When it comes to food, I’ve acted the part of intercessor more than once in my life. I’ve given propagandistic explanations of what CAFO’s are. I’ve pressured room mates and lovers, gently but manipulatively, to give up corn syrup and non-organic produce. I’ve been even more sneaky and covert. When my little sister, who will eat only four things, revealed that she was under the misapprehension that kosher meat was ethically raised, I didn’t disabuse her.

The kosher food industry has been playing its undeserved part as moral intercessor for a while now. An article like this one in Food Quality, shows that non-Jews invest our religious standards for food as a moral litmus that corresponds to their ethics. This revelation makes me feel proud, but also somewhat angry. The world thinks so highly of us that they’re willing to trust our standards, but Agriprocessors showed that the laws of kashrut have nothing to do with the laws of the rest of the world.

Yet non-kosher folks still purchase kosher products 10 times more than kosher Jews. They don’t seem to understand that Agriprocessors proves that the system of kashrut doesn’t reflect contemporary ethics regarding food safety, workers rights or animal rights ( these are ranged in my perceived order of food issues that get people excited).

Instead, as Rabbi Seth Mandel stated on the panel at Asilomar, kashrut certifying agencies reflect the laws of kashrut, no more and no less. The fact that Hekhsher Tzedek changed its name to Magen Tzedek is exciting because it fosters a possibility for dialog between sects, but it also admits that when we’re talking about worker’s rights and animal rights, we’re talking about something other than the laws of kashrut.

A statement like that is pretty empowering. We who were listening to Rabbi Mandel suddenly had a clear directive: if 21st century ethical action is your goal, kosher certifying agencies are not going to help you achieve it. We love to pretend that the agencies we entrust reflect our values exactly, that when they say “fit” they mean our kind of “fit”: no blood in our meat and no blood on our hands. Rabbi Mandel, when he made his point, made it quite clear that this trust is false.

Yet people who are neither kosher nor hallal invest the Jewish and Muslim religions with ethical values that they feel are somehow “higher,” more worthy, more righteous, like valuing food safety, workers rights and animal rights above speed, efficiency and profit. It’s a kind of spiritual whitewashing that claims that because food safety is ethical and religions are the origin of ethics, therefore, religions endorse food safety and a kosher item is safe.

I think I’ve been guilty of the same whitewashing my whole life long. When I showed up at the food conference I was considering the possibility that I might go home with a will to be kosher again. I grew up kosher, and so the idea of kashrut as a high mitzvah is deeply implanted in me. I’ve always been proud of my family for keeping kosher, and I think that’s partly because I too conflated religious ethics with moral ethics.

Instead, Rabbi Mandel seemed to be to be saying that kashrut as the OU practices it is about obedience, not morals. There seems to me to be a pretty enormous disconnect between Jews who think that kashrut is a system of laws designed by god to help our ancestors eat ethically, and Jews who think kashrut is a system of laws designed by God, period.

The former group might think kashrut meant food safety: no scavengers, no diseased animals; ethical distribution of food: leave the corners for the poor, let the land rest for a year; workers rights: free your slaves every seven years; sustainability: let the land lie fallow. It follows that we should then hold our current food system to stringent standards along the same ethical categories. The latter group is talking about obedience, what God asks of us, we do, we have our rules, all we need to do is follow them, and if they’re the rules that God gave us, they work as they are. After all, it’s not like God didn’t know that the industrial revolution was coming when He gave the Torah.

So the next question follows: is there a fundamental conundrum between obedience and interpretation? Jews who want kashrut to reflect the ethical choices we have to make in 2009 are asking the same questions that say, radical protestants were asking in 1620: who have we named as our intercessors between ourselves and God, and how much of our obedience is obedience to our intercessors rather than obedience to God? Are the laws as written down at Mount Sinai a reflection of the will of God filtered through the particular cognizant ability of the people who received them or are they marching orders for all time?

I don’t know, but I got a serious sinking feeling listening to Rabbi Mandel explain to the audience that we’re supposed to either discard or dissect the hindquarters of a kosher animal in order to remove fats attached to the sciatic nerve, the same sinking feeling I got watching the documentary “Trembling Before G-d”. It’s a feeling that means: this is so minute, so complex, so derivative, and reeks so much of human discourse. This is not religion, it’s bureaucracy.

In the middle of John Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost”, the whole purpose of which is to “justify the ways of God to man,” God sends the angel Raphael down to Adam and Eve in order to warn them to be especially vigilant because Satan is in the garden. It sounds like a straightforward message, but Adam takes so much pleasure in divine discourse that he spends three books, thousands of lines of poetry, talking to Raphael about subjects as diverse as the war in heaven, the creation of the world and the order of the universe. By the end of their conversation, God’s straightforward warning is made small in a sea of knowledge. My sinking feeling comes from the sense that kashrut is subject to the same dwarfing influence as a result of our love of complexity and the joy we get from communing with God’s word down to it’s most minute and derivative application.

Maybe I come to this conclusion out of ignorance. I’ve never understood why the laws of kashrut are privileged in Judaism as a greater mitzvah than the laws that say you have to treat strangers well, forgive debts, free slaves and tithe a tenth of your income. Maybe the answer to that question is actually pretty clear, and my prejudice in favor of social justice makes me see it as more important than the Torah really says it is. I’m interested in people’s opinions on this issue, and especially interested in how they came by these opinions.

Perhaps, when it comes down to it, I, like those ten million Americans buying kosher food for a sense of well-being, am not really practicing Judaism at all, but investing my own sense of right and wrong with a righteous power it doesn’t actually hold. Maybe part of faith is throwing your weight behind a moral system you don’t understand because God says so. But whatever I ultimately decide about kashrut in my life, it won’t be on the authority of the OU’s interpretation. Rabbi Mandel seemed committed to making alliances toward more ethical kashrut at the conference, but one hazy explanation for discarding the entire back end of an animal is enough for me. I’m up for fewer intercessors, more pursuit of knowledge, less talk with the angels, more listening to the message I’ve been sent, though I’m not sure where to find it.