Reé 5775 - English

By Rabbi Guido Cohen
Asociación Israelita Montefiore Bogotá, Colombia.

This week’s Parashah contains several mitzvot, more than 50.  Among them, we find in Reih the rules relating to the consumption of meat that has not been sacrificed and offered at the Temple.  

According to the sages, during the journey through the desert (and during a good portion of our people’s ancient history), every animal killed using the procedure of Shechita was an animal that would be ritually offered at the temple or sanctuary.   This meant that our ancestors only ate meat when giving an offering.  There was no “kosher butcher” where one could by meat for simple enjoyment.  Even though Rabbi Akiva claimed in the Gemara (Julin 16b) that this was not the case, the opinion of a big part of our wise men is that in the desert every Shechita was done as an offering.  Bible critics go even further and show us that during the time of King Josiah this was the case as well.  

Then we get the text of this week’s Parashah and it gives us the rules for what is technically called “basar taava”, the meat of desire.  The meat we eat because we want to eat meat, not necessarily for performing a sacrifice.  The text begins by saying: “When the Lord enlarges your territory, as He has promised you, and you say, "I shall eat some meat."  The desire to eat meat is linked in this verse with possessing a larger territory.  In other words, the greater the possession, the greater the desire.

When the people of Israel are in the desert, struggling through 40 years of nomadism and trying to survive the many threats that are presented to them, the desire to eat meat appears only one time (and does not end very well).  But through most of their journey, what they eat is not relevant.  Man, which God gives in His eternal goodness, tastes like the best feast when it’s all you have to eat.  But when we possess, we want to possess more.  When we covet something, we enter a vicious circle that makes us feel dissatisfied with what used to fill our stomach and our soul.  And this is why God warns that the people -once they settle in their land and become comfortable in their large territories- will no longer be happy with eating a “korban” once in a while, but they will need rules that allow them to eat meat every day.  From these verses, stem the first rules of Kashrut.  The more we have, the more we want.  And the Torah creates a counterweight to that desire by saying that the more we want, the more regulations for our desire we will find.  

The rules of Kashrut are, in a way, a limit to the almost natural predisposition of human beings of feeling free to do what they want in a land that belongs to them in an imaginary way.  As the psalm says: “Of god is the world and everything on it.”  Every feeling of owning the world is nothing but an illusion, and even though we have many things and we consider ourselves owners, the Torah warns us that to be able to enjoy what we “possess”, we need to be subjected to regulations that limit our ambition and inspire in us the virtues of self-discipline and self-control.  

Mitzvot were given to us as a “refinement”, to bring us closer to the divine dimension and further away from our destructive instincts.  Contrary to what we sometime believe, the more we evolve, the less refined we become in certain aspects.  We feel more entitled to that which is given to us simple for safekeeping and hard work.  

Therefore, the wider we feel in our conquests, the more careful we need to be with our limits and controls.  

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Guido Cohen