting the)Gordian knot
"The Kosher Pig."
5/5 stars
"An economy of words to express great ideas."
*******
Of the book:
-159 pages; 20 essays
-≈8pps/essay
-Needn't be read in order
**
This author was a very interesting, insightful and thoughtful person (who was incidentally a rabbi). In his lifetime, he was an avid runner, as well as a beekeeper in addition to all of his rabbinic duties.
He puts me in mind of what Andy Rooney would sound like if he tried to write on Jewish topics.
Or, maybe Bob Newhart.
He gets in and out in 159 pages, and, based on his own words that is what you would expect. (p.49-"Verbosity and bluffing are usually part of the same package. Inadequate preparation is one of the most frequent reasons people talk too long. It is usually more work to be brief.")
These essays are essentially his greatest hits over about a 30-year period and published in many different sources.
And to be clear: the content of this book is from 30 years ago - - and it was a different world then. The author is a ba'al teshuva to the Conservative movement--way back in the days when it was an ongoing movement. (It has shrunk to about 300 people these days; it seems like there are more Samaritans in the world than there are Conservative / Masorti Jews.)
This book is dated by the author's suggesting (in the context of recommending a prayer book) that "High on the list should be the Hertz prayer book, because of its rich content. It has another advantage [of being bilingual]." And this was way before Artscroll had taken over the world (p.37): we have a single dusty old edition of Hertz and the Soncino Chumash floating around in my Modern Orthodox shul--and almost certainly not a single copy in any of the other dozens of Haredi shuls around here.
But, even though the author has been dead for 23 years as of the time of this review..... I would say that his advice on giving a D'var Torah is the backbone of the book, and makes this particular book worth keeping for my own children. (There are many other good reasons to keep the book, but that in particular put it over the top.)
Strange But True ("Kosher Pig") questions that the rabbi has had to field:
1. One of his parishioners is a married non-Jewish woman and is having an affair with a married Jewish man. She wonders if he should not sleep with her when she is having her period.
2. Should a Jewish lesbian with a Jewish lover go to mikvah?
3. Should a woman with a yeast infection go home for a passover, since all yeast is forbidden at that time?
4. An orthodox Rabbi made a serious pass at a woman, and she wonders if she will have to go to the mikvah before she has an affair with him.
Other quotes:
1. (p.34): "They're not searching for what is absolutely true, at least not anymore. Maybe they did once, but by now they have either decided that they are not ever going to get answers to Big Questions, which they have accordingly stopped asking, or (more probably) they have forgotten what the questions were.
2. (p.53): "The standard Hasidic commentaries usually leave me cold as well, particularly if they explain the human and divine psyche in terms of the Sefirot, the Kabbalistic system.... I never like the way they dissolve the text and dehistoricize it to make it mean something altogether different from what it says.
3. (p.131): "it was impossible to participate in the games without paying one's respects to the gods of the Greek pantheon. Today's ritual of carrying the Olympic torch is a vestigial relic of the Greek torch races in which fire was brought from one god's sacred altar to another."
4. (p.115): "1 lb of Honey is the life's work of about 900 bees. They have had to fly distance which is equivalent to many times around the world in order to gather it. Experiencing that fact makes it impossible for me to deal casually with my honey. It is not an exaggeration to say that I find it a holy product."
5. (p.151): "My home synagogue was one of the last holdouts of radical Reform Judaism. Major Services were held only on Sunday mornings. Jewish holidays were not observed on the dates they fell according to the Jewish calendar, but instead, on the nearest Sunday."
6. (p.152): "Our family regularly celebrated holidays, though hardly in what could be called traditional fashion. Bread was not served during Passover, but there was no reason to remove the bacon from the house. We celebrated Hanukkah.... But we gave presents for Xmas and even had a tree for a few years."
7.(p.154): "An apikorus, a knowledgeable atheist who rejects the tradition, gets a kind of grudging respect in Judaism. A mere ignoramus gets none."
8. (ibid): "'Cut it out, will you! Let's get the goddamn prayers written already.' at that instant, I definitively discovered that I was not in a place of Torah, but rather in a sophisticated trade school."
9. (p.41): "Teaching is the best way to learn."
Second Order Thoughts:
1. (p.84). The author makes an observation about the Jewish prohibition on non-jewish wine. It is interesting that the original prohibition was also on non-jewish bread and oil. And those things are now ignored. It's not such a hard step to imagine ignoring the prohibition on non-Jewish wine.
The Italqim drank non-Jewish wine for many centuries.
Also, if the point is to not drink with non-Jewish people, that can also be short-circuited by the fact that you CAN drink beer and liquor with then.
2. Because the books that this author mentions (Soncino; Hertz), are so obscure and so far out of date, it might be enough for my kids to just pick them up and resurrect the arguments contained therein, since no one has read them in current times.
3. "We will not know in which way we will serve Hashem until we get there." (Shemot, 10:3)
One or two quotes from each chapter:
1. The Kosher Pig. (See "kosher pig" questions.)
2. The Late Jewish People. "I am told that black people, when speaking among themselves, May refer to Colored People's Time, and in some circles even talk about Old Colored People's Time (i.e., African time, which is a bit later than Ordinary Colored People's Time.)
3. Speed Davening. "Prayer is a curious business. There are no results that can be guaranteed in advance, or even in retrospect."
4. Torah and Telephones. "He believed that Torah could be seen in all of the new devices that affected 19th century life. From a train, one could learn that because of one second a person can miss everything. From a telegraph, that every word is counted and charged. From the telephone, that what we say here is heard there."
5. How to Survive Your Synagogue. "You may be flirting with Jewish observance, but it doesn't quite make sense to you yet. Or it makes a little sense, but you would like it to make a lot more sense for all the trouble it causes you." /"People who want to talk sit in the back rows. People who really want to daven sit forward. If you sit very far back you will probably only hear talk about the stock market or ball games.
6. How to give a D'var Torah. "There is a kind of person, often inexperienced, for whom making other Jews angry is a source of joy."/"Ramban's ideas are often wonderful, but he is very verbose and sometimes you can die waiting to get to them. A taste for him has to be cultivated."
7. Hospitality Should Be Practiced Religiously. "Every now and then we get a few duds--guests who pretend that they are visiting anthropologists come to watch our quaint Oriental rites."
8. On Baldness and the Jewish Problem. "Others, unable to keep them in place, whose kippa'ot are seldom on on their heads but always on their minds develop a kippah tic, forever reaching up to put the little rascal back in place."
9. Jewish Haute Cuisine/Kosher in the Clouds. "When I started observing the kosher food rules, I viewed my decision to do so as a very private one, something between me and the Holy One. It did not occur to me that if you want to keep kosher at 30,000 ft, a lot of other people are involved as well."/"Now, you really have to have a religious mandate or a very specialized taste for bland brisket to enjoy kosher food on an airplane, because that is all you are likely to get."
10. Fast Food. "This may be hard to believe after one is 20 or so hours into a fast, but most healthy adults can survive well over a month without eating."
11. Why Jewish Wine Tastes Terrible. "When Jews start to worry about a subject, they worry a lot."/"Perhaps one of the reasons there have been so few Jewish alcoholics until recent years is that for generations, the only wine Jews had to drink tasted awful. It is hard to develop a taste for wine if one is limited to Jewish wine."
12. Memorable Weddings. "The rowdiest wedding I ever officiated at was one where the groom's mother punched out the bride's mother over a derogatory remark the bride's mother made about the father of the groom."
13. Washing the Dead. "I had never really thought that being dead and healthy at the same time was one of the available options. It seemed to me that if you are dead, you are definitely not healthy." AND "After the washing, Gorelick puts some egg white mixed with a little vinegar on the eyes, under the nose, on the nipples and groin. I remember that it had to do with some complicated Kabbalistic doctrines of birth and death."
14. The Spurious Kaddish. "He wasn't introducing me, he was giving my eulogy, and a fake eulogy at that."
15. Bees and Bee-ing. "Even though the Roman conquest was cruel, the Romans did bring with them those gentle Italian honey bees we use to this day."/"after the Roman conquest, the Jewish attitude to bees changes. Rabbinic literature begins to discuss systematic bookkeeping, controlling swarms and the crushing of combs to remove honey."
16. Jews and Wasps. "Bees eat only sweet things. Wasps can be interested in sweets, but they like meat and fats even more."/"..... Bait and switch technique. A splendid plate of food is placed outside of the sukkah so that the wasps can eat the decoy food and ignore what is on the inside. Unfortunately, the wasps never seem to know which plate is intended specially for them. They just divide up forces and enjoy."
17. Judaism and Jogging. "Within the gymnasium, there was a considerable amount of sexual activity. Heterosexuality was coming to the classical Greek mind, a moderately dull option available to any run of the mill animal. Homosexuality was the uniquely human act, the bit of culture and civilization that could be added to ordinary sex..... Pederasty was a commonplace feature of the gymnasium."
18. The Piece of Pork. "By this time, it was a huge piece of ham they had fed the rabbi's dog. By the third day, it was practically a whole suckling pig. Each time they retold the story in my presence to other men in the firehouse, both the piece of pork, and Giggles gusto in eating it had grown."
19. Hives and Blisters. "Want to come I foolishly opened a hive shortly after a rainstorm. When they can't earn a living, bees become very irritable. Within 30 seconds, I have 60 stings on each ankle."/"some months ago, I ran my third 50-mile race. It took more than 9 hours...."
20. You Can't Do It All On One Foot. "I did not find the idea of chosenness to be a self-aggrandizing embarrassment. I took it to mean that the Jew still has a role to play in Gd's plan for the resolution of history. I see no great intellectual scandal in assuming that Gd wants to work out history through particular peoples as opposed to all of humanity together. One makes as much or as little sense as the other."/"The question of the divinity of the law would just have to wait."
*******
New Vocabulary:
(cutting the)Gordian knot