Kosher Pork from Test-Tube Pigs? Not So Fast

A prominent Israeli rabbi recently made headlines for suggesting that artificial meat grown from the stem cells of pigs would be kosher. Gil Student argues that the halakhic consensus is not on the rabbi’s side:

One argument in favor [of permitting the meat] is that the pig stem cells are microscopic. Since the Torah, [according to traditional rabbinic interpretation], does not forbid anything that is invisible to the naked eye, the cell itself is permissible. Therefore, any meat that grows from it must be permissible as well.

Both Rabbi J. David Bleich and Rabbi Ya’akov Ariel point out that in this case we do not discount the microscopic cell because we manipulate it. It comes from a large animal and will grow into a visible item, and, in between, humans interact with it. . . .

[One argument in favor of allowing the meats draws on the halakhic rule that] a prohibited item is permitted when diluted in a mixture in which it is either a simple minority or less than one-sixtieth, depending on the circumstance. When a pig cell is added to a growth medium, the cell is diluted by much more than one-sixtieth. Therefore, it should be permitted. . . .

Ariel, [however, argues] that there is no actual mixture. The pig stem cell is placed in a growth medium and then grows. The result is many more pig cells that grow from the original stem cell. Rather than a mixture, this is just one substance growing substantially. The lab-grown meat consists of the original stem cell multiplied greatly, thus maintaining the forbidden status of the original cell.

Read more at Torah Musings

More about: Halakhah, Kashrut, Pork, Religion & Holidays, Technology

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society