Israel’s religious affairs minister has introduced far-reaching reforms in the country’s kosher food supervision.
In the current system, all food, to receive kosher certification, requires the stamp of approval from the Chief Rabbinate. Under the proposed reform, multiple rabbinic organizations will be allowed to provide nationwide supervision services, with the Chief Rabbinate serving as a government regulator of these independent bodies.
The plan has received the support of the Tzohar rabbinic organization, which argues that competition will lower costs and increase professionalism, thereby leading more eateries to select supervision that Israeli consumers will trust. The Chief Rabbinate, in turn, has argued that the new system will confuse consumers and undermine kosher food certification.
Experts should decide if these reforms will improve kashrut service and standards. Yet it’s important to understand that a decentralized system (as already found in the US and elsewhere) is perfectly acceptable for kosher supervision. To understand why, it pays to explore why kashrut supervision is required in the first place.
AS A condition for imposing corporal punishment and other penalties, the Bible famously requires two witnesses. In contrast, Jewish law accepts the attestations of a single witness in ritual matters as well as related commandments and prohibitions.
The Bible indicates, for example, that priests had no qualms about consuming meat from animals privately slaughtered by average citizens. Similarly, the laws relating to menstruation and family purity rely on the statements of individual women. Jewish law, the Talmud asserts, places trust in pious Jews. Otherwise, as some medieval commentators noted, it would otherwise be impossible to maintain any communal life. Eating food at a friend’s house or even that prepared by your own family members requires trusting that others will follows the laws scrupulously.
In fact, Jewish law generally trusts pious Jews even in cases when the person gains financially from their attestations. Classically, we trust a ritual slaughterer who examines the lungs of an animal and determines that it is kosher, even though he will subsequently benefit by selling the food. Thus, historically, there was no outside kosher supervision on Jewish-owned farms, field or inns. If the owner was pious and meticulous about their ritual observance, one could rely on their word.
For several reasons, this arrangement is no longer possible. Firstly, many Jews (and certainly non-Jews) involved in food production today are not personally committed to observing these laws. The Talmud does not grant the same level of trust to those who are not scrupulous in these laws; even with honest intentions, there is concern that they will not carefully uphold the required standards. Kashrut food supervision eases some of these worries by ensuring that someone provides them with guidance on the laws and generally oversees that they abide by them.
Indeed, even during Talmudic times, the Sages imposed limits on purchasing wine, cheese and other products from the Syrian region, because they deemed the local residents as insufficiently fastidious in the observance of these laws. More significantly, a whole category of law known as demai was enacted to deal with purchasing produce, because large groups of people were insufficiently committed to taking all of the necessary tithes. The Sages understood that a system based on trust cannot be built around those who lack knowledge of, or commitment to, the detailed laws.
In truth, there are times where even pious individuals committed to dietary laws make mistakes because of their complexities. Others take illicit shortcuts because of their financial pressures.
Over the centuries, this contributed to greater scrutiny over the production of meat. Some rabbis suggested slaughterers require certification and have their work knives regularly inspected. Many medieval communities, in turn, appointed slaughters and regulated these positions to preclude any financial incentive to sell nonkosher meat.
Occasionally, one also sees greater scrutiny for other foods. In the 16th century, the Maharal of Prague indicated that this should be done for wine production as well. In the same century, the Council of Four Lands which governed ritual life in Poland and Lithuania issued a decree that all village producers of cheese and butter must be certified as trustworthy by the local rabbinical court head, and that otherwise people should not buy their products.
THE CONTEMPORARY food industry has all of the pitfalls that historically concerned scholars with a trust-based system: incredibly complex technologies involved in food production that require intricate knowledge of both the industry and Jewish law; nonreligious Jews and gentiles fully integrated into the line of food production; and a huge financial market that creates temptations of fraud.
Kosher food supervision is meant to help alleviate those concerns and provide a level of comfort to consumers, who, unlike in previous generations, have little to no contact with those providing them with their food.
Ultimately, however, the kosher supervisors and the food producers must build their own trusting relationship to make this arrangement efficient, economical and reliable.
Those last three characteristics are not usually the terms that we apply in free-market economies for bodies that a) are run by the government and b) have monopolies on the market. The Chief Rabbinate, nonetheless, insists that it is best qualified to run the entire field of kosher supervision in the Jewish state.
This claim is undermined by the widespread use of (costly) “supplementary” kosher supervision certificates issued by private agencies that have greater public trust (sometimes called Badatzim) and by a scathing report issued several years ago by the state comptroller that highlighted inefficiencies and irregularities in the Chief Rabbinate’s system.
I, for one, hope that the push for reform will greatly improve the system. It remains clear, however, that Jewish law certainly does not mandate a centralized body to govern the nation’s kosher food production.
The writer is co-dean of the Tikvah Online Academy, a postdoctorate fellow at Bar-Ilan University Law School, and the award-winning author of A Guide to the Complex: Contemporary Halakhic Debates.