April 17th, 2020
23 Nissan 5780
This week’s parashah, Shemini, offers one of the major collections of laws regarding Kashrut. Chapter eleven outlines classifications of animals that we can eat and those that we can’t, from those with split hooves and that chew their cud, to the water animals with fins and scales, and the birds that are kosher or treif. This system attempts to give us discipline around food, a way of separating the Israelites as a people based on what we eat and what we don’t. While some commentators have tried to offer various explanations for which animals we can or cannot eat, these distinctions are seemingly arbitrary. As a system, it’s not entirely clear how some animals fit into the kosher category and others are treif. However, commentators have attempted to offer meaning to some of these distinctions.
One of those meanings is offered regarding the stork. We are told about lots of birds that are not kosher, but one of them in Hebrew is called the חסידה/hasidah, the stork (Vayikra 11:19). Rashi comments on this hasidah with a teaching borrowed from the Talmud: Why is it called חסידה/hasidah? Because it deals kindly (חסד) with its fellows in respect to food (Talmud Bavli, Chullin 63a).
You can hear the word ‘hesed’ in the name of the bird, hasidah. This is the word that we use for loving-kindness, the way we hope God treats human beings and the way we try to emulate God when we deal with others. So it begs the question - if the stork is named after hesed, why would it be prohibited from our diet?
Rashi’s commentary describes her hesed with a word that’s easy to look over. He describes that the stork offers hesed, deals kindly with her חֲבְרוֹתֶיהָ, her fellows, those that are her friends, her people. This fact mitigates the goodness of her hesed: she is only willing to offer hesed to those close to her. Perhaps we are restricted from eating the stork because she restricted herself from offering hesed to those that were different, from those that weren’t her people. Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson wrote, “Our hesed, if restricted only to providing for the needs and interests of our own kind is treif.”
In the past month, as our world has turned upside-down, amidst the stress and sadness, I’ve been deeply moved by the hesed, the outpouring of love not just to those we know, but to perfect strangers as well. On erev yuntif, I read an article about a market owner in New Orleans. He opened the market in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans came to rely on him as a mainstay for food and community. But of course, his business has greatly suffered in the last month, many of his customers having lost their jobs and unable to pay for their groceries. He found one of his regular customers shoplifting a carton of eggs so she could feed her family - she had never done such a thing before. He gave her the groceries on credit, as he had started to do for many of his customers. Eleven dollars here, 7 there. Nothing huge, but it certainly adds up, and he’s kept a notebook with a tab for each customer.
Last night, after yuntif, I saw that hundreds of people had reached out to help this market owner. Some had sent notes of encouragement and love, and some sent even just $5, to offset the cost of someone’s groceries, to help him pay his rent, or to feed his own family. Certainly, some of these people who reached out to him were enduring their own struggles. But I realized that in a time when the pain of the world is affecting everyone in their own way, our capacity for compassion and empathy can also expand. It is hesed, it is the ability to pour out our love onto others, those we know and those that we don’t, that will get us through this period.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Sarit
