A kosher McDonalds inside Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo: Marco Plassio via Wikimedia Commons

After dealing with the sacrificial system, and the roles that priests play within it, the Torah turns to the laws of kashrut. More specifically, the Torah tells us the sorts of animals, fish, and birds that we are allowed to eat and those to be avoided.

In this context, the Torah uses the words Tamey and Tahor, which are usually translated as impure and pure. However, these words are usually misunderstood and have nothing to do with cleanliness or uncleanliness.

The concepts of purity and impurity in the Torah are concerned with states of being, and states of holiness in a religious sense — and to prepare people to enter or exit from a particular location of holiness, such as entering the Tabernacle or Temple.

So what is the connection with what one eats? The laws of what we can and cannot eat are now known as keeping “kosher.” The word simply means approval. But what is the true purpose of keeping kosher?

Some say it concerns health — that some animals are more disease-prone than others, or that carnivores and bottom feeders are to be avoided. Others say that it had to do with commercial or animal husbandry, while others look at which animals were worshipped in the ancient world, and which were not. But no explanation covers all of the animals, birds, and fish that are listed here in Leviticus. There are always exceptions.

Some people think it’s ultimately a matter of laws without logic intended simply as matters of faith or differentiating one religious way from another. Mystics will say that what you eat intrinsically affects who you are, and can physically modify you and your experience of life and God.

I prefer the idea that regardless of how or why these specific examples came to be, the one thing that they do achieve is to get us to think before we eat or prepare food from living beings.

The sacrificial system starts with ways that we relate to a higher power, but also encourages us to be better people through mechanisms of repentance and atonement. The Torah takes something conceptual and turns it into something practical — just like how we should treat Shabbat different from other days of the week.

The sacrificial system involved the participation of everybody in the community, one way or another. A significant part of the system involved individuals bringing animals and birds of different kinds to be sacrificed. Whereas sacrifices towards God would be totally consumed on the altar, others might be shared with the priesthood and then ordinary people — so that they could benefit from the offering, eating it together there or at home. Originally, people living in reasonable proximity to the Temple could only eat meat if it was sacrificed there.

Looking at the books of the Bible during the era of the Kings, and as the tribes spread out further and further away from the Temple, killing animals for food no longer depended on the Temple exclusively, and this was where the laws that we have today that permit anyone to kill an animal and prepare it for food have come about.

These laws are not mysterious or occult systems of practice. Rather, they are part of the whole behavioral structure of Torah that seeks to raise a person’s consciousness and spirituality by what we call mindfulness. By thinking before one acts and bringing the spiritual world into everything we do, these acts inspire us to be a better person.

The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.