 So, I often have meetings with people who are looking to either reconnect with Judaism after having been away from it for a long time, or people who are looking to connect with Judaism for the first time in their lives. And usually, what I'm asked is to give these people a recommendation for a synagogue they can attend. And although it's true that synagogues are very important, it's a very central part of Judaism. The truth is that the home is the true center of Jewish life. The real center of Jewish life is the home, not the synagogue. After all, the truth is that the home is where we spend most of our time. And even, for example, the Shabbat, the Sabbath, and the holidays, we do spend time in the synagogue, but only a few hours. Most of the celebration, most of the observance of the Sabbath and the holidays, takes place mainly at home. Because of this, a Jewish home will have numerous artifacts, items often displayed year-round that are used for these festive occasions. For example, for the holiday of Chanukah, takes place usually in the winter. So the practice of Chanukah is to light a candle each night in increasing numbers. There's one candle the first night, two candles the second night, three candles the third night, until the eighth night when you have eight candles. And so just about every Jewish home has what is referred to as a Chanukah, a special candle labra that contains eight places for candles. Usually there's another one, a ninth that's another candle used to light the other ones. But that is usually on display in any Jewish home. It's not just put in a closet somewhere. So one of the ways you'll know that you're in a Jewish home is you'll usually see a Chanukah. Also, almost every Jewish home that pays attention to Jewish living will have special candle holders for lighting Shabbat candles and holiday candles. Every Shabbat begins with the lighting of two candles as well as every Jewish holiday. So usually these are not just candles that are stuck on, you know, a piece of tin foil. Usually people will have nice candle holders often they inherited from a mother or grandmother. But this is also one of the things that you'll see in a Jewish home. Also you'll often see people have special wine goblets because every Shabbat and holiday meal begins with holding up a cup of wine and saying a blessing on wine. So there are all different kinds of wine goblets, some are made out of metal, some are made out of porcelain. But these are the kind of artifacts of items that, again, are present in homes that live according to the teachings of Judaism. There'll often be a special tray on display in the home where the challah, the special bread, usually a Sabbath meal or a holiday meal, begins with having special braided bread called challah. There's often a special basket and often a special cover that covers the bread. So these are the kind of items, and I'm not going to show you all of them tonight, but these are often very, very plainly evident and on display in Jewish homes. For the end of Sabbath, the ceremony is called hafdalah where we take a special candle, a braided candle, a special container for spices, and so often there's a special tray that holds the candle, that holds a special cup for the wine at the end of the Sabbath, holds the spice box, and so that's another item that you'll see on display. For the holiday of Passover, there's a special plate that all the items from the Passover Seder are on that plate. For people that celebrate Sukkot in the fall, the Feast of Tabernacles, many people will have a special box, a special container, to hold their etroge. The etroge is called a citron. This is my etroge from about 10 years ago. It used to be much bigger, much more yellow. It happens after a year, it dries up, but people will have a special box. Some of the boxes, again, may have different kinds of metals, some out of wood. And so, again, a Jewish home is one where there'll be many artifacts and items that tell you that you're in a Jewish home. For people that live in a house rather than an apartment and they're able to build a sukkah, a special booth, a special hut for the holiday of Sukkot, so they'll have that in their home. Usually they'll be stored in a basement or in a garage, but those are all in the home. People will have for themselves a special scroll for the holiday of Purim we had recently, so you could theoretically have just a printed scroll of Esther. Scroll of Esther, and the Giyot Esther is a book in the Bible, so you could actually have a printed book, but some people go to the expense of actually having a special scroll written on parchment. And again, these are among many of the items that would be displayed in a Jewish home. And then there are many things that are displayed, not in relationship to holidays, but there are things that are displayed in a Jewish home that are used throughout the year every day of the year. For example, this is a very common item. This is called, usually we call this a pushka, or an English charity box. But people will often have many boxes. Many Jewish institutions will have their own, either a can that usually has a hole on top, but you can insert money. Sometimes they're decorated. My wife recently got a Hello Kitty charity box. But again, this is something that's important in Jewish home, because giving charity is an incredibly important activity. It's really important to get children involved. So children that get allowance, for example, they should be trained to put some of their allowance money either every week or every day into a pushka, a charity box. One of the things that Jews do every day is ritual washing of the hands. So the first thing that we do in the morning is to take a special cup. It doesn't have to look exactly like this, but usually it'll have two handles. It's filled with water. And then it's poured over each hand, one, two, three, four, five, six. Also hands are washed before the eating of bread. So this kind of item will be, again, very, very prominently around in a Jewish home. Also critical to have in a Jewish home is a calendar. When does the Shabbat begin? Does it begin at 7.30 or 7.40? When does Shabbat end? When does the holiday begin? When is the holiday taking place? What special days are we having in the Jewish calendar? What will be the Torah portion read this week in the synagogue on Shabbat? So these are, again, available very readily all over the place. There was a time, by the way, in Jewish history when we didn't have access to a calendar. It's one of the reasons why outside of Israel our holidays don't last seven days. They last eight days, right? In Israel where people were able to know during the time of the temple when the holiday actually began. So they had a holiday. The Bible speaks of a Passover being seven days. But outside of Israel, if you were in Babylon, for example, it would take people time to get from Israel to Babylon on horseback. And you wouldn't know necessarily when the holiday began. So to make sure you were keeping the holidays properly, they added an extra day outside of Israel. Now you could ask a question which Atalmet asks. But today we have a calendar. We know exactly when the holidays begin and end. So Atalmet says, you know what? You may end up living in a time where you're living in a country where it becomes forbidden to have something like a Jewish calendar. Jews that were living in Soviet Russia were not allowed to have Jewish books or Jewish calendars. So the Atalmet said that in order to make sure that we'll always know when the holiday is outside of Israel, we keep it for two days outside of Israel. But a calendar is always an important thing to have. Some people have what is referred to as a shiviti. There's a verse in the book of Psalms which says, shiviti adonai l'negdi tamid, I set God before me at all times. So some people will have this, for example, at the place in their home where they pray. Many synagogues will have this written above the holy ark. But there are many different kinds of Jewish art, Jewish ritual objects that are present in Jewish homes all over the place. Some Jewish homes will have, there's one on the wall right there, but the cameras can't see that. Some Jewish homes will have a sign that says Mizrach. Where is the eastern wall? How do you know where the east is? Because you're supposed to pray facing the east. So when we look at the decor of a Jewish home, these are just some of the things that you'll find. One of the things that's more unusual, but some people make it a point of practicing it, is that there is a concept in Judaism of always remembering the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the destruction of Jerusalem. We mentioned last week that even at a Jewish wedding, at the moment when people are going through their happiest occasion, the groom will smash a glass under the wedding canopy to remember the destruction of the temple. So there is a practice some people have of leaving part of their home unfinished, part of the wall unpainted or the wall unfinished. Usually it's about 18 by 18 inches. And it's again done as a way of never forgetting the fact that our lives today are not complete because we don't have our holy temple. Now the truth is the first thing you encounter when you enter a Jewish dwelling that lets you know you're coming into a Jewish home is something called a mezuzah. A mezuzah actually literally means doorpost. We'll see in a few moments that a mezuzah is a special parchment scroll that's written. They're often almost always put into a special container. So the word mezuzah has come to mean both the doorpost itself, the scroll itself and the actual scroll with the container. And this is based upon a commandment in the scriptures in the Jewish Bible. It's found both in Deuteronomy chapter six verse nine in Deuteronomy chapter 11 verse 20, which says you shall inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Now we'll see in a moment when it says inscribe them, what is it referring to? But the idea of inscribing them on the doors of your home refers to the writing of two passages from the Bible onto a parchment scroll. And these two passages are the two paragraphs, two of the three paragraphs of the most central prayer in Judaism called the Shema Yisrael here, O Israel. So the first paragraph I'll just read for you. It comes from the book of Deuteronomy chapter six verses four through nine, where it says, here O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all your soul and with all of your resources. And these matters that I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children and you shall speak of them while you sit in your home, while you walk on the way, when you go to sleep and when you rise in the morning. You shall bind them as a sign upon your arm and as ornaments between your eyes and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and upon your gates. So this paragraph speaks about central ideas of Judaism such as the unity of God, the love of God, the importance of studying God's Torah. And then the second paragraph that's written on these scrolls is from the book of Deuteronomy chapter 11 verses 13 to 21. I'm not gonna read the whole passage but that passage basically speaks about and teaches that our fate and our destiny both as individuals and as a nation hinges on our obedience to God's commandments. That paragraph deals with also the idea of divine providence and the idea of reward and punishment. That's on one side of this parchment. On the other side of the parchment is written one of God's names in Hebrew, the name Shaddai. Shaddai is often understood to be a contraction of the Hebrew words, Shana'em Ar-Dai, that God said enough because when God unfurled the creation process, he didn't let it go on forever. After six days at the beginning of the Sabbath, God said enough, stop. The process of creation is coming to an end. The name Shaddai though is also understood as an acronym of three letters, Shindalid Yud which stands for Shomer Daltot Yisrael, the guardian of the doors of Israel. Now before the Jewish people left Egypt and in order for them to merit being saved from the Egyptian servitude, they had to do something that was an act of bravery. They had to take a lamb which in Egypt was worshiped as a deity. The Egyptians worshiped the lamb as a God and the Israelites had to take a lamb and they had to sacrifice it. They had to kill the deity worshiped by the Egyptians. And then they had to take the blood and they had to put the blood on the lentils on the doorposts of their homes. The lamb that was then eaten by the family, that was actually the first Passover meal. The Torah describes that when the angel of death came to carry out the last, the 10th of the 10 plagues which was supposed to be the slaying of the firstborn, when that angel saw the blood on the doorposts of the Jewish homes, that was an indication that this is a home of Jewish people, the angel of death passed over to homes of these Jewish people, hence the name of the holiday passed over and they were saved. So already 3,300 years ago, the doorpost of our home was a sign that this is a Jewish home. And ever since that time, our doorposts became one way of identifying that the people living inside this dwelling place were Jews. It's interesting that you go to many places in the world. For example, you can go to Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem now. Arab neighborhoods that used to be Jewish neighborhoods and you can see in the concrete, in the rock of their front doors, it carved out an area where the mezuzah was put at one point. It was removed by the Arabs that are now living there. But you can see in many homes, if you go to New York, where I grew up, you can still see probably on the doors of many apartments the residue of a mezuzah that was sitting on the door for decades and now you can still see there was something once there. To be kosher, to be an appropriate mezuzah, a mezuzah has to be written by a specially trained scribe that's called a sofar. A sofar doesn't only write this mezuzah, a sofar is the person that writes the Torah scrolls that we read in our synagogues. A sofar will write a scroll of Esther. The sofar will write the phylacrophies that's filling that a worn on the head and on the arm. It has to be written with a special quill pen with special black ink and has to be written on the parchment of a kosher animal. It can't have a Xeroxed mezuzah. Again, the scroll itself is often called a mezuzah and the way it is written has to be written according to very precise Jewish laws. The formation of how each letter looks is very precise. It's not so simple if the scribe makes a mistake to then correct the mezuzah. They're very complex laws about the writing of a mezuzah. The person that does it isn't only someone that's skilled as an artist, they have to be as well a very religious pious Jew. Because these handwritten scrolls require a lot of time and expertise, so the starting price, normally, the basic starting price for a mezuzah is usually in the range of about $40 to $60 but they can be more expensive. That's for the parchment. For the cover, you can get a simple plastic one for a few dollars and sometimes the covers are beautiful or innate works of art that can cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I used to work in a bookstore, Jewish bookstore, where people would come in and they would say, I want to buy a mezuzah, how much is it? And I would say, well, back then it was $25 for the parchment, it's 50 cents for the plastic case. People unfortunately said, just give me the plastic case. So there's not much value in putting up just a little box on the door. The commandment really is to place the parchment scroll. Now because the letters on that parchment scroll can fade or crack due to humidity or to aging, the custom is to have a scribe check the parchment about once every three and a half years. That's the custom. I told a very amazing story a few years ago in another lecture where I had taken a trip to Cincinnati and unfortunately we hadn't checked our mezuzah in our home for many years. We let a number of years go by without checking it. We just were negligent. And we finally realized, you know, it's been quite a few years, we need to get them checked. So there happens to be someone in Toronto who will come to your home in the morning, take down all the mezuzah, if you live in an apartment that could just be four or five rooms. If you live in a home, you can have sometimes 20 mezuzah to even more. So he'll come to your home, take them all down, check them and bring them back in the evening. So we had arranged that the day after I came back from this trip to Cincinnati, this fellow was gonna come and check our mezuzah. So I went to Cincinnati, I was there for a few days, I gave a number of lectures and then someone drove me back to the airport, a sort of unusual person. And as we were driving, he said to me, you know, I think you need to get your mezuzahs checked. And I was a little bit taken aback by this because you know, how did he know? So he said to me, I think you have a problem with the mezuzah on your front door. Okay. And then he said to me, you know, on the second floor of your house, and now I got nervous. How does he know I have a house? How does he know it has two floors? He says to me, on the second floor of your house, you've got a bathroom. Okay, that's not so strange. He said, across from the bathroom, you have two rooms. That's true. He said to me, you have a problem with the mezuzahs on those two rooms as well. And now I'm sort of a little bit bewildered. Here's someone that's out of the blue telling me I need to get my mezuzahs checked, which is true. I just had it arranged it for the next day. And he tells me of all the mezuzahs, I have about 20 in my house. These three have a problem. So the fellow came the next day. It was a Thursday morning. He brought them back at night. And what do you know? Those three mezuzahs had problems. So I was a bit shocked and amazed. And I called up the people in Cincinnati who brought me out. And I said, does this fellow do this? He said, yes, he's able to do this. Go figure. The mezuzah, when you have a kosher mezuzah, so it's placed on the right hand side door post of all the entrances to a house. Some people think it only goes on the front door. But the scroll should go on every entrance to the home. And it has to be placed on the right side door post of every room of the dwelling. Except for let's say a bathroom or a small closet. If it's a huge walk-in closet, that would also require a mezuzah. And the mezuzah is placed on the lower part of the top third of the door post. So you don't put it in the middle of the door post. It's placed on the lower part of the top third. The custom among Ashkenazic Jews, these are Jews from Europe, is that we place our mezuzah on an angle slanted with the top pointing towards the room you're gonna enter. The custom among Svardic Jews, these are Jews from Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Africa, Iraq and Iran, is they place their mezuzah vertically. The mezuzah should be attached to the door post in a permanent manner with nails or screws or glue or double-sided foam tape. It should not be put up with tape that could very easily crack and fall down within a few weeks or a few months. Just before affixing the mezuzah to the door post, we recite a blessing in the same way that the practice is that every single time we do any commandment, we first recite a blessing. So the blessing for the mezuzah is blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us, he made us holy with his commandments and he has commanded us to affix the mezuzah. Some people have a custom of when they enter or exit a room placing their hands on the mezuzah and then kissing their hand as a way of showing their affection for the commandment and also as a way of connecting with it. The mezuzah is supposed to be a opportunity to reflect and to think and not go through our movements unconsciously. The word mezuzah itself comes from the root meaning zaz, zaz which means movement. And so the purpose of the mezuzah actually is that as we move through our home from one room to the other and when we leave our home, we should be conscious of God, conscious of his unity, conscious of the message of the mezuzah. It becomes a moment that's a meditative moment. So the mezuzah basically is a very powerful symbol, a very powerful tool like tying a string on your finger which is to remind us of God's presence in our homes, in our homes and as we leave our homes. Now we learned a few weeks ago that Jewish living, the enterprise of Judaism is summed up by the two parts of a proclamation that the people of Israel made just as they were about to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai. And at that moment they said to God, whatever you are going to command us, naase venishma, we will do and we will hear, we will listen, which means basically that whatever you command us God, we commit ourselves to doing whatever you are going to command us and we will try to understand their meaning and their significance. When we say we will hear, we will listen, often we use that term, when we say to someone, I hear what you're saying, what you're really meaning is I understand what you're saying. So our commitment is not just to listen and to obey like robots, God, whatever you say I'll do, if you say jump I'll say how high, we're committing to more than that. We're saying to God we will do and we will try to understand. So therefore one of the most critical central basic activities of a Jew is studying the Torah. Studying the Torah both to learn how to live, the word Torah means instructions. So we wanna know how to live, what is God's will? What are God's instructions? There's a lot to learn in the Torah. But also to try to gain insight as we grow older to grow in our sophistication of appreciating and understanding the meaning, the symbolism, the significance, the relevance, the message of these instructions. That's our commitment. We will do and we will try to understand. Now the last of the 613 commandments in the Bible in the Torah, the Torah has 613 commandments. Number 613 is to write a Torah scroll. Now if you're interested in doing that, so you could either learn how to do it yourself and spend a year or two or three actually writing a whole Torah scroll or you can engage someone to write one for you or you can actually fulfill the obligation by being part of the writing of a Torah scroll. You can for example, if a scroll is being written in the city, you can sponsor a word or a letter or a sentence or a paragraph. But our sages teach us that you can fulfill the commandment to purchase, to own, to write a Torah scroll by purchasing religious books. And therefore in a Jewish home, one of the most important places is the Jewish library in that home. It is very important to have a library in a Jewish home that contains the Bible, that contains commentaries to the Bible, that contains books on Jewish thought, on Jewish philosophy, on Jewish inspiration, on Jewish history. There were so many, there's a myriad of topics within the field of Jewish study. So we should have access to these books in our home. Now today, the truth is, you can have an entire library on your cell phone. You can get on your computer a database that has 70, 80, 90,000 books and a DVD disc. But the truth is, we don't use these devices on Shabbat and on holidays. So we still need hard copy books in our home. And it's hard to curl up in bed with your cell phone. Some people do, but there's nothing like actually holding a book. So the library in our homes is an incredibly important place. Now next week, the last week of this series, we're going to be discussing the Shabbat and the Jewish holidays. There's a famous joke that you can summarize, sum up all the Jewish holidays in eight words. Those eight words, they try to kill us, we won, let's eat. There's this historical connection between Jews and food. Now when you think about it, how much time do we devote every day to thinking about what we're going to eat, to shopping for our food, to preparing our meals, to eating the meals. Eating is a very central activity in our lives, whether you're Jewish or not. It takes up a lot of our time and energy. As we go through the day, we become acutely aware of when we're hungry and we need to grab a snack. This entire realm of life is regulated by the Torah's dietary laws. The Hebrew word kosher simply means fit, proper or acceptable. That's all the word means. For example, you can have a kosher or non-kosher mezuzah. If the mezuzah was not written properly, if there's a mistake in the writing, if a letter was left out of a word, that mezuzah is not kosher. Or you can have a kosher or a non-kosher bill of divorce. If a couple is going to get divorced, the Bible says that the groom, the man, has to write a get, a bill of divorce for his wife and give it to her. So there are laws regarding regulating how a get is to be written. And you can have a kosher get and a non-kosher get. You could have a kosher or non-kosher sukkah. If you build a sukkah, a booth for the holiday of Sukkot, they were both kosher Sukkot, which are okay to use a non-kosher Sukkot. There are many, many laws that govern, that delineate how we're supposed to build a sukkah. So when speaking about food, kosher means that the food is acceptable to eat. So what I'd like to try and do tonight is quickly go through with you a basic understanding of the basic laws of Kashrut and then conclude tonight with sharing some simple ideas about what these laws might mean and their significance. So the most widespread misconception about Kashrut is that food is kosher if a rabbi blesses it. All right, someone once told a story about riding on a plane and the person in the seat next to them said, is the ham sandwich kosher if a rabbi blesses it? So that's not the definition of kosher. Although there are certain situations where it might seem like that and we'll do that a little bit later tonight. So let's go through briefly, we're not gonna do this, not gonna be comprehensive, you're not gonna learn everything there is to know about the dietary laws in 20 minutes, but I'll give you a general idea. First of all, there are means of determining whether or not a food generally can be eaten at all. So when it comes to land animals, the Torah tells us that any species that has two signs can be eaten. If a land animal has split hooves, like Spock, I guess when Spock was giving his blessing, live long and prosper. So there are animals whose hooves are split and the animal has to chew its cud. Animals that chew its cud have more than one stomach. So when they first chew their food and swallow it, it sort of hangs out in one of those stomachs and then this is not something that I would ever wanna do. They regurgitate their food, they chew it again and that's a strange way of eating, but there are animals that eat in that fashion, it's called chewing the cud. And so if an animal has those two characteristics, that kind of animal is an animal which may be eaten. For example, that would include cattle, sheep, goats, deer, bison, but if an animal has neither of those characteristics, let's say like a horse or a hippoponemus or a bear or a lion, so those animals cannot be eaten and even if it only has one of those characteristics, it can't be eaten. For example, a pig, a pig has split hooves but a pig doesn't chew its cud. And the rabbi's always said that the pig was a symbol of someone that's deceptive because the pig sits there, lies down there with its nice kosher hooves sticking out, big smile on its face. You see, I'm kosher, I got kosher hooves but you can't see the fact so easily that it doesn't chew its cud. So the Bible says that of all the animals that have only one characteristic, the pig is a problem because even though it has split hooves, it doesn't chew its cud. And then the Bible names three animals that don't have split hooves but they do chew their cud. For example, the camel or the hare or another one which is not so easy to identify, sometimes called the hyrax. That's not our point for tonight but the Bible mentions specifically four animals that have only one of these characteristics and they would not be kosher. When it comes to creatures that live in the water, either sea creatures or freshwater creatures, so they have also two signs that would make them kosher. They have to have fins and they have to have scales. Those kind of animals are kosher and may be eaten. Therefore, the kind of animals that are fish that are not aquatic animals, that are not kosher would be crabs, lobsters, shrimp, oysters, dolphins, eels, squid, et cetera. Those are all sea creatures and water creatures that don't have these signs and therefore are not kosher. When it comes to birds, animals that fly, the torah does not give any signs. Interestingly, there's no signs that are given. All the torah does give us is a list of the birds that may not be consumed and therefore everything else is okay. Now, one of the things that the rabbi has noticed is that all the animals on the forbidden list were either scavengers or birds of prey. So one general rule would be that if it's a scavenger or a bird of prey, we're not allowed to eat it. But the kind of birds that can be consumed would be common fowl like chicken, ducks, geese. These are all kosher. Turkey is somewhat controversial because we didn't have a tradition that turkeys were part of the list that was okay. When Jews first came to North America, there was a bit of un-clarity. Can you eat turkey? Can you not eat turkey? Most people today consider turkey to be a kosher species, but some people do stay away from it. Now, the Bible does permit certain winged insects. Not that I have any particular personal interest in eating them, but the Bible does speak about certain species of locusts or grasshoppers that may be eaten. The problem is that we're not very clear today about which species they are. So most people today do not eat any kind of winged creatures, although there are some Jews in the world that do have a tradition, and they will eat these kind of creatures. All rodents and reptiles and amphibians, these are all always not kosher. Another rule is that any derivative of a non-kosher animal may not be consumed. So for example, the milk of a pig or the milk of a horse cannot be consumed. An exception, by the way, is the honey that comes from a bee. Even though a bee is not kosher, we're able to eat honey that comes from a bee because the truth is that the honey does not really come from the bee. The honey comes from the nectar of the flower that the bee will hang around near, and it doesn't really, it's not produced so much by the body of the bee. The bee just basically houses the honey, but the source of the honey is the nectar. Now there are additional rules when it comes to the consumption of eating animals or birds. For example, just because an animal's species, like a cow, is okay, it doesn't mean that you just automatically eat any cow. So one of the most important rules is that the animal that is from a kosher species must be slaughtered according to Torah law. So if the animal died by itself, or if the animal was killed by another animal, or the animal was shot with a gun or an arrow, that would mean that the food is not kosher. You cannot eat from that animal. There's a special trained person who does the ritual slaughter. He's called a shochet. Takes years to learn how to perform this ritual slaughter. There's many complex laws. When I was in Israel studying for the rabbinate, we spent six months studying the laws of ritual slaughter, and I didn't become a ritual slaughterer. I just had to know a little bit about it. So it's a very, very complex body of law, and it requires not just theoretical knowledge, but the ritual slaughter has to get practical training in how to do it, and aside from the fact that the laws are very complex and it's a difficult skill to master, the shochet has to be someone who is pious. Has to be someone who is very, very pious and spiritual and religious as well. Now basically what is done is that a very special knife is used. It is extremely sharp, and it has to be regularly checked to make sure there are absolutely no nicks on the knife. When I was in Israel studying, I was brought a knife of a slaughterer that had been checked earlier in the day, and someone asked me to check the knife. Now the way the knife is checked is that you run your finger nail and flesh over the blade. You have to be very careful because it's very easy to lose a finger. So what I did was I closed my eyes and I very gently ran my finger nail and flesh of my thumb up and down this blade, and I did it for five minutes and I said, I cannot feel anything. It's very, very smooth, like a baby's bottom. That's how it seemed incredibly like glass to me. And the person that gave me the knife to look at said it was checked earlier in the day and there were three nicks in the knife that disqualified it. So they make sure to use an extremely sharp knife. And what happens is the blade is very quickly and smoothly severing both the trachea and the esophagus of the animal. And what this does is it also, while it does this, it severs the jugular vein, the carotid artery, and many other major blood vessels that carry blood to the brain. So what happens is the animal basically is rendered immediately unconscious and it dies very quickly. There have been many groups in Europe that tried to ban ritual slaughter, claiming it's cruel, and all of the scientific tests that were done, they did all kinds of electroencephalograms and different galvanic skin measurements. They did all kinds of scientific tests that showed that basically the process of ritual slaughter is painless. Another thing to bear in mind is the animal that is going to be slaughtered has to be totally healthy in order to eat it. Jewish law speaks about 70 different categories of abnormalities, diseases, and injuries that would render an animal not kosher, inedible. Now most animals, we presume that they are healthy, meaning unless you see before you do the slaughter and you wouldn't do it in that case, if you see that the animal has a broken leg, that's not considered to be an animal that you can slaughter. So usually an animal that's being brought to slaughter is assumed to be healthy. And therefore we don't normally check for all 70 of these potential abnormalities, but we do check for common problems. Now one of the common problems that can be found is in the lungs and the esophagus of the animal. There you might find an abnormality or growth or sometimes an animal when it eats, let's say hay or grass, it might eat a needle or a pin or something sharp that punctures the lung or the esophagus and that would make the animal not kosher. So what happens is after the animal is slaughtered and it could have been slaughtered perfectly in a perfectly fine way, they need to check the esophagus and the lungs. Now, if they check these organs and they find that the surface is perfectly smooth, there are no adhesions or punctures. So this animal is called glott. Glott is the word for smooth and it has the category of being an animal that's glott kosher, meaning when they check the lungs and the esophagus, there were no questions. It was totally smooth, no potential problems. Now, if they do check the lungs and the esophagus and that's so they find an adhesion, so they're allowed to check the adhesion, they do it by palpitating it, by handling the adhesion. Now, if they find that the adhesion basically falls apart by itself, it dissolves, there's nothing really there, so it's not considered to be a real adhesion, a real problem, a real abnormality and the animal can be eaten. If they do find that the adhesion is a real adhesion as a real problem, then the animal will not be kosher. But these animals, if they do this examination and turns out that the animal is okay, they're not called glott kosher because it wasn't entirely smooth. Now, there are people who, their personal practice is to say, I only will eat glott kosher food, I don't wanna get involved with the potential problem that there was a problem and it had to be checked, they just say, we'll just do away with all the problems and we'll only accept meat that is what they call glott. There are two other considerations that come into play when it comes to kosherut, when it comes to animals at least, one is that you cannot eat the sciatic nerve or the surrounding blood vessels of an animal, so that has to either be removed or the truth is it's too expensive normally to remove it. If you had someone that was a specialist that had to remove the sciatic nerve, the hindquarters of the animal would cost you $50,000 a pound. So what's normally done is that part of the animal is given away to non-kosher food distributors. But if you do have someone that's able to check it and remove it, you can eat the hindquarters. A second consideration is that all blood has to be drained from the meat before it's consumed. Now, most of the blood is drained when the animal is slaughtered, specifically because of the manner of slaughter when they sever these arteries in the neck and these blood vessels, most of the blood is drained at that point. The remaining blood in the meat of the animal is then removed by a process of soaking the meat, salting it and then rinsing it afterwards or the meat can be cleaned of its blood by broiling the meat over fire. But the removal of all the blood is a very important part of the kosher laws. Now, another major concern in the dietary laws is not cooking meat together with milk. That's meat or poultry together with milk or eating any meat or poultry at the same meal that was cooked together with milk. The truth is that Jewish law prohibits more than that. Jewish law requires not only cannot eat them together at the same time if they were cooked together, Jewish law requires that you have to wait a certain amount of time after eating meat before you consume dairy. There are different practices, different customs in terms of how long to wait. Jews from Holland will wait one hour, German Jews will wait three hours, virtually everyone else waits six hours. After having dairy, there's no requirement to really wait before you have milk. I'm sorry, after dairy, there's no real requirement to wait before having meat. All you need to really do is rinse your mouth, although some people will wait a half hour after dairy before eating meat and if you're having hard cheese like cheddar cheese, then you have to wait the full period of time between. Everything that's not meat or not dairy is called parov. Parov is basically what you call neutral. That would be things like bread, vegetables, fruit, etc. Nuts, seeds, and they may be eaten freely. These kind of things that a parov can be eaten with meat, with milk, anytime you want. There is a custom, by the way, of not eating fish and meat together, at least in the same course at a meal. So if you're having a big meal with a fish course and a meat course, the custom is to eat them on separate plates and at different times during the meal. Now because of the requirements to separate milk from meat, Jewish law basically requires separate dishes, separate utensils, separate silverware, separate pots and pans for meat and dairy. So in a traditional, normal Jewish home, it's customary to have two sets of silverware, two sets of pots and pans, etc. There will also be different table cloths that are used. There'll be a special table cloth for a milk meal, special table cloth for a meat meal, and there are tremendous problems with things like dishwashers and ovens, which we're not gonna have time to get into tonight. So dishwashers present all kinds of problems. Most people will designate their dishwasher for either only meat or only dairy. There may be ways of somehow negotiating some technical ways of using it for both, especially if you can get separate racks, but it's a complicated topic. The use of an oven for meat and dairy is a very complicated issue as well. Obviously you can never bake or cook in the oven at the same time, meat and milk. Whether or not you can use the same oven for meat and dairy at different times is a very complicated issue. There are ways of negotiating this issue. I cannot get into all the details tonight. Some people avoid the problem altogether by again either designating their oven as only meat or only dairy, or they will get two ovens. I've been to such homes. If you can afford it, if you have enough space, I've been to homes where there are two kitchens. I've been to homes where there's an entire dairy kitchen, entire meat kitchen. Now one further problem with the dietary laws is processed foods. Everything I've been discussing tonight is basically stuff that comes from Mother Nature. I'm talking about a chicken, an egg, milk, fruit, vegetables, milk, cheese. These are all basically pretty pure products. But when you buy processed foods that are made in a factory with all different kinds of ingredients, there's a need to have kosher supervision, usually rabbinical supervision to certify that the food is kosher. They have to make sure that the ingredients are all kosher. And again, when you're making commercially produced food, there are all kinds of ingredients. And that the product was produced using kosher utensils. Can you imagine a factory where, for example, they are canning clams? So they have a whole line of cans that are being clammed. There's some cans that are all some other non-kosher line. And then they're gonna use the same instruments, the same vessels to produce some kosher product. It's not so easy, it's not so simple. So if they're using such a factory, they have to make the utensils kosher. There are ways of taking a vessel, a huge pot or a vat, for example, that wasn't kosher and making it kosher. But it's not simple. And so these kind of production facilities need to have rabbinical supervision. That might be one of the reasons why people say, oh, to be kosher, the food has to be blessed by the rabbi. That's not true. It has to be certified, and not even by a rabbi necessarily. You don't have to be a rabbi to have this job of certifying food. But you have to be knowledgeable in the laws of Kashrut. Now there's been a tremendous amount of literature over the centuries that has explored the significance and the relevance and the benefits of the dietary laws. We'll try to look at just a few of these now. Number one, the ultimate reason that we observe the dietary laws, and really the laws, any laws in the Torah, is that they are commandments from God. If we want to really understand why do we do anything in the Torah, it's because these are instructions from God. Now the truth is that many divine commandments make perfectly reasonable sense. They're perfectly rational and they make sense. You wouldn't need God to command you to do it. For example, in the Bible, this applies by the way to the Jewish home, there's a commandment in the Bible that if you have a roof of your home, you've got to put a fence around the roof, a parapet. It's a commandment to the Bible. Now I think most people would figure out on their own, that's a reasonable thing to do. You wouldn't have to have God telling you, put up a fence or a parapet around your roof. So you have many commandments in the Bible that seem very rational and reasonable, honoring your parents, don't steal, et cetera. And most people would have no problem observing such laws. But there are many laws in the Bible, like the requirement, for example, to check your garments. See, I had my suit was checked to make sure there's no mixture of wool and linen. The Bible prohibits clothing that has a mixture of wool and linen. Now why in the world would there be such a law? It's very, very mysterious. And yet if you want to know why anyone would observe such a law, the most pressing and compelling reason is because it's a commandment from God. Do I understand it? No, but the truth is my doctor gives me certain medications. I have no idea in the world how it works. But I do it because I trust the doctor. I'm assuming that the doctor is someone that has done their research or other doctors have and people have determined that this pill is gonna be good for you. So our assumption is that God created the world. God knows who we are. God knows what we need. And so God is capable of giving us instructions that will be for our benefit, even though I may have no idea how it works or why it's given. So the dietary laws are not obviously rational, although I believe that you can give many compelling reasons for them. But on the surface, they're not simply plainly, self-evidently rational and sensible. And therefore, one of the reasons, one of the benefits of observing dietary laws is that it's an expression of our faith in God. It's an expression of our humility. I'm saying, you know what? You know, the Greeks had a philosophy. I think it was Protagoras who said, man is the measure of all things. There is a philosophy which says that I am the ultimate arbiter of everything that's right and wrong in this world. If it makes sense to me, I'll do it. Does it make sense to me? I won't do it. That's not Judaism. That's called Scobachism or Schwartzism. So what we have to be is a certain amount, there has to be a certain amount of humility to place God's wisdom above our own wisdom and say, I'm willing to submit to the will of God. And so observing the dietary laws is important because it's an expression of our faith. It's an expression of our desire to live according to God's will and according to the covenant that he made with us. Number two, there are very, very significant ethical elements to the dietary laws. The dietary laws teach reverence for life. They teach sensitivity to the feelings of animals. So for example, the Bible tells us that we're not allowed to slaughter a mother and its child on the same day. That would be considered to be cruel and insensitive. We're not allowed to boil a kid in its mother's milk. That would be considered cruel. We learned before that the slaughter of an animal has to be done in as painless a way as possible. There are many people before they eat meat who don't care how the animal is killed. They're very happy, which is what happens in most slaughterhouses in the world today, is that they take a bolt from a jackhammer and they just drive it into the brain of the animal. Or in the past, animals would be just shot with a gun or an arrow. So we have to be concerned about and sensitive to the pain of animals. We're not allowed to eat the limb of an animal before it is killed. Prior to refrigeration, that's often what happened. People would take an animal and they would rip off a limb and they would eat it. The animal might not even be dead yet. So the Bible prohibits what is called everminachai, eating the limb of a living creature. The laws of kashrut forbid us from eating birds of prey. We keep away from animals that are scavengers, that are birds of prey, that are cruel. Ultimately, we are what we eat. So the Bible generally permits us to eat animals that are herbivores, not animals that are preying on other animals. But one of the lessons of kashrut, the dietary laws, is to build ethical sensitivity. A third area is that dietary laws build Jewish unity and preserves our unique identity as a special nation. The dietary laws help us focus on our role as a unique people in the world with a historical mission. The dietary laws prevent assimilation. It forces us when we're traveling to look for a kosher restaurant to try to eat with other Jewish people who observe the dietary laws. It certainly prevents assimilation when you can't share a simple meal with people that don't observe the dietary laws. So the dietary laws become a firewall against assimilation. It helps us preserve a unique special nature as a separate people in the world. Another benefit of the dietary laws is that they build personal discipline. Observing the dietary laws requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline. You can't eat any food. You can't eat certain foods whenever you want. You have to wait. Eating out of your house is especially difficult and challenging and requires a tremendous amount of commitment and self-discipline. Dennis Prager once said, it's not a bad thing for a child to learn they can't eat every candy in the store. It's not a bad thing for children to grow up with self-discipline, to know that if they just had frankfutters for lunch, they can't go and have some pizza right after that as a snack. They've learned in many studies recently that one of the most important indicators of success later in life is children who have self-discipline and they can control themselves and they can delay gratification. So one of the valuable aspects of the dietary laws of this discipline is that it builds this muscle in our bodies. And finally, one of the most important aspects of the dietary laws is that it elevates and spiritualizes the physical and the instinctual. One of the words that the Bible uses when it comes to the dietary laws is holiness and elevation. You know, there are some spiritual paths that advocate that the way to holiness is through escaping the physical, through a life of asceticism and celibacy. That's the philosophy of many spiritual paths. The holy person takes a vow of poverty and a vow of celibacy and they live on top of a mountain and they meditate all day long and they drink yaks milk and they are isolated from society and they basically live a life of deprivation and of separation from the physical world. That has been a very prevalent philosophy of many spiritual paths. And many especially pagan spiritual paths take the exact opposite of point of view. And they say that man is nothing more than a sophisticated animal. And therefore they revel in orgies, in the physical, in hedonism. They say that that's what we should be doing. So Judaism takes neither of these paths. Judaism directs us neither to escape the physical or to indulge and succumb to it, but to elevate the physical, to sanctify the physical and to transform the physical into spiritual activity. Something that's a holy activity. What Kashra's does, the dietary laws do, is they infuse what can easily be a simply physical and instinctual activity with profound meaning. When we use something or some activity in the service of God, it becomes a holy activity. The dietary discipline coupled with the practice of reciting blessings before and after eating makes the act of eating a conscious activity, one in which we engage in eating mindfully with consciousness. It becomes an elevated activity. You know, there's a famous phrase that's bandied about all the time called tikkun olam. You hear it a lot in the Jewish world. It's often assumed tikkun olam simply means social progress and liberal values. The term technically is from the Kabbalists, the Jewish mystics, who said that everything in the world can be elevated. The Kabbalists speak about different levels of the creation. They speak about inanimate objects like salt or rocks. And then plant life, which basically the plants nourish themselves from the inanimate level. And then animals, which basically are nourished by the plants. And then the human being that is able to harness all these levels and raise them up to their source. The idea of tikkun olam is taking every element of the world and raising it up in the service of God. It becomes not just a physical activity, it becomes a spiritual activity.