R’EIH (2nd part of triennial cycle)
Devarim (Deuteronomy) 12.29 - 14.29
Eitz Hayim 1068; Plaut 1423; Hertz 804

ומא  בלחב  ידג  לשבתאל 

These five words appear on page 1074 in Eitz Hayim and 810 in Hertz, and are generally translated as: You shall not boil (lit. also “cook;” “seethe”) a kid in its mother’s milk.  They are part of verse 14:21.  Precisely the same words appear at 23:19 and 34:26 in Shemot.  Three identical sentences in the Torah.  Very rare.  According to Plaut (593), one each of the citations comes from the E, J, and D sources, and there are a dozen other, more fanciful explanations of why there are three expressions of the same commandment.  Moreover, in each case they are seemingly attached to earlier sentences in the verse but then appear as if they are a one-line paragraph.  Even more rare, from these five words, repeated three times, a whole structure of kashrut is built.  Instructions to eat only animals that have split hooves and that chew their cuds is pretty straightforward, and requires little elaboration.  Just the reverse with  ומא  בלחב  ידג  לשבתאל.  It engenders whole sections of Talmud.  ידג seems straight forward.  The rule applies to young goats, possibly lambs.  Not at all.  As elaborated, the rule applies to all meat, even fowl, which do not have mothers that provide their young with milk.  Eventually, the rule was enlarged to become a “prohibition against eating meat and milk together in any way or form whatever.” (Hertz, 318, note.)  Restrictions on this or that animal are common in early religions, but, to the best of my knowledge, restrictions on combining meat and milk are unique to Judaism.  However, my d’var will not focus on the meaning of those five words, but instead on the process by which they became central to kashrut.

A digression: The extension of לשבתאל to chicken (and presumably other kosher birds) is not the same as the extension to meat other than goats and lambs, but not to fish.  Extension to other sources of  meat is a matter of rabbinic interpretation to include all kosher mammals.  Those same commentators were well aware that chickens did not nurse their young.  Rather, they were included as a way of building a fence around the Torah.  The appearance of cooked chicken does not differ much from other meats (“red meat”), and many rabbis were afraid people would be confused.  Even then, it was a contentious issue in the Talmud, and there are some otherwise kosher people who do combine chicken and milk, including the Talmudist R. Yosi Ha-G’lili and one fictional character in the Rabbi Slept Late series.  (Source: Commentary of R. Leonard Levy,  
who cites Hullin 8:4 in the Mishnah and subsequent discussions in the Gamara in Hullin 103b and 113a. See http://www.jewishvaluesonline.org/39)

Getting back on topic, if you do not know the origins or rationale for the commandment of לשבתאל, do not feel ashamed. They are still in dispute today. To compound the  confusion, the first two times the commandment appears, they are in association with rules on Jewish religious practice; only in the third repetition (ie, the one in today’s parashah) is it in association with eating and dietary rules.  Sometime in the 11th century, R. Abraham Ibn Ezra wrote, “the reason for the prohibition implied in לשבתאל  is concealed from the eyes of even the wise” (Ibid.).  Rambam suggested that its origins lie in reaction to some pagan practices and superstition. The problem with his comment is that no one knows of such a practice. The unhappy result is a sequence of citations, all going back to an original supposition for which there is no evidence. Every so often, someone comes upon an ancient reference to the practice, but in every case to now, the translation has been proven to be faulty.  Almost a millennium later, Jewish German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn suggested that לשבתאל was among other inexplicable laws of God, the benefit of which “is in their practice, and not in the understanding of their motive (Ibid.), a thought that must have applied to the expanded view of the rule, and not to its original, narrow meaning, when the opportunity to cook a kid in its mother’s milk would have been limited to shepherds and perhaps workers at the Temple.

Over the years, other commentators have suggested that לשבתאל had some link to human health or was meant to promote kindness to animals.  The problem with the former rationale is the total absence of any link to health, and with the latter only a remote link to human kindness.  If God had wanted to express those linkages, there were lots of better ways to do so.  As for Rabbi Plaut, he simply says that the prohibition of eating milk and meat together is “a meaning entirely extraneous to the text” (1439).

Of course, the failure of previous explanations with a rational base has not prevented people from trying with new explanations.  Perhaps the most satisfying was published by ethno-anthropologist Gloria London.  She noticed that elderly people working with clay pots in rural parts of Cyprus carefully kept meat from dairy products, even to the extent of having different shapes for the two kinds of pots.  The explanation was simple: meat, which was expensive, tended to sour, if placed in pots that previously held milk products.  I do not know why London’s explanation has not gained more recognition.  Perhaps it just arrived a millennium or so too late.  Rationality of the rule לשבתאל is no longer relevant; it is its application that it is important. 

So what is going on here.  Can we come up with a better rationale for what is sustaining Jewish practice to separate meat and milk?  I think that we can, and here is my sugges-tion, which goes in three steps.  Before starting, I must recognize that other and far more learned commentators than I have proposed a similar approach to the problem.

First, it is easy to accept that the early rabbis building toward Jewish law were great at categorization.  They made distinctions among different types of animals, birds and insects, and within those groups they spent even more time indicating how to distinguish those that were kosher and those that were not.  Among other things, they were very suspicious of anything that crossed a categorical line, as with animals that crawled along the bottom of the ocean and seemed to breathe water. Indeed, Soler refers to “the horror of the hybrid for the Hebrew imagination” (cited in Welfeld, 100), as with “an animal that seems to straddle two realms.”  Hence, Jews do not eat shellfish.

Second, early on, rabbis began to focus on mammals, especially those that were the backbone of their nomadic economy, and, therefore, the distinction between milk that was life-giving and meat that was inherently death-bringing was – and is – logical.  After the great flood, and in Noah’s time, human beings had been given the right to eat meat (before then, they had been vegetarians), but from the first restrictions were imposed on meat eating, particularly the separation of meat from blood.  It was not much of a jump to make laws about separating meat from milk.  As Prager writes (cited in Welfeld, 129), “This concept is directly related to Judaism’s obsession with separating death from life.  Judaism is the only religion in history which is preoccupied with this life and virtually ignores the issue of life after death.”

Third, and this is the biggest jump, the early rabbis were willing to make a huge pyramid of rabbinic law that rests, upside down, with its tiny top at the bottom.  The best example I know is the law of Ba’al Tashchit: Do not destroy, or more accurately do not needlessly destroy, anything on earth.  Where did this come from?  Dev 20:19 says that one should not cut down fruit trees to build defensive structures in time of war.  After all, the argument went, the trees not human beings who can avoid battle. However, the rabbis did not stop there.  First, they reasoned, if one is forbidden to cut down fruit trees during wartime, how much more is one forbidden to do so in ordinary circumstances.  Second, the rabbis took fruit trees as an example, and derived the principle that we are forbidden to destroy not just fruit trees but anything that could conceivably be useful, and, given that everything on earth, natural or human-made, had to have a use, anything at all!!!!!   It was still anthropocentric, but now so broadly conceived as to lean strongly against human arrogance toward nature.

Based on Bal Tashchit, the Rabbis forbade overgrazing of hillsides, sport hunting, and even over-consumption.  However, these corollaries immediately raise the questions that in modern terms might be:  Who gets to define the trade-offs?  What constitutes wise use?  The answer, as so commonly in Judaism, is human beings.  It remains for us today to find ways to make these decisions, and then ways to enforce them.  The principle is given; its application is not. As Psalm 115 says, “heavens are the Lord’s, but the earth has been given to humankind.”

It is that same principle that allows ומא  בלחב  ידג  לשבתאל to be expanded from a  seemingly narrow commandment about goats and their mothers to what we know today as the laws of meat and milk, which are far from narrow.  As R. Forst writes (168), “The laws of basar b’chalav are among the most extensive, stringent and unusual of all the halahchos,” and he devotes about one-third of his 400 page book to them.

I will conclude with a lighter note on the same topic, a joke that I first heard from the late Rabbi Ben Hollander when he was leading a shabbaton at Agudath Israel.  (Rabbi Ben was fond of jokes and used to complain that more people remembered his jokes than his message.)  This joke goes back to the time when Moses is still up on the mountain receiving the Torah from God.  Moses remarks to God that he has noted that ומא  בלחב  ידג לשבתאל is repeated three times, so he knows that it must be important.  Therefore  he gave it some study and finally realized that it means that Jews should have two sets of dishes, one for meat and one for milk.  God responds kindly to Moses and says that he is pleased to see Moses working so hard, but that some things do not require interpretation.  Please, he says to Moses, just read; don’t interpret.  Moses goes off and comes back to God saying, now I get it.  We should wait six hours after having meat before eating dairy.  This time God responds not so kindly and says to Moses, look go back again and read the words, just the words.  So Moses goes back to wherever he stays up there and comes back to God once more.  This time he says, oy, why didn’t I see this before, Jews should have separate dishwashing machines for meat dishes and milk dishes.  God sighs, looks down at Moses and says, You know what Moses, Let’s just do it your way.

Shabbat shalom, 

Bibliography (other than chumashim)
Forst, Binyomin R. (1995). The Laws of Kashrut: A Comprehensive Exposition of Their Underlying Concepts and Applications.  Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications; Artscroll Halachah Series.

London, Gloria (2008). Why Milk and Meat Don’t Mix, Biblical Archaeology Review 34 (6), 66-69, November/December.

Welfeld, Irving (1996). Why Kosher? An Anthology of Answers. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson.

Wikipedia, citation on Milk and Meat in Jewish Law.