Parshah Commentary
In this week’s parshah, after delivering a set of prohibitions on offering physically blemished animals as sacrifices, God informs Moses of certain restrictions on the sacrifice of perfectly healthy animals: A newborn must be allowed to stay with its mother for at least seven days before being brought as an offering, and no animal may be slaughtered on the same day as its offspring. While some commentators explain the first rule in ritual terms (as a concern that an animal in its first week of life may prove unviable), most agree that the latter rule is primarily sentimental—that it feels inherently cruel to slaughter a creature alongside its young. Several commentators compare this to the rules prohibiting boiling a calf in its mother’s milk, and the requirement to send away a mother bird before taking her eggs or fledglings. The commentarial consensus—and among halachic authorities—is that despite being situated in the context of ritual sacrifice, the prohibition on slaughtering the mother and her young together is applicable even to non-ritual slaughter, just as in the cases of not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk and sending away the mother bird.
Many commentators take pains to emphasize that this rule is more for the sake of the humans involved than for the benefit of the animals. Shadal, a 19th-century Italian commentator, writes: “This isn’t really to have compassion upon the animals, but rather to strengthen the attribute of compassion in a person’s heart, and to distance them from cruelty.” Ramban, a 13th-century Catalonian scholar, makes this point most emphatically, arguing that if it were really about compassion for the animals, “God would have forbidden slaughter altogether!” Indeed, none of these prohibitions alter the animals’ ultimate fate: One is permitted to slaughter the mother one day and her offspring the next, or to cook the kid in one pot and use its mother’s milk to prepare a milchig dish in a separate pot. These commentators therefore insist that the goal of such commandments is to prevent inculcating a sort of casual cruelty, a trait unbecoming of the pious individual. Empathy here becomes not something that the animal truly deserves, but something I cultivate to ensure my own moral perfection.
This focus on one’s own goodness, to the exclusion of grappling with actual suffering inflicted, is echoed in a tendency in centerist, liberal Zionist discourse that insists that losing the ability to mourn Palestinian life is to lose one’s humanity. Within this rhetoric, the “loss” of life is seen as a fait accompli, a necessary tragedy. It is a discourse that views with aversion those who gleefully revel or indifferently shrug at the mass slaughter of Palestinians, but insists that the only moral option is to continue waging “just wars” while grieving the death and destruction that follow. For the members of this camp, if one solemnly mourns the tragically necessary losses entailed in defending an ethnostate, one can remain a compassionate individual.
In the Ramban’s diatribe on the nature of these mitzvot, he references a related sentiment from the meandering final mishnah of Tractate Kiddushin, where the Rabbis make the startling declaration that “the fittest of butchers is a partner of Amalek.” Why? Because to devote one’s entire life to the work of slaughter requires, in their minds, some measure of cruelty, of becoming callous to suffering. And this is true even for those butchers performing slaughter in the way the Torah mandates! The Rabbis acknowledge that slaughter that avoids the exceptional cruelty of killing a mother and her offspring together still necessitates some brutality. Yet the Rabbis aren’t arguing that butchers should not exist, that the community should abstain from meat. In the context of the mishnah, they’re arguing that rabbis and their families should not pursue such unclean, corrupting work. Rather, they should preserve their moral perfection while offloading the “necessary” brutality to others.
Notably, there are minority voices that disagree with this presentation of the mitzvot listed above. The Rambam, in his Guide for the Perplexed, writes that these prohibitions are in fact meant to prevent undue emotional suffering for the animals. And elsewhere in the Rabbinic corpus, we see the concept of “tzaar baalei chayim,” a prohibition on causing animals suffering, which—while occasionally limited in its application—does focus on the animals’ experiences and materially improving their circumstances.
In the context of our parshah, and in line with the dominant understanding of these prohibitions, I don’t disagree that mitzvot are meant to instill in us certain attributes, to shape our orientations to the world. But an approach that emphasizes cultivating our own moral excellence in complete detachment from material impact on others is one that turns compassion into a navel-gazing, self-congratulatory exercise that does not produce a more compassionate world. When people insist that “we will lose our humanity” if we cannot mourn Palestinian death, but concede that some measure of death is necessary to preserve the stability of their ethnostate, that mourning has not produced a more humane world, but rather a more humane self-image. If we are truly to reject cruelty, we must reject it for the violence it does to others, not only ourselves. One cannot merely refuse to revel in this world’s “necessary” suffering, allowing others to carry out this brutal work while maintaining our own sensitivities. Rather we must insist on building a world where the notion that our comfort and security can be built upon the “necessary” suffering of others is incoherent.
Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.
