Tuesday night at Yeshiva University, a crowd of more than five hundred came to watch their best and brightest duke it out over the connection between kashrut and ethics…and by duke it out I mean have a calm and respectful conversation based on Torah and tradition. “These are the giants of the generation.” Ari Hart, a member of the Uri L’Tzedek leadership team, said of the panelists.

The panel has received a lot of attention. The New York Times covered it, and an article on the YU website gives a run down of the conversation and the basic ethical conundrum. What it doesn’t do is give any sense of the soaring heights of rhetorical fervor reached by Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz of Uri L’Tzedek (though the Times did refer to his delivery as “Jeremiah-like” for whatever that’s worth).

While his fellow rabbis were in conversation about what the halakhic connection is between ethics and kashrut, the dictum not to assume guilt before it’s been proven, and the need to let secular authorities do their job, Rabbi Yanklowitz delivered a ten minute oratory complete with lectern thumping, gesticulation, and repetitive phrasing that filled the room with such intensity, I think it broke the microphones. It could have come hot off the press from Obama’s speech writing team, and it got the crowd going wild.

To summarize, Rabbi Yanklowitz repeated stories of both abuses and social justice actions in the Orthodox community, asking at the end of each vignette, “where is our moral courage?” He, echoing panelist Rabbi Menachem Genack before him, mentioned Rabbi Jacob Soloveitchik, who took personal responsibility for the rights of workers in the kosher establishments of Boston, up to the point of paying them out of his own pocket, and also the Orthodox community’s support of the California grape boycott in the 1970s.

In seeming opposition to the remarks of Rabbi Shafran, who said that the Orthodox movement focuses on “reverence for the past and those who lie closer to the past than we do” rather than on youth, Rabbi Yanklowitz exhorted the generation of YU students in front of him to take responsibility for the ethical problem at hand, and work to assure that their kosher food establishments (the Tav HaYosher ethical seal that Uri L’Tzedek is trying to institute is specifically for restaurants and not for meat processing factories) are held accountable to the ethical aspects of halakhic law, not just the rudiments of kashrut.

I doubt there’s any need to convince Jew and the Carrot readers of the connection between food and almost anything, much less of the connection between food and ethics. Yet this was the question on which the panel was founded, and each speaker reiterated a difference between kashrut and ethics. Even Rabbi Yanklowitz, when asked what his reservations were regarding the conservative movement’s Heksher Tzedek movement, answered first that he felt they “conflate ethics and kashrut”.

Rabbi Shafran compared the relationship between ethics and kashrut to the relationship between poetry and hygene, counting on our awareness of the large number of very good, very dirty poets to smooth the way for his analogy. I have to admit finding the gulf between those two virtues to be rather intimidatingly impassable, so I asked Ari Hart to clarify Rabbi Shafran’s reasoning for my undereducated Jewish brain.

He gave me a new analogy, “To be a good American citizen, you should pay taxes and you should also not assault someone on the street. Not assaulting someone on the street and paying taxes, they’re both really important, but they’re not the same.” In other words, just because you kill someone doesn’t mean you’re guilty of tax fraud. That’s a given in Orthodox judaism, and the fear, Hart says, is that “if we conflate them, people will stop keeping kosher and just focus on the other things.” Kind of like reasoning that because you don’t assault people on the street, you’re no longer responsible for paying taxes.

Of course, many people already conflate kashrut and ethics. “I think what’s happened is that kosher has come to mean more than just the ritual process,” says Hart. “The laws of the fitness of food are very precise and very legal, but we have to be fulfilling those and we have to be fulfilling the very specific and very precise other commitments in Jewish law, about the rights of workers and the pain and suffering of animals.”

Another main issue on the panel was the injunction to assume innocence until guilt is proven. Rabbis Herring and Genack spoke repeatedly about the proper response to a scandal. When I asked him if Uri L’Tzedek disagreed with this assumption of innocence, Ari Hart referred me to a rule called hashash that is commonly applied to kashrut.

“The idea is,” says Hart, “if you suspect that there is, say, a little milk in your meat pot, you should take steps to remedy it, even if you’re not sure. We were really really concerned [about Agriprocessors], especially after we met the people [who had worked at the plant], and we need to be just as concerned about the violations of workers’ rights as we are about mixing meat and milk.”

Shmuly Yanklowitz wasn’t alone in his calls for change on Tuesday night, not the least because of a 500-person crowd that was extremely responsive to his speech, but also because his fellow Rabbis were receptive to the idea of creating ethical oversight of kosher producers. “We cannot under-estimate the importance of ethical behavior on behalf of every single Jew…24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” said Rabbi Herring, who also suggested forming ethical business guidelines across the board, starting with kosher producers. “However,” he cautioned, “we delude ourselves and mislead the public if we imagine that all producers can be monitored…it’s simply beyond expectation.”

In a scandal that’s in some ways all about “misleading the public”, Rabbi Herring’s concern is a very real one, shared by Uri L’Tzedek in its concern over the Heksher Tzedek movement, which he said was “striving for ideals” during the question and answer session. Uri L’Tzedek proposes instead Tav HaYosher, an ethical seal for restaurants based on the Bema’aglei Tzedek in Israel. Tav HaYosher would certify kosher eateries in New York for safe, non-abusive workplaces and fair wages, including overtime, for workers. Last night’s panel was a big win for Tav HaYosher, as numerous panel attendees approached Uri L’Tzedek representatives to find out how to help make the seal a reality in New York. “We need People who speak spanish, compliance officers, people to host info sessions in their apartments, to teach about ethics and kashrut and to write letters to editors and blogs” said Hart. To get involved yourself, go to the this link on the ULT web page.

In the meantime, just having the panel was a huge step forward, as it showed the overwhelming interest, in every movement of Judaism, in using our laws as a pretext to create a more just community. As Rabbi Herring put it, “Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, we’re all in this together, and God-willing, we’ll all come out as one.”