In Poland, the land of Auschwitz and Treblinka, of Majdanek and the Warsaw ghetto, in the land where millions of Jews and Jewish children were slaughtered just 65 years ago, a ban against the kosher slaughter of animals has been enacted, citing animal cruelty.
Too bad there was no such law in place against gruesome human cruelty when Poland was occupied by Germany in WW II. Yes, Poland was occupied, but today we also know all too well about the willing Polish sympathizers of Hitler in the country — not to mention the murder of Jews returning home to Poland after the war.
To say it is a bit ironic that Poland, human-bloodsoaked Poland, is limiting the religious freedom of Jewish practice because of supposed compassion for animals is an understatement.
Don’t get me wrong. I care very much about being compassionate toward animals, as the Torah itself does. But when contrasted with cruelty to humans, it is a different story.
Plus, I am not convinced by the argument that stunning an animal is more humane killing than shechitah, ritual slaughter. An animal is equally conscious at the onset of both a stunning procedure and a ritual slaughter.
The key to compassion is to be as quick and calm as possible, which kosher slaughter aims to do. Not to mention, too often animals that are shot in the head are not killed right away and must be shot with additional bullets.
This is hard to write. Killing a living creature is a painful thing. In India, the tradition is to apologize to the animal before killing it in order to feed family. Perhaps there is something to be said for that.
Back to Poland.
To outlaw kosher slaughter in Poland in the name of humane animal treatment —in a country in which Jews themselves were slaughtered and is weighted by its actions in the Holocaust — is patently absurd.
Poland is a country where hunting is legal to this very day.
How can Poland allow hunting, which inflicts more pain than any form of slaughter, kosher or otherwise, and also outlaw kosher slaughter, which limits the opportunity to live Jewishly?
Something is amiss.
Now, I know many people feel strongly that Jews have no business living in Poland in the first place.
That is beside the point.
Iam talking about the principle of infringing on a Jewish religious practice that is, like Sabbath observance, a sine qua non of Jewish life.
If you look at the trajectory of history and animal cruelty, long before it came into vogue as the latest secular cause, Jewish tradition has been sensitive to this issue. Judaism has been sensitive to the treatment of animals for millennia.
When other cultures or religions were torturing animals or disregarding their dignity, Judaism was legislating laws that prevented as much pain as possible in the slaughter of animals.
Judaism came up with the whole idea of minimizing pain to an animal in the first place.
I understand the ban against kosher slaughter in Poland is for export purposes only; that there is a large kosher meat export industry that would be thwarted, but that kosher slaughter for local religious minorities living in Poland it would continue to be legal.
This sounds like a fine-tuned tolerance, but it isn’t really. It is a step toward delegitimizing a basic Jewish practice and a basic Jewish way of life in the name of a noble cause that is, in fact, disturbing in its elevation of animal life at the expense of human life.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
