Setting an ethical table

As I was reading yet another chapter in the on-going exposé of business as it’s conducted by the holier-than-thou crowd which runs Agriprocessors, the largest kosher meat slaughtering and packing institution in the country, I engaged in a thought experiment. If I had the choice of eating a steak produced by people who flaunt the laws of society, exploit first one group of workers, and then their replacements, or a pork chop produced by a packing plant that treated its workers with respect, paid them an honest wage and treated the animals humanely even in bringing them death, which would I chose? The kosher steak or the traif pork? On the one hand the steak from Agriprocessors is from a kosher animal which rabbis have certified was slaughtered according to halacha, Jewish religious ritual. On the other hand, the pork is chazer, but the people who bring it to my table aren’t. Thus the dilemma. The obvious solution, of course, is to go vegetarian. But that avoids the issue.

I’ve addressed this sort of thing before. Back in October 2006 I wrote about Conservative rabbis whose law committee voted against (yes against!) requiring Conservative Jewish employers paying their employees a living wage. There’s nothing in halacha that requires it, they complained; Jews would be at an economic disadvantage, they moaned as they washed their hands of the question. Now Conservative rabbis are taking the other position arguing that there is more to kashrut than the process by which kosher animals are slaughtered and prepared. There is an ethical component as well. It’s nice that the Movement is on the right side of an ethical issue this time.

Rabbi David Lincoln, emeritus of New York’s Park Avenue (Conservative) Synagogue is quoted in the Forward as saying “I think there’s a general feeling that in the Orthodox community, in many Orthodox communities, and especially in the more Haredi, more extreme Orthodox communities, there’s more concern for the strict rules of halacha, for how you cut the animal’s throat and how you examine the lungs. They’re not really concerned about whether you’re stealing, or whatever, or going into court and perjuring themselves.”

Harsh words. But some Orthodox rabbis agree. Shmuel Herzfeld, an Orthodox rabbi from Washington, DC wrote an op ed piece in the Times condemning the hypocrisy Agriprocessors and those who defend its practices, calling it a desecration of God’s name. He was roundly condemned in his turn by the Orthodox Union which certifies Agriprocessors. One Orthodox group, Uri L’Tzedek, describes itself as the Orthodox Social Justice Movement. Its website says that its purpose is “to develop the new, growing discourse among traditional Jewish communities making the connection between God, Torah, and social issues in America, and to help translate that discourse into action.” It has come out against the abuses at Agriprocessors but again, defenders of the see no evil, discuss no evil camp of the Orthodox attack it and its leaders.

So, must ethical people chose between pork and vegitarianism? Or can American Jews apply to ourselves the standards we hold dear when discussing America. Many of us abhore the policies of the current administration. It is our right. Is it an obligation to go public with our complaints? Of course. Are there those Jews to whom the administration is doing the right thing? Of course. Is it their right to defend? Certainly. Is either less American for doing so? Is one group demonstrably more patriotic than the other? P’shaw, of course not. Is America embarressed by the public outcry? I hope so. Should the public scrutiny cease? Not until a determination is made. It’s the same with the Agriprocessors scandal. Those of us who maintain a kosher household must weigh what we read and decide. To eat meat or to go parev. Hiding the truth, denying the truth is an abandonment of ethical principles. Knowing what I right is no secret. Read Micah. We know what God requires, what Judaism has always advocated—to do justice, to love goodness and to walk modestly with our God. Exploiting our workers for the purpose of greater profits, ignoring the prophets in the process cannot be defended. I won’t eat the pork, but meat produced by Agriprocessors is off my table.

The Bard and Barack

It’s summer time and the livin’, as Ira Gershwin wrote, is easy. The world has no fewer problems but the tendency is to put the serious stuff on the back burner until after the World Series. But people can go too far.

I have in mind Edward Achorn in Tuesday’s August 5 Providence Journal: “Was the Bard a secret Catholic?” is the question asked, and it will come as no surprise that the answer is a definitive “could be.” Achorn relies on Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome. You may remember Pearce. He was a member of the British National Front, a neo-fascist society dedicated to race purity. Twice he served time for militant racism, but then he found the Catholic Church and reformed. Currently he is a professor of literature at the right-wing Catholic Ave Maria University.

The evidence Achorn selects from Pearce’s tome is interesting, but it’s the kind that people present when they want to make the case that Columbus was Jewish—as circumstantial as it is irrelevant. Achorn concludes his article with a graphic you-really-don’t-want-to-have-to-read-this-stuff-while-sipping-your-morning-coffee description of being drawn and quartered, a punishment meted out to Catholics in Elizabeth’s persecutions of them. This is followed by, “His works remain universal. But that Shakespeare might have been a hidden Catholic lends undeniable piquancy to the themes of power, honor and strained loyalty running so strongly through his work.”

If Catholics want to claim Shakespeare, it’s fine with me. But what is objectionable is that while Achorn uses as his source a (pseudo) academic and quotes a legitimate one—Anthony Esolen who contends that Pearce’s case is “meticulous, reasonable and convincing” he without cause or justification maligns academics in general. Hey! What’d I do?

“All this of course, [that Shakespeare was devout crypto-Catholic] must seem anathema to academics who wish to embrace Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity. The popular creed of our day is that godless Man is all, and that elites, using Machiavellian means to advance themselves, should have as much power as possible to work their superior will over less enlightened human beings. In the view of some, Shakespeare had nothing specific to say about morality or religion, other than to question the legitimacy of both.”

Let’s parse this. To begin with there is no such thing as “academics”. We are, if anything, anarchists. No one of us speaks for another, and often enough, not even for ourselves. We are ready to admit that we favored something until we opposed it. We are a punching bag for conservatives who see our malign presence in the classroom as undermining everything they believe in, but the punching bag is never the aggressor; it’s the innocent bystander.

Is there really a stampede of academics embracing Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity? Is secular modernity so immoral as Achorn assumes? I know conservatives who are atheists, liberals who believe in God and neither camp advocates immorality.

Now we get to the core. We secular modernist academics are elitists! And we don’t trust the common man to make decisions for themselves! And we are inappropriately co-opting Shakespeare, that moral Roman Catholic. I know you know, this, dear reader, but when conservatives use the word “elite” they are not talking about Noble Prize winners, nor even of Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. They are talking about liberals, especially liberal Democrats, and, now-a-days more particularly Barack Obama. It’s the cry of the right-wing haves who want to wrest the poor and the lower middle class away from the Democrats who have been their champions at least since the days of FDR.

Oh, and lest it goes unsaid. Poor Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic because he feared torture and death at the hands of rabid Protestants? This is why he “revered justice, detested bullies, and fully understood the sinfulness and frailty of his fellow men and women”? Elizabeth’s predecessor, her half-sister Mary, burned Protestants at the stake and Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, tried to blow up Parliament. In Spain the Inquisition’s auto de fes were consuming Protestants, Moors and, need I remind you, Jews. Galileo was threatened with the same punishment for the same crime as Giordano Bruno who had been burned at the stake for teaching the Copernican theory. Let’s face it, Catholics at that time held no monopoly on being persecuted. Belief in God does not equate with moral behavior; secularists can be just as moral—or immoral—as religious folk.