Rabbi Dr. Rebecca Joseph
This week’s Torah portion is Shemini: Leviticus 9:1 — 11:47
It is well-known that Judaism and Islam forbid eating pork. This is why a far-right agitator and pardoned Jan. 6 rioter recently targeted a kosher restaurant, leaving a roasted pig outside on the back of a parked truck with a Confederate flag. Later, he and several others carried the pig to their anti-Muslim demonstration outside the New York City mayor’s residence. An insulting provocation to Jews and Muslims, yes. A clichéd attempt at menacing us, that, too.
What is it about not eating pigs that holds so much power emotionally, morally and symbolically?
Parashat Shemini introduces the laws of animals permitted and forbidden to the Israelites as food in a technical manner akin to the instructions previously given for selecting animals for sacrifices.
“These are the creatures that you may eat from among all the land animals: any animal that has true hoofs, with clefts through the hoofs, and that chews the cud — such you may eat.” (Leviticus 11:2-3)
The pig is not unique among the animals mentioned by name. Rather, it stands beside the camel, the hare and the rock badger, each one possessing only one of the required signs. The Torah frames the prohibition on consuming the flesh of these animals as boundary setting by “distinguishing between the unclean and the clean” (Leviticus 11:47) and setting the Israelites apart from other peoples in relation to God (Leviticus 20:26). Jewish identity is defined, at least in part, by refraining from eating certain foods that are fine for others.
It is often quipped that no one ever died for refusing to eat a camel. However, adherence to the prohibition on eating pigs became viewed by more powerful pig-eating groups as a particularly Jewish form of deviance. Through centuries of persecution beginning in the Greco-Roman period, intensifying in medieval Europe and spreading to new geographic regions through the Inquisition, abstention from eating pork becomes a practice Jews are watched for, tested by and punished for with torture and even death.
How does the weight of these long-ago historical events affect us?
When Jews refrain from eating pork today, we are not only following biblical law. We carry forward a memory that the Torah made possible:
“For I the Eternal am the One who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God: you shall be holy, for I am holy.” (Leviticus 11:45)
Holiness, here, is not abstraction. It is memory lived through the body.
Thankfully, we do not live in a time when Jews are forced to eat pork publicly as a sign of submission to political authorities as during the Seleucid persecutions, take the medieval Jewish Oath, requiring us to stand on a sow’s skin while placing a hand on a Bible in order to testify in court, or secretly create holiday dishes using eggplant in place of pork, lest we be reported by a household employee or neighbor for Judaizing.
Still, memory studies show that trauma attached to the body, especially through eating, produces unusually durable collective memory. What enters or is forced into the body leaves a trace that is passed on to subsequent generations.
In the United States today, many Jews eat pork. Many Jews who avoid it may no longer keep kosher. Memory theory explains why both groups, along with the minority who continue to practice kashrut, still may be deeply disturbed by antisemitic tropes centering pigs. The practice of not eating pigs, having become symbolic of Judaism and “the Jews,” has absorbed generations of trauma, resistance and survival. The associated collective memory is no longer cognitive. It long ago became somatic for us.
Dr. Rebecca Joseph is a community rabbi based in Sterling, Virginia.
*Attributed to the humorist David Rakoff.
