Bustling with tall, lean, small, and stout people hovering about the baked goods, the cider, last year’s apples or this year’s first peaches, the NYC farmers market on Columbus Avenue at 79^th – 77^th street, displayed its early summer harvest – especially greens, berries, shelling peas and young onions. The children placed the fresh organic milk into the cloth bag that hung over my shoulder. The sun danced friskily with the cool breeze, and we grabbed onto our hats as we headed arms around arms to the cheese stand. It felt so right, so connected, so sustainable.

Then, my son remembered a camp bus conversation. Tenuously, he asked, “Do you make your cheese with rennet?”

“Of course” she said. “That is how you make cheese. Sometimes we use vegetable rennet, but we don’t keep track.”

That is when the clouds threatened to roll in and the potential of emotional thunder thunder cracked in the background. Our idyllic fantasy of our ethically organic lifestyle – at least on  Sunday – bumped up against reality.  Rennet is an enzyme produced in mammalian digestive tracts. Typically, it is often made from the stomachs of slaughtered calves.

From the perspective of Kashrut,  as Nina Budabin McQuown explained, rennet is a complicated issue. The orthodox rules state you can eat the cheese if the rennet doesn’t contribute to the form of the cheese and it is made by Jews working for a Jewish company, and if the animal is kosher and then killed according to halacha. From a conservative perspective, you can eat it because once processed the rennet is no longer food.  Reform and Reconstructionist Jews believe that these laws do not apply to the original intent and are thus not restrictive.

Yet, does eating rennet in any way, shape or form, ever alleviate Tza’ar ba’alei chayim, the suffering of living creatures?  Does Kashrut? Certainly the manner of slaughter widely recognized to be the most humane.  And Genesis (9:3) does proclaim that these animals have been given to us to eat along with the grasses.

Judaism’s concern with the welfare of living creatures uniquely charges humans with responsibility toward animals. Are we fulfilling that responsibility simply by observing schechitah? Yet if we are commanded not to hurt or exploit, and to actually aid and assist any animal in pain, is any slaughter of the domesticated animals that depend on us for their subsistence and care ever really correct?  If the animals that depend on us are like the young in the nest (Deuteronomy 22 6-7), can we really remove these young in the presence of the humans who are their de facto parents and send them to the slaughterhouse, even a kosher one?

How can Kashrut and the prohibition against cruelty to animals co-exist?
This is a genuine question, and its validity requires an imaginative stretch.  If animals exist under the dominion of humans, does that give us the right to domesticate for the purpose of slaughter? If animals have more consciousness than we realize, or than we have the current tools to understand, is it possible that anything other than strict vegetarianism violates Kashrut?

The Torah tells us two things.  Think one moment and one relationship at a time, and concern one’s self with practicalities of the here and now. Abide by the laws that help us to survive one moment at a time. It also tells us to think systemically, and to recognize that we are all embedded in a larger field. Every individual action reverberates through another and thus we must adopt an ethically constructive position that takes into account the plight of others – including animals -  as though our being were an inextricable part of theirs.

The contradiction is, I think, the beauty of  Torah. The space between those two perspectives creates room to struggle.  In this household, however, it probably means no rennet.

We wistfully passed by the cheese stand, leaving the delectable pecorino behind. The children held their heads high, their eyes focused only on the larger intuition that says the animals, at least for now, are their friends, the complexity postponed in favor of a warm sunny day at the market.