The Kosher Commandments

A guide to understanding the Jewish dietary laws

Story by Marielle Messing // Photography by Caitlin Deibel

Senior Sara Blanchard has been following the laws of keeping kosher all her life. After arriving at Syracuse University for the first time four years ago, she found it difficult to meet her family’s kosher standards while living in the dorms. She was pleased to have more freedom to observe the laws when she moved into an off-campus apartment her junior year, but living with senior Lilly Clervi proved that sharing a kitchen with a Catholic, non-kosher roommate has its own challenges.

“Because I know her stuff has touched meat, I don’t want her silverware touching my dairy dishes,” Blanchard says. “Making meals together is difficult because I have to make my own chicken and she makes her own chicken and then we need to find something we can share together.” On one cooking occasion, Clervi accidentally added milk and butter into the mashed potatoes and then Blanchard, who was busy preparing a meat main course, couldn’t eat them.

“I always know that she can’t have dairy with her meal, but I think of dairy as separate, like a glass of milk, not the butter that goes into the mashed potatoes,” Clervi says.

Blanchard says that small things like this come up frequently — like whose spatula they should use when making pancakes — but overall, the two friends can cook together without major catastrophes.

Like Blanchard and Clervi, many kosher students on our campus and their friends run into problems when it comes to dining out or cooking a meal together. Friends can get confused when their kosher buddies explain what they do and don’t eat — especially since everyone has different levels of observance when it comes to the kosher rules. For the curious and confounded, here’s a handy guide to your kosher friends’ dining customs and taboos.

Kosher 101

• Rule #1: No pork and no shellfish. In other words, no bacon, ham, lobster, or crab — or any food that contains such animals. This rule comes straight out of the Torah. According to Jewish tradition, Moses delivered the kosher laws to the Jewish people from God at the same time as the Ten Commandments, about 3,000 years ago. The book of Leviticus, chapter 11, goes into great detail about the animals that Jews can and cannot eat.

In order to be kosher, mammals must have cloven hooves and chew their cud (cows, goats, sheep); fish must have scales and fins (tuna, salmon, herring); any fowl not mentioned in the Torah are kosher, though traditionally only chicken, turkey, duck, and goose are eaten; only insects with joined legs that leap on the ground (locusts, grasshoppers) are kosher; and no reptiles or amphibians are kosher (sorry, you’ll have to pass on the turtle soup).

• Rule #2: The animals that are OK to eat, particularly meat and fowl, must be slaughtered in a specific way to minimize suffering. This directive comes not from the Torah, but from the Talmud, a book of commentary on the Torah written by Jewish scholars over the past two millennia.

According to Rabbi Yaakov Rapoport, the head of Chabad House at SU, in the 12th century a scholar named Nachmonides wrote that God didn’t want Jewish people to ingest the cruelty of predator animals. Rapoport ties this reasoning into another feature of kosher slaughter: draining the meat of all its blood. Jews do not eat blood, and so kosher butchers carefully salt their meat in a way that absorbs and removes it. This is why some Jews won’t eat any old hamburger, even though beef is kosher. If the meat has been certified as kosher by a rabbi, they know the animal was slaughtered in a special way and that all the blood was drained from it.

• Rule #3: Don’t mix milk and meat. As you can see from Clervi and Blanchard’s mashed potato story, this is crucial. For many Jews who start keeping kosher later in life, this is also the hardest to follow. The rule comes from the verse, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” which according to Rapoport must be important since it can be found in three places: Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, and Deuteronomy 14:21.

For some Jews, this means no milk with their steak dinner. For others, say goodbye to cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizza. For those who follow the laws most closely and literally, it means a non-dairy margarine substitute replaces butter on a meat dinner’s ingredient list. Fish is not considered meat, but fowl are.
Because there are so many rules about meat, dairy meals become especially important in a kosher home, according to “Spice & Spirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook,” which is published by a group of Lubavitch Ultra-Orthodox women. The book explains that dairy and meat foods may not be cooked, served, or eaten together, and that separate utensils are used exclusively for dairy. Even a small amount of a milk-derived ingredient can make a food dairy according to Jewish Law, and like meat, all dairy produc ts require a reliable certification of kashrut, the Hebrew word for kosher. Observant Jews are expec ted to wait six hours between eating meat and dairy meals, just to be safe.

Not every Jew uses the Lubavitch standards to gauge time between meals though. Junior Rachel Dudley waits three hours between meat and milk and 20 minutes between milk and meat — the time, according to Dudley, it takes to digest each type of food.

Kosher rules complicate eating, which for Dudley ac ts as a reminder of who she is. “Part of why I keep kosher is me having to stop before I eat anything and constantly be aware of my identity. Part of it is simply because that’s what God tells us to do and there are many things we don’t understand.”
Identity is a popular reason that many Jews, especially college students, choose to keep kosher. Other benefits attributed to keeping kosher include theories that it is more hygienic, that it teaches morals, and that, if you are what you eat, then eating a holy diet should make you a holier person.

However, according to Rapoport, these are just rationales. “The reason we keep kosher is because it’s part of the divine law. I call rationales icing on the cake.”

Keeping Kosher on Campus

There are three places on campus where students can get ready-made kosher food. The first is the Kosher Kitchen inside Shaw Dining Hall, where students can call ahead to order kosher dinners and lunches.
Shaw’s Kosher Kitchen prepares about a dozen orders a day and up to 150 meals on Friday nights, which they send to the Winnick Hillel Center for consumption, says Patrick Hess, a cook help at Shaw Dining Hall. He adds that on Saturdays the staff cannot cook in the kosher kitchen because of Shabbat, but will prepare cold meals for students who request them. Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, runs from sunset on Friday nights until an hour after sunset on Saturday night. During this time Jews are restric ted from lighting fires, which could lead to doing work, but which incidentally prevents one from cooking.

Many students find the services offered by the Kosher Kitchen to be limited.

Dudley, who has a busy schedule, complains that even when she calls ahead, her food is never ready at the time she needs it. “The kosher dining hall system just isn’t sufficient. The fac t that they have it is wonderful and I understand the need to cook meals on an individual basis as opposed to offering a line. The problem is that it is almost never ready. Sometimes it’s a matter of five minutes, but often it’s much more, 20 to 30 minutes. When you have a tight schedule, you can’t rely on something like that.”

On the bright side, says Dudley, the meals that the Kosher Kitchen cooks for Hillel on Friday nights are delicious. Hillel is a national organization focusing on Jewish life on college campuses. SU’s branch is located at The Winnick Hillel Center for Jewish Life at 102 Walnut Place and offers kosher meals every Friday night following Reform and Conservative Shabbat services at 7 p.m.

Dudley also likes that Hillel serves meals every day during the weeklong Passover holiday, which they prepare in their own kosher-for-Passover kitchen inside the Winnick Center. A kosher-for-Passover kitchen requires the absence of leavened bread produc ts (chameitz, in Hebrew), down to the very crumbs in the cupboards.

“Eating on Passover can be very difficult, even when someone has their own kosher kitchen, so the fac t that Hillel serves all the meals is great,” Dudley says.

Blanchard comes from a more religious background than Dudley does and says that she prefers Chabad House over the Kosher Kitchen and Hillel. Chabad House, located at 825 Ostrom Ave., is run by Rabbi Rapoport and is open every Friday night and Saturday for services and large meals home-cooked by his wife, Chanie. Chabad House also offers meals and services at every Jewish holiday.

“Chabad is really nice — I ac tually like it more than Hillel. The environment is so homey and the food is so good,” Blanchard says. At home in Boston, Blanchard’s family goes to a Chabad shul (synagogue), so she’s comfortable spending Shabbat at the Rapoports’ house, while less observant students might be more comfortable at Hillel.

Off campus, there are also a few places to get kosher goods. Rabbi Rapoport recommends shopping at Price Chopper and Wegmans. “They both have a large kosher sec tion. Price Chopper has more meat and poultry than Wegmans. Wegmans will have more dried goods, Price Chopper will have more dairy produc ts and frozen foods.” He says between the two stores, you can find everything you need. He adds that there is also Nature Time, a health food store on Bridge Street, and Samir’s Imported Foods, a Lebanese grocery store with many Israeli foods on East Genesee Street, both in Syracuse. For groceries, Rapoport also recommends looking in the school bookstore and in Food Works, which carry kosher-certified products.