How do you get from “Don’t seethe a kid in it’s mother’s milk” to two sets of dishes? I mean, three, if you include pareve? Oh, make that six, for Pesach? Plus add in the the treif set from the olden days, for the non-Jewish servant, and we’ve got our magic number – seven sets of dishes!!
Behind the multiplication of the plates is a serious question, however. This week’s parashah, Mishpatim, is much more than a jumbled collection of laws regulating capitol and civil offenses. Not only is it not jumbled at all (hint: compare the progression of themes in the various sets of laws in Mishpatim with those of the storyline in parashat Shemot!), it contains some of the most powerful “one-liners” in Jewish tradition. “Na’aseh v’nishmah”, for example, is uttered by the people in THIS parashah (and not in Yitro, as some people mistaken think). The definitive reference to the unity of the written and oral Torah also appears herein. But probably the verse which is most closely associated with daily Jewish life is the verse forbidding mixing milk and meat.
But how does that verse prohibit basar bechalav? After all, isn’t it just some poetic flourish brought as a coda to the Book of the Covenant – the term used by the Torah itself (as understood by the Ramban) to refer to the legal codex presented in Parashat Mishpatim? It can’t actually mean two sets of dishes, can it?
Ah, but the verse is repeat two more times in the Torah. Once, in Parashat Ki Tisa, as the concluding phrase of yet another “covenantal” passage, in which Hashem re-offers the covenant, functionally rejected by the people as they revel before the Golden Calf. And a second time in Devarim, where the verse as a coda to the repetition of the laws of animal prohibited and permitted for eating. Clearly, a verse so frequently and prominently intoned must have some overarching significance.
And indeed, the Sages in the Talmud interpret the three-fold repetition of “don’t seethe…” to be teaching three separate prohibitions:
- Don’t consume a meat-and-milk mixture.
- Don’t cook a meat-and-milk mixture, even though you won’t eat it.
- Don’t derive benefit from a meat-and-milk mixture (such as reselling cheeseburgers for fun and profit).
The dishes are another story – absorption and re-emission of flavors by cooking vessels is considered to be substantial and not incidental.
But our question remains – given that the repetition of the verse means something – whence do the Sages get the notion that it is precisely these three things being prohibited by the Torah, and, perhaps more importantly, how does such a practice make us into more refined servants of Hashem?
Let’s take a step back. After giving over to Moshe an entire ethical-legal corpus which forms the core of legal traditions and societal structures the world over to this day, Hashem turns to task at hand. For, that ethical-legal corpus is written from a standpoint which presumes a society settled in its land. And that has yet to be accomplished. The land still needs to be conquered, the morally bankrupt people still lingering there is yet to be disposed, and, perhaps of central importance, their idolatrous, violent and corrupt religious civilization has yet to be eradicated, to be replaced by a people constantly yearning to ascend to Oneness.
Imagine all the people, living for the One. Leaving aside their worldly occupation to join as one in the place Hashem will choose to cause His Name to dwell there, three time a year: On Pesach, the feast of springing anew into life; on Shavu’ot, the first-harvest feast of the firstfruits/firstborn – first to arrive at adulthood, and at Sukkot, the feast of the ingathering of all our works – animal and vegetable – from the field, and eight-day ending-of-a-cycle festival joyously awash with meat and drink (for there is no real joy save sacrificial meat and wine, say our Sages), all that physicality transmuted through boundless joy into Divine service.
Now read this:
And everything which I said to you guard carefully; do not mention the names of other gods – let them not be heard upon your mouth.
Three festivals shall you celebrate for Me each year.
- ·Keep the festival of matzot – seven days shall you eat matzot as I have commanded you, on the occasion of the spring month, for in it you emerged from Egypt; let there not be seen hametz in your houses.
- ·And the harvest festival, the first fruits of your works which you shall sew in your fields;
- ·And the ingathering festival at the going-out of the year, when you gather your works from the field.
Three times each year all your males shall be seen/see the Face of the Master, Hashem.
- Do not slaughter the blood of my sacrifice upon (i.e., while) chametz (is yet to be seen) and do not allow the fat of My festival offering to linger until morning;
- The first of the firstfruits of your land bring to the House of Hashem;
- Do not seethe a kid in its mothers milk.
Shemot 23:13-19
The parallels are clear: We all gather in Yerushalayim at three points in the agricultural year, laden with symbolism. We are commanded to be careful regarding three specific commandments, one for each holiday:
On Pesach, we must be precise regarding the Pesach sacrifice – we must neither sacrifice it too early, when chametz is still to be found, nor may we leave it/its fat parts unconsumed past the following dawn.
On Shavu’ot, we must stand before Hashem and, surrendering the first products of backbreaking labor in the field, we stand with the Kohen in the Temple courtyard, waving our offering and proclaiming we have arrived in the fullest sense (See Parashat Ki Tavo).
On Sukkot, … hmm, what is this mother-and-kid non-reunion? Ramban writes (davka on the repeated verse in Parashat Ki Tisa) that when the first-born animals were brought as sacrifices to the Temple, their mothers came along for purposes of nursing the young animals, right up until the time of the sacrifice. But Ramban doesn’t specify that this is happening on Sukkot. In fact, he might be referring to the holiday of firsts – Sukkot.
I’d like to suggest a slight twist on the Ramban’s take. The first of Elul is one of four Jewish new years, the new year for tithing of the animals born that year. One of each ten new-born sheep, goats and cattle would be designated as the tenth, the ma’aser, releasing all nine others to the realm of the secular. The ma’aser animals would be offered as sacrifices at the Temple and their flesh would be consumed by their owners in purity, anywhere throughout the city. When would this most naturally be done? On the next trip to Yerushalayim, of course, since zerizim mak’dimim lamitzvtot – the zealous jump at the chance for mitzvot. And this would be…Sukkot.
Sukkot, the blow-out holiday-to-end-all-holidays, as time dies and new time is born, eight days more meat, more drink, more dancing, more music, more spectacle and more holy indulgence than we can really imagine. Just the time to fall over the edge into the REAL spiritual seductions of ultimate unboundedness.
Rambam understands the prohibition of milk and meat as an anti-idolatrous practice – THEY horrifically cooked kids in mothers’ milk, you must not do this. They allows life to bleed into death, to conjure a self-contained and self-perpetuating cycle where life and death are yin-yanged into one another, a boundless self-invoking myth of existence leaving no room for the truly transcendant. You shall not do this in your holiness.
This should imply that the kohanim should not behind like idolatrous priests. They should not consume the holy sacrificial flesh in its delicious, saturated-with-meaning self-sauce at the propitious time of connection. But what about regular Jews.
All three of the holiday practices are really on the threshold of the “kohanic”. Non-kohanim are allowed to slaughter a sacrifice, but not to collect the blood nor dash it upon the altar in atonement, and on Pesach, with so much work for the kohanim to do, that’s precisely what they did. On Shavu’ot, the Jew bringing his basket of first-fruit entered into the Temple as deeply as he was allowed and, waved, with Kohen’s hands upon his, his offering before Hashem. And on Shavu’ot, the Jews ate holy meat in amounts fit for only for a Kohen, with the lactating mothers bleating outside in the courtyard. It’s sooo good, and, with the Rambam, it only has its anti-pagan symbolism at this time, in this setting, so the rest of the year, back home in the kitchen…
“You shall be for Me a nation of priests, a holy people”. The “extension” of the prohibition of mixing milk and meat, with its undeniable ethical and spiritual implication, in inherent already in the first appearance of the verse. When it is brought again a third time in Devarim, that “extension” is complete – every Jew is in a certain sense a kohen, aware of the incredibly powerful spiritual reverberations of every act, the symbolism that is more that symbolism, echoing its implications throughout the universe.
It is stated in the Talmud, “when there is no altar operative, a man’s [comportment at his ] dining table atones for him. Separating meat and milk can, should and needs to be a way of separating from a life lived in a realm of linear, cause-and-effect superficiality to re-engage that same life as one constantly on the dizzying edge of the holy.
Now about that seventh set of dishes…
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