Ever since the
book of Leviticus provides the pig as an example of a nonkosher animal because
it does not have both signs a kosher animal needs, chews cud and has split
hooves, as is written in Leviticus 11:7 “and the swine—although it has true
hoofs, with the hoofs cleft through, it does not chew the cud: it is impure for
you,” the pig has been one of the biggest taboo foods in Judaism. There are people
who don’t keep kosher still refuse to eat any pork product. Archaeologists can tell whether a site is an Israelite site or a Canaanite or Roman site if they uncover pig bones in their dig. Daf TB Menakhot 64a tells a story why
the rabbis cursed Jews who raised pigs.
“The mishna
teaches: There was an incident where the omer came from Gaggot
Tzerifin and the two loaves on Shavuot came from the valley of Ein
Sokher. The Sages taught a baraita that provides the background
of this event: When the kings of the Hasmonean monarchy besieged each other
in their civil war, Hyrcanus was outside of Jerusalem, besieging it, and
Aristoblus was inside. On each and every day they would lower dinars in a box
from inside the city, and those on the outside would send up
animals for them to bring the daily offerings in the Temple.
“A
certain elderly man was there,
in Jerusalem, who was familiar with Greek wisdom. He communicated to
those on the outside by using words understood only by those proficient
in Greek wisdom. The elderly man said to them: As long as they are engaged
with the Temple service, they will not be delivered into your hands.
Upon hearing this, on the following day, when they lowered dinars in
a box, they sent up a pig to them. Once the pig reached halfway up
the wall, it inserted its hooves into the wall and Eretz Yisrael
shuddered four hundred parasangs by four hundred parasangs.
“When the Sages saw this, they
said at that time: Cursed is he who raises pigs, and cursed is he who
teaches his son Greek wisdom…” (Sefaria.org translation)
Today in modern Israel raising pigs
is highly regulated. Although pork products are available in Jerusalem, one has
to know where to purchase it because most establishments only sell kosher meat.
On the other hand, pork products are much more available in Tel Aviv. I
remember when I was a participant in the Leadership Institute’s to Israel, we
visited where African refugees lived in a park and in abandoned buildings. All
around this area were butcher shops that sold pork products because these
refugees could eat pork products since they were neither Jews nor Muslims.
I searched the Internet about pig
farms in Israel and found the following article.
On Israel’s Only Jewish-Run Pig Farm, It’s
The Swine That Bring Home the Bacon
By Jeffrey
Yoskowitz
April 24, 2008
I stood beside the road with a traveling backpack and a
yarmulke, my arm extended, hitchhiking to the junction from Ramat Raziel to
catch a bus home. I was singing “Lev Tahor,” a verse from Psalm 51
meaning “pure heart” that I’d been singing all Sabbath long. A car stopped, and
a bearded man in a knit yarmulke picked me up. As I entered his car, he turned
to me: “I’m Oren… So where you going?” Damn. I’d begun to hate this question,
especially when asked by religious people. “Kibbutz Lahav,” I answered,
expecting a gasp. Unfazed, he further inquired, “And what do you do there?”
Again, I hesitated, this time with dread. “Uh, well… I work on their pig farm.”
And just like that, I managed to overwhelm and confuse Oren,
as well as myself, while simultaneously expressing the contradiction that pig
farming in Israel played in my life for the two months I spent working at
Kibbutz Lahav. Luckily, Oren was an open-minded man whose parting words to me
were: “God put you on the pork farm for a reason.”
The kibbutz and its pigs sit comfortably in the northern
Negev, just 30 minutes north of Beersheba, surrounded by the Lahav forest,
Israel’s largest manmade woodlands. Pine trees, scattered acorns and orderly
planted “wild” grasses and flowers seem somewhat out of place in the desert
hills. The iconoclastic kibbutz similarly appears incongruous in a Jewish part
of a Jewish country, next door to religious Kibbutz Shomeriya. As I learned
over the course of two months, though, the kibbutz, just like the forest, fits
into the complex web of Israeli and Jewish identity in more ways than one.
Toward the end of January, I moved onto Kibbutz Lahav in an
effort to understand the phenomenon of pigs in Israel. While there are a number
of similar farms in Israel, Kibbutz Lahav is unique because, as its slogan
suggests, it is “the meat from the Kibbutz.” All the other pig breeders operate
in a zone in the North dominated by Christian Arabs, the only place where
raising pork is legal, according to a 1962 law. Kibbutz Lahav, a Jewish-run
farm, proudly operates outside the legal zone.
Lahav’s pig breeding gained widespread notoriety because of
its legal loophole, almost talmudic in its ingenuity, in which the kibbutz is
exempt from the law and can rightfully raise pigs for research as a part of its
Animal Research Institute. Thus, the kibbutz raises pigs for science and eats
the excess, developing over the years a rather staggering excess. For many
years the institute was no more than an ad hoc veterinarian research institute,
which, on the scientific side, boasted little more than the successful splicing
of an ibex with a goat.
“Israelis weren’t ready to pay more money for it,” said
Dodik, a kibbutz elder whose last name I never learned, as was the case with
most people on the kibbutz.
Today, as a result of the recent biotech boom, the institute
is the center of Israel’s most spectacular medical advancements, where
religious Jewish scientists are among the hundreds of researchers who use the
pigs for innovative experimentation.
Despite the institute’s success, raising and processing pig
meat is the main purpose of the farm, as the 10,000-plus animals suggest. Most
workers commute from Beersheba each morning. Jewish immigrants from Argentina
and Russian immigrants with little Jewish background make up the largest
proportion of the 50-something workers. On any given morning, the workers are
spread out among the 15 or so indoor buildings, administering antibiotics,
slaughtering and butchering, inseminating sows and moving pigs to the fattening
rooms from their weaning rooms.
Eshai, a proud Israeli-born pork eater — and self-proclaimed
messiah (he was born on the Ninth of Av, the prophesied birthday of the future
messiah) — was my supervisor for most of February. He seethed with a cynicism
toward all things Jewish and traditional. I once asked him why nobody collects
and sells pigs’ milk. He answered me, grinning: “Pigs’ milk isn’t kosher.”
One day after work, when changing out of my coveralls and
knee-high boots, a new immigrant from Brazil, Yehoshua, was discussing his
former religiosity with Marcos when he mentioned in passing that he still
didn’t eat pork. “Me neither,” I interrupted their conversation, excited to
discover I wasn’t alone. “I keep kosher.”
Then Marcos chimed in, in his equally broken Hebrew: “Yeah,
neither do I.” And there we sat, three confused Jewish pig farmers, when Imat,
the Palestinian Muslim pig farmer, who also didn’t eat pork, entered the room.
How can you spot a kosher pig farmer? We blended in — except
for Yehoshua, who always wore facemasks in a last-ditch effort not to inhale or
ingest the same air as the pigs, or the floating fecal dust. Early on I also
donned a facemask, but unlike Yehoshua, who can hardly understand Hebrew or
English, I got the jokes and insults, such as “Jewboy” and “rookie,” from the
Sabras, not to mention Eshai’s looks, which implied “pansy.”
It was when I learned from co-workers that our manager
doesn’t eat pork, and that his manager and the head of the entire pork
operation has a pork-free home, that I first felt at home, comfortable as a
kosher Jew on the kibbutz. Through such revelations I saw the pig-breeding
center as home to the same neurotic Jewish traditionalism that courses through
my veins.
Such contradictions shed light on the beautiful and
confusing Jewish identity of Kibbutz Lahav and its pigs. On Friday night in the
kibbutz dining room, there is a Sabbath display of candlesticks, a challah
cover and a Kiddush cup. Kibbutzniks thus have the Sabbath on their minds as
they eat their special meal of braised pork or ham on the ceremonial white
Sabbath linens. During our celebratory barbecue just prior to Purim, management
handed out mishloach manot, traditional Jewish gift baskets, to all the
workers, with a note wishing everyone a “happy Purim.” Most workers ate the hamantaschen
as dessert after the grilled pork spare ribs. One Thursday, while I was
shopping in the kolbo — the kibbutz grocery store — a panicked woman ran behind
me to speak to the cashier, urgently asking if she could leave a ham in the
freezer and collect it tomorrow for Friday’s dinner. When she left with
permission to do so, I turned to the cashier woman, smiled and asked her if the
meat was “for Shabbat.” She nodded, and we both laughed.
According to Dodik, one of the kibbutz founders, Lahav
embarked on pork production by chance. In 1952, the year of the kibbutz’s
founding and a period of major food shortages in Israel, the struggling Lahav
received a gift of one boar and two sows from a neighboring kibbutz. After a
number of years, and thanks to the will of a few kibbutzniks, those pigs became
the kibbutz’s financial linchpin. As kibbutzim have been failing and Lahav, in
particular, has had trouble, the pigs have remained a stable revenue producer,
an unlikely friend to a Zionist institution.
And even though most kibbutzniks no longer “work in the
pigs,” the porcine influence on the kibbutz is nearly impossible to miss. Ten
thousand-plus pigs howl throughout the night, along with the desert jackals.
There’s a dreaded western wind here that brings with it the inescapable and
potent scent of industrial hog waste that cannot possibly be ignored. In the
dining room there is almost always a pork option. The kibbutzniks find no need
for the silly euphemisms used by greater Israeli society, like “white meat” and
“white steak.” Pork, or at least the right to raise it, serve it and eat it, is
no doubt a point of pride at Lahav today, and part of the kibbutz’s national
legacy. (https://forward.com/news/13245/on-israel-s-only-jewish-run-pig-farm-it-s-the-01742/)
I guess there was a terminal end date for the curse on those
raising pigs.
