The question arrives as a dietary restriction. It ends as a question about identity, belonging, and whether tradition owns your body or your body owns tradition.
I learned this not from reading Leviticus, but from watching three people navigate what it means to keep kosher in ways that have nothing to do with hygiene and everything to do with survival, survival of self within a community that defines itself, largely, through what it refuses to eat.
Esther arrived at the Katz’s delicatessen on the Lower East Side at 8:47 AM on a Tuesday in November, carrying with her a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from negotiating the same argument with yourself for thirty years.
She is fifty-two, Ashkenazi Jewish, born to parents who maintained kosher homes with the precision of people for whom kashrut was not a choice but an inherited architecture. Her mother, now eighty-one, still separates dishes. Still checks labels. Still maintains what Esther calls “the fiction of coherence”, the pretense that kashrut is a consistent system with clear rules that one either follows or doesn’t.
Esther stopped keeping kosher when she was eighteen. She remembers the exact moment: a plate of shrimp at a seafood restaurant in Providence, eaten with deliberate slowness, waiting for the sky to crack or her mother’s voice to materialize. Neither happened. She ate the shrimp. She ate another. She ordered more. She waited for transformation, punishment, revelation, lightening of spirit, anything, and instead she felt only the ordinary satiation of hunger addressed.
But she was also aware, even then, of the transgression. The shrimp was not simply shrimp. It was not-kosher shrimp. The category preceded the thing itself.
Now, thirty-four years later, standing in Katz’s delicatessen, a space thick with Ashkenazi Jewish history, with the smell of salt and curing meat, with a kind of embodied memory that exists regardless of personal observance, she was ordering a pastrami sandwich.
The pastrami is kosher. The deli is not. This contradiction does not seem to bother her, until I ask her directly about it.
“I come here,” she said, settling into a booth with the sandwich on a paper plate, “because Katz’s is the closest I come to feeling what my grandmother felt. She would have kept kosher. My mother keeps kosher. I don’t. But the pastrami, the pastrami is something we would have all eaten the same way.”
She paused, examining the meat.
“The question is not whether the pastrami is kosher. The question is what it means that I need this place to feel connected to women I never fully knew.”
On the same morning, across the city in Brooklyn, David was standing in his kitchen preparing for a Shabbat dinner that he would host but not believe in.
David is thirty-eight, Ashkenazi, the son of a woman who has kept a kosher home for sixty years and made it clear, through every gesture and every meal preparation, that David’s defection from kashrut observance is experienced as a kind of abandonment, not of rules, but of her. Of the life she built. Of the sacrifice she made to maintain Jewish identity against the weight of American assimilation.
When David turned twenty-three and stopped keeping kosher in his own apartment, his mother wept. Not from moral outrage, though that was present. She wept from the particular anguish of someone watching her child step outside the boundary she had spent her life building.
Now, at thirty-eight, David maintains a kosher kitchen. Not because he believes that separating meat dishes from dairy dishes has any spiritual significance. Not because he believes that a shellfish prohibition comes from divine instruction. But because his mother is aging. Because the cost of maintaining kashrut, buying different products, checking labels, performing the rituals correctly, is less than the cost of his mother’s grief.
This is not a noble arrangement. It is not even a particularly honest one. It is a negotiation conducted in the currency of shame, obligation, and the knowledge that his mother’s time is finite.
He was preparing brisket, definitely kosher, in a kitchen where he maintained kashrut observance the way one maintains a photograph of someone deceased. With care, but without the presence of actual belief.
“My therapist,” he told me while trimming the meat, “suggested that my keeping kosher while not believing in it is a form of dishonesty toward my mother. But I think it’s actually a form of honesty. I’m acknowledging that my mother’s identity is more important to me than my own freedom. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s relationship.”
I asked him whether he thought his mother would agree with that formulation.
“No,” he said. “She would say that my keeping kosher is only meaningful if it’s sincere. That fake observance is worse than no observance. That I’m going through the motions while being spiritually empty. And she would be right. But the alternative is her pain, and I’ve decided that her pain is worse than my dishonesty.”
The third voice arrived through Miriam, a woman of sixty-one who was born in Jerusalem to a Mizrahi family, emigrated to America at twenty-eight, and has spent the subsequent thirty-three years navigating what it means to keep kosher in a way that reflects her tradition, a tradition that Ashkenazi American Jews often don’t recognize as kashrut at all.
When Miriam first arrived in New York, she sought out communities of Mizrahi Jews. She found almost none. What she found instead were Ashkenazi communities that had established themselves as the default expression of American Judaism. Their kashrut, their prohibitions, their stringencies, their particular ways of negotiating modernity, had become the unspoken standard against which all other practice was measured.
Miriam’s family, in Jerusalem, had maintained kashrut in ways that Ashkenazi communities found puzzling. They ate certain foods that Ashkenazi Jews prohibited. They prepared food differently. They understood the relationship between kashrut and tradition not as a series of discrete rules but as an ongoing conversation with history.
Now, at sixty-one, living in a small apartment in Flatbush, she had largely given up maintaining strict kashrut observance, not because she stopped believing, but because the particular form of kashrut available in Brooklyn was Ashkenazi kashrut, and she was tired of constantly explaining why her traditions didn’t match the default.
“In Jerusalem,” she said, sitting in her kitchen while preparing lunch, “kashrut was something you did with your community. Everyone knew what foods were acceptable because you grew up eating them. Here, kashrut is something you do alone, checking labels, consulting online resources, trying to fit into an Ashkenazi system that treats my traditions as variations on what they do rather than as equally valid expressions of Jewish law.”
She was preparing a meal that would have been completely normal in her childhood, foods that, by Ashkenazi standards, would require careful investigation to verify their kosher status, but that she ate without concern because she understood the sources of the ingredients and the communities that produced them.
“The funny thing,” she continued, “is that I probably maintain more of the spirit of kashrut than these Ashkenazi women do. I think about where my food comes from. I think about the relationships embedded in it. I think about what it means to consume something in my community. But because I’m not checking labels and separating meat from dairy in the specific way they do, I’m considered non-observant.”
What Esther, David, and Miriam were each circling, without necessarily knowing that the others were circling it too, was a question that conventional discussions of kashrut almost never address directly.
Kashrut is not a dietary system.
This is the crucial sentence, and it arrives as a shock to almost everyone who encounters it seriously for the first time. We have been trained to think of kashrut as a set of rules about food, foods you can eat, foods you cannot eat, proper preparation methods, permissible combinations. We think of it as hygiene made sacred, or as practical wisdom dressed up in religious language.
This is incorrect.
Kashrut is a boundary-making system. It is a way of marking who belongs to the Jewish community and who does not. It is a way of inscribing Jewish identity onto the Jewish body itself, through the act of consumption. It is a technology of community maintenance. And it is deeply, irreducibly social.
To understand this, you have to begin not with the rules themselves, but with the function the rules serve.
The Torah, in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, provides a list of animals that are permitted for consumption and animals that are not. The logic of the list is, even to careful readers, somewhat opaque.
Land animals are permitted if they have a split hoof AND chew cud. Both conditions are required. This is why the camel is forbidden, it chews cud but lacks a split hoof. The pig is forbidden, it has a split hoof but does not chew cud. This creates a mathematical precision to the law: the clean animal must possess both markers.
Sea creatures are permitted if they have fins AND scales. Again, both conditions required. Shellfish, shrimp, crab, lobster, oysters, lack scales, so they are categorically forbidden.
Birds are entirely forbidden by negative example, the Bible provides an exhaustive list of birds you cannot eat (eagle, vulture, raven, owl, hawk, etc.) but never explains why, or what principle determines the category.
For insects, only certain locusts are permitted. Everything else is prohibited. The prohibition extends to all “creeping things”, anything that crawls is forbidden.
The stated reason for this classification system appears only briefly: “For I am the Lord your God: you shall therefore keep yourselves holy, for I am holy.” The logic is purity through separation, holiness through restriction. But the specific content of the restrictions, why these animals and not those, is opaque even to the Biblical text itself.
Modern scholars have proposed various theories. Some suggest the system reflects nutritional wisdom, shellfish could spoil easily in warm climates, so their prohibition protected people from food poisoning. Some suggest ecological reasoning, the rules maintain particular animals or prevent overexploitation. Some suggest that the classifications reflect ancient cosmology: animals that don’t fit neatly into categories (scales without fins, hooves without cud-chewing) are inherently disruptive to order and therefore forbidden.
But here is what is crucial: nobody keeps kosher according to the Biblical list anymore.
Not the strictest Orthodox. Not the Haredi communities of Jerusalem or Brooklyn. Not the scholars who have studied Talmudic law for decades. Everyone deviates from the literal Biblical text. And they do so through a process of interpretation that began immediately after the Biblical period ended.
When the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, Jewish religious practice underwent a catastrophic transformation. The temple had been the center of Jewish religious life. Sacrifice had been the primary way Jews related to the divine. The priesthood had been organized. The system was concrete.
Then it was gone.
The Pharisees, who would become the founders of rabbinic Judaism, faced a problem: how do you maintain Jewish identity and Jewish law in the absence of the institutional structure that had contained them?
The answer they developed was the Talmud.
The Talmud is not a book of rules. It is a massive, contradictory, perpetually unresolved conversation about law, ethics, and how to live a Jewish life in exile. It contains multiple interpretations of the same rule. It contains arguments where both sides are presented and neither is definitively selected as binding. It contains speculations that have no practical legal application but are included anyway because the conversation itself is valued.
With regard to kashrut, what the Talmudic rabbis did was radically expand the Biblical categories. They created new prohibitions that did not exist in the Bible. They created new permissions. They developed elaborate taxonomies that divided animals and foods into categories that had no Biblical precedent.
The prohibition against mixing meat and dairy, for example, does not appear in the Torah. The Torah contains the single sentence: “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” The Talmudic rabbis transformed this cryptic sentence into an entire system. They forbade cooking meat with dairy. They then forbade eating meat and dairy together. They then created waiting periods between eating meat and dairy. They then created waiting periods between eating dairy and meat (which are different from the waiting periods between meat and dairy). They then created foods that are considered neutral (parve) and can be eaten with either meat or dairy.
This is not interpretation. This is creation. And it is explicitly framed as such. The Talmudic rabbis do not claim that they are revealing what the Torah “really meant.” They claim that they are creating fences around the Torah, building walls of extra prohibition to protect the core prohibition. They are aware that they are innovating. And they are comfortable doing so.
Kashrut, in the Talmudic vision, becomes exponentially more complex than kashrut in the Biblical vision. A Jew in Biblical times had a relatively simple list to remember: these animals yes, these animals no. A Jew in the Talmudic period had to understand not just which animals were permitted, but how they had to be slaughtered, what methods of killing were acceptable, how to check for physical defects that would make the animal non-kosher even if it was from a permitted species, how to handle foods that had come into contact with prohibited foods, how to structure the kitchen to prevent forbidden combinations.
The expansion continues from there. Medieval authorities add more stringencies. Modern communities add more. By the early twentieth century, kashrut had become so elaborated that it required a class of specialist authorities, the rabbis who certified products, who interpreted new situations, who made judgments about novel technologies.
And this was understood as normal. As expected. As exactly how Jewish law works.
Standing in a modern supermarket in 2024, looking at the product labels with their certification symbols (OK, Kof-K, Star-S), you are looking at a system that would be entirely unrecognizable to someone from even two hundred years ago.
The certification symbol, the tiny logo that indicates a product is kosher, is a twentieth-century invention. Before that, kashrut was a local, community-based practice. You knew your butcher. You knew which foods were acceptable because you had grown up with them. When you moved to a new community, you learned their particular practices.
The industrial food system destroyed this basis for kashrut observance. When food began to be manufactured in large factories, when ingredients began to be sourced from multiple suppliers, when foods began to contain dozens of additives and components that had never existed before, kashrut observance became impossible without some mechanism to track the sources and processes.
The certification symbol solved this by creating an authority structure that could verify products. But in doing so, it created an entirely new form of kashrut, one that is based on documentation and certification rather than on tradition and community knowledge.
This matters because it means that modern kashrut observance requires constant, active engagement with authority. A woman keeping kosher in 1850 knew whether something was kosher because she had internalized the rules from childhood. A woman keeping kosher in 2024 has to check a label. She has to verify the certification. She has to potentially consult online resources if the certification is ambiguous.
This is a fundamentally different relationship to the practice.
Moreover, the categories of what requires certification have expanded beyond anything the Talmudic rabbis could have conceived. Is gelatin kosher? It depends on the source. Is the gelatin derived from fish bones or from animal bone? Is the animal that the bone comes from a permitted species? Was it slaughtered according to Jewish law? These questions would have seemed absurd to ancient Jewish authorities because gelatin did not exist. But for a modern observer, these are precisely the questions that determine whether a product is acceptable.
Vitamins and medications present an even more extreme case. A Jew in the ancient world who was ill took medicine. If the medicine was forbidden, you took it anyway because health supersedes kashrut observance. But what happens when the medicine is encapsulated in gelatin? What if the gelatin source is non-kosher? Do you take a non-kosher pill, or do you risk your health for the sake of kashrut?
The Talmudic rabbis created a category to address this: pikuach nefesh, the saving of life. When life is threatened, kashrut observance is suspended. But modern medicine exists in a liminal space where life is not directly threatened, but health is compromised if treatment is not taken. Is this pikuach nefesh? Different rabbinical authorities give different answers.
The point is that modernity did not simplify kashrut. It exploded it into an ever-more-complex system that requires constant interpretation, constant judgment, constant negotiation with authority.
What Esther, Miriam, and David did not fully realize when I spoke with each of them was that they were not even speaking about the same religious system.
Esther, as an Ashkenazi who grew up in a household influenced by Eastern European Jewish traditions (even though she was born in America), understood kashrut as a certain set of prohibitions and practices. The separation of meat and dairy. The avoidance of certain foods. The checking of vegetables for insects. These practices felt universal to her.
But they are not universal. They are Ashkenazi-specific.
Mizrahi Jews, Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, and Mediterranean regions, kept kashrut, but often with significant differences from Ashkenazi practice. Where Ashkenazi Jews forbid kitniyot (vegetables) on Passover, many Sephardic and Mizrahi communities permit them. Where Ashkenazi Jews have strict rules about which fish are permitted, Mizrahi communities often have different interpretations. Where Ashkenazi communities impose waiting periods between eating meat and dairy, some Mizrahi communities impose different waiting periods or no waiting periods at all.
This is not because one tradition is more correct and the other less so. It is because Jewish law, as it developed in the Talmud and thereafter, was local. Different communities had different authorities. Different communities had access to different foods. Different communities developed different interpretations.
When Mizrahi communities immigrated to America, they encountered an American Judaism that was predominantly Ashkenazi. The Ashkenazi practices had become established as the default. Mizrahi Jews were faced with a choice: maintain their own traditions and be considered non-observant by the dominant community, or adopt Ashkenazi practices and erase their own heritage.
Miriam experienced this directly. In her Jerusalem childhood, her kashrut observance was unremarkable. In Brooklyn, it became invisible. Not because she had changed, but because the community’s definition of what counted as kashrut observance had changed.
This is the hidden power of kashrut. It is not simply about individual choice. It is about which practices are recognized, within a particular community, as counting as authentic Jewish observance.
To understand what kashrut really does, you have to think about the body.
The Jewish body, from the perspective of Jewish law, is not simply a biological organism. It is a body that is constituted through practice. It is a body that is marked as Jewish, that is inscribed with Jewishness, through the actions it performs and the foods it consumes.
This is why kashrut observance is so emotionally loaded. It is not simply about making a dietary choice. It is about marking your own body as Jewish. It is about saying, through the act of consumption, “I am part of this community.”
Conversely, when David eats non-kosher food (which he does, privately), he is marking his body as potentially outside the community. Even though he is biologically Jewish, even though his family is Jewish, even though he has all the markers of Jewish identity, eating non-kosher food creates a category problem. His body becomes ambiguous.
This is what his mother understands, even if she cannot articulate it. When David stopped keeping kosher, from her perspective, he stopped being Jewish in a particular, embodied way. He retained his Jewish identity in some abstract sense, but the concrete, daily inscription of that identity through kashrut observance had ceased.
Esther experiences this in a different register. She is not observant. She does not maintain a kosher home. But when she eats pastrami in a deli that is thick with Jewish history, she is performing a kind of Jewish body, a body that remembers, even if it does not believe. The pastrami is not simply food. It is a way of marking herself as connected to Jewish tradition, even as she lives outside it.
Miriam, meanwhile, has largely ceased to maintain the visible markers of kashrut observance, not because she has rejected Jewish identity, but because the particular form of kashrut available to her in Brooklyn does not match the form of kashrut that is embedded in her body from childhood. So she is in a strange position: she is probably less observant of formal kashrut rules than most Ashkenazi Jewish women in her neighborhood, but she probably maintains a more genuine relationship to the ethical and communal dimensions of kashrut than they do.
This is the paradox: kashrut is supposed to mark the Jewish body, but the particular rules and practices that mark the Jewish body are constantly changing, constantly contested, constantly local.
The moment that crystallized everything came when David’s mother, Sara, came to dinner at David’s kosher-maintained apartment for Shabbat.
David had prepared everything correctly. The brisket was from a kosher butcher. The vegetables had been checked for insects. The dishes had been washed using the proper procedures to maintain kashrut. The table had been set in a way that reflected the sanctity of Shabbat. By every outward measure, this was a properly observed Shabbat dinner.
And David was lying about every element of it.
Not in the sense of deception, necessarily. The food was genuinely kosher. The rituals were genuinely performed. But the intention, the spiritual intention that is supposed to animate kashrut observance, was entirely absent. He was going through the motions because his mother expected him to. He was performing Jewishness for her benefit, not expressing it from his own conviction.
At one point during the meal, his mother asked him, directly, whether he believed that kashrut observance was spiritually meaningful.
The question was unanswerable. If he said yes, he would be lying. If he said no, he would be announcing that everything she had just watched him do was a performance of sincerity he did not feel. Either way, he would be betraying either truth or relationship.
He chose, in that moment, to deflect. He said something about how belief was less important than practice, that maintaining traditions even without full understanding was valuable, that kashrut was more about community than about personal conviction.
None of this was true. And his mother, who had raised him, knew it was not true.
What struck me about this moment was that it was not really about kashrut. It was about the impossible position that tradition creates when tradition is experienced as obligation rather than as identity.
David’s mother wanted him to be Jewish in the way that she was Jewish, through embodied practice that expressed deep belief. But David experienced that same practice as a performance of belief he did not feel. From his mother’s perspective, this made his practice inauthentic. From David’s perspective, his honesty about the insincerity of his belief made him more honest than he would be if he had claimed to believe something he did not.
There was no resolution to this conflict. It simply had to be inhabited, negotiated, lived within.
Miriam’s crisis was quieter, but in some ways more devastating.
She had largely stopped maintaining strict kashrut observance not because she had rejected her tradition, but because maintaining her particular form of kashrut in an Ashkenazi-dominated community required constant, exhausting explanation.
When she did not check labels with the obsessive precision that Ashkenazi women did, people assumed she was not observant. When she ate foods that were considered non-kosher by Ashkenazi standards but that she understood to be acceptable within Mizrahi Jewish law, she had to explain and justify. When she prepared food according to her family’s traditions, rather than according to Ashkenazi protocols, she had to defend.
At a certain point, she stopped defending. She stopped explaining. She simply withdrew from the visible markers of kashrut observance, even though she continued to think about the ethical and communal dimensions of kashrut in her daily life.
This is a form of erasure. Not erasure of her identity, she knew who she was and where she came from. But erasure of the visibility of that identity within the community. She became, to the Ashkenazi Jewish community around her, someone who “didn’t keep kosher.”
The tragedy is that this assessment was partially true. She did not keep kosher by Ashkenazi standards. But she did keep kosher according to the standards of her own tradition. The community’s inability to recognize this meant that her practice simply became invisible.
The transformation of kashrut from a set of relatively straightforward Biblical prohibitions to the complex technological system we have today follows a specific historical arc. Understanding this arc is crucial to understanding how radically the system has changed, and why someone can claim to be observant while someone else, using the same rules, claims they are not.
1200 BCE – Levitical Period: Torah provides basic categories. Land animals with split hoof and chew cud; Sea creatures with fins and scales; Specific birds forbidden; Locusts permitted. Logic is implicit, categories are relatively simple.
70 CE – Talmudic Transformation: With the destruction of the Temple, rabbinic Judaism develops oral law that massively elaborates on the Biblical text. New categories are created (meat/dairy separation). New stringencies are added. The system becomes exponentially more complex.
1000-1400 CE – Medieval Codification: Jewish authorities in different regions compile the Talmudic discussions into written codes. The Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law), compiled by Joseph Karo in the sixteenth century, becomes the standard reference. Regional variations are recognized but a certain uniformity is achieved.
1700-1850: Enlightenment and Emancipation begin to challenge kashrut observance. As Jews enter secular, non-Jewish society, maintaining full kashrut observance becomes increasingly difficult. Jewish communities begin to negotiate what kashrut means in these new circumstances.
1850-1920: Industrial food production begins to make traditional kashrut observance nearly impossible. Food is no longer produced by local, known sources. The certification system emerges to solve this problem, but in doing so, creates a fundamentally different relationship to kashrut observance.
1920-1960: The certification system becomes standardized. Kashrut symbols appear on products. A class of professional kashrut authorities, rabbis who specialize in certifying products, emerges. Kashrut becomes a commercial, industrialized system.
1960-2000: New technologies create new problems. Preservatives, additives, processing methods that would have baffled medieval authorities become the normal way that food is produced. Kashrut authorities must constantly interpret whether these new substances can be permitted.
2000-Present: Digital technology creates new possibilities and new problems. Online databases allow people to check whether specific products are kosher. But they also create a kind of democratized interpretation, people can access multiple interpretations and choose which authorities to follow, rather than relying on their local rabbi.
Throughout this arc, what remains constant is that the rules continue to change. What changes is only the pace of change and the mechanism through which change happens.
The most revealing way to understand kashrut is to compare how the same phenomenon is handled across different Jewish traditions. The table below shows not abstract rules, but living practice as it varies geographically.
| Practice/Food | Ashkenazi Tradition | Sephardic Tradition | Mizrahi Tradition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kitniyot (Legumes) on Pesach | Forbidden; considered derivative of grain | Permitted; understood as separate category | Permitted; historical practice unbroken |
| Fish | Requires visible scales; swordfish debated | More permissive interpretation of scale requirement | Varies by specific Mizrahi community |
| Waiting Period (Meat to Dairy) | 3-6 hours depending on authority | 1 hour after eating meat; no waiting after dairy | Varies; some communities no waiting |
| Wine | Must be produced under Jewish supervision; requires special handling | More permissive; relies on community knowledge in Mediterranean contexts | Varies; traditional production methods trusted |
| Certain Spices/Flavorings | Scrutinized for hidden non-kosher ingredients | Trusted through cultural knowledge of Mediterranean markets | Trusted through community knowledge |
| Gelatins & Additives | Rigorous sourcing required; often prohibited | More flexible interpretation of sourcing | Traditional foods without additives; additives problematic |
| Certification | Requires formal certification symbol (OK, Star-K, etc.) | Traditionally relied on community authority; certification now used | Traditionally relied on community; certification adoption variable |
| Modern Practice | Highly standardized; observable uniformity across communities | More regional variation persists; some resists standardization | Highly variable; depends on whether in Israel or diaspora |
What this table reveals is that there is no single “authentic” kashrut observance. There are multiple authentic traditions, each with its own history, logic, and current practice. A food that is considered confidently kosher in one tradition might be considered questionable in another. An observance level that is considered fully compliant in one community might be considered incomplete in another.
This is not a bug in the system. It is fundamental to how Jewish law develops. Different communities, different times, different circumstances, all produce different interpretations of the same core principles.
Here is what is almost never said directly in discussions of kashrut: the system does not actually make sense theologically.
The Talmudic rabbis knew this. They discuss it explicitly. They ask: why these animals and not others? The answer they provide, that it is a divine decree, not subject to rational explanation, is unsatisfying even to them. They spend pages discussing various possible rationalizations before concluding that the fundamental reason is simply that God commanded it.
But that answer becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as you move further from the Talmudic period. Medieval authorities begin to propose rationalizations. Modern authorities do even more so. But the rationalizations never fully convince, because the system seems, on its face, arbitrary.
Why is the pig unclean while the lamb is clean? From a hygienic perspective, modern pigs are no dirtier than modern lambs. From an ecological perspective, there is no obvious reason to prefer lamb over pork. From a nutritional perspective, pork is a perfectly adequate protein source.
The answer, the only answer that actually makes sense, is social. Kashrut makes sense not because it reflects some objective truth about which animals are inherently clean or unclean, but because it marks community membership. The pig is unclean because the community says the pig is unclean. The lamb is clean because the community says the lamb is clean. The function of the rule is not to protect anyone from anything. The function of the rule is to create and maintain a boundary between those who observe the rule and those who do not.
Once you understand kashrut this way, many things become clear. You understand why rabbinical authorities have been willing to expand and reinterpret the rules constantly, because the rules are not meant to be fixed and eternal, but to evolve with community needs. You understand why different communities have different practices, because the boundaries they are marking are different, reflecting different historical contexts and different relationships to non-Jewish societies. You understand why violation of kashrut is experienced not as a violation of an objective law but as a violation of community membership.
But you also understand why the question of “authenticity” becomes so fraught. If kashrut is fundamentally about community boundaries, then the question of whether you are observing kashrut “correctly” is really the question of whether you are identifying with the particular community that practices that particular form of kashrut.
David’s problem is not that he cannot follow the rules correctly. He can, and does. His problem is that his observance is a performance, not an identification. He is marking his body with Jewish practice, but he is not claiming membership in the community that gives that practice meaning. From his mother’s perspective, this makes his observance hollow. And she is right, it is. But his honesty about the hollowness is, in some ways, more authentic than a false claim to belief would be.
By the end of my time with Esther, David, and Miriam, I had encountered the same unresolved tension in each of their lives.
Esther does not keep kosher, but she identifies strongly as Jewish. Her Jewishness is expressed through culture, history, and community, but not through the embodied practice of kashrut observance.
David keeps kashrut, but he does not identify with the belief system that is supposed to animate kashrut observance. His Jewishness is expressed through obligation to his mother and to tradition, but not through conviction.
Miriam kept kosher according to her own tradition, but found that tradition made invisible within the Ashkenazi-dominated community. Her Jewishness is expressed through the practices of her family, but those practices are not recognized as legitimate within the broader community.
All three of them are Jewish. All three of them relate to kashrut in different ways. And yet all three of them share a particular anxiety: the anxiety that they are not Jewish “enough,” not observant “enough,” not authentic “enough.”
Where does this anxiety come from?
It comes from the fact that kashrut has been made to do a job it cannot actually do alone. Kashrut is supposed to mark who is Jewish and who is not. But Jewishness is a messier category than any single practice can contain. You can be Jewish and not observe kashrut. You can observe kashrut and not be Jewish (a non-Jew can follow the rules). You can follow the rules halfway, or differently, or in ways that your community does not recognize.
The real question, the question that every person who relates to Judaism in any way eventually faces, is not whether one should observe kashrut. The real question is what observance or rejection of kashrut means about your relationship to Jewish community and to Jewish self.
Esther has chosen to reject kashrut observance, but she has chosen to remain embedded in Jewish culture and history. Her Jewishness is expressed through belonging to a historical people, even if it is not expressed through the embodied practice of dietary restriction.
David has chosen to maintain kashrut observance, but without the conviction that is supposed to animate it. His Jewishness is expressed through obligation and relationship, even if it is not expressed through authentic belief.
Miriam has chosen to withdraw from visible kashrut observance, but she continues to think about the ethical and communal dimensions of food consumption. Her Jewishness is expressed through tradition and memory, even if it is not expressed in ways that her surrounding community recognizes.
There is no single answer to the question of what it means to be “truly” Jewish. There is only the question itself, endlessly reformulated, endlessly renegotiated, within each person’s particular circumstances and relationships.
What struck me most forcefully about observing these three people was the silence that surrounded their practices.
Esther does not talk about why she abandoned kashrut observance. She simply performs her non-observance in spaces where she will not be judged, and performs a kind of cultural Jewishness in spaces where that is valued.
David does not talk about the inauthenticity of his observance. He performs the practice correctly, and the correctness of the performance is meant to shield both him and his mother from the knowledge that the intention is absent.
Miriam does not talk about why she stopped maintaining visible kashrut observance. She simply eats her food according to her own understanding of her tradition, and does not insist that others recognize this as legitimate observance.
All three of them, and, I would argue, most Jews navigating this terrain, have entered into a kind of collective silence about kashrut. The silence says: you maintain whatever relationship you have to kashrut practice, and I will not interrogate whether that practice is authentic or sufficient or truly expressive of Jewish identity. We will all perform the parts we have chosen to perform, and we will not speak about the gap between performance and belief.
This silence is both merciful and devastating. It is merciful because it allows people to maintain multiple, contradictory relationships to tradition without being forced to resolve those contradictions. It is devastating because it means that the real conversations about what kashrut means, what Jewishness means, what tradition is supposed to do in contemporary life, these conversations almost never happen.
Esther, David, and Miriam are each navigating their relationship to kashrut in fundamentally different ways. But they do not speak to each other about their navigation. They do not ask each other questions. They do not compare their choices or try to understand why the choices diverge. Instead, each of them maintains a private relationship to the practice, and the community silently agrees not to ask too many questions about the authenticity or sufficiency of that practice.
By the traditional logic, an essay on kashrut should end with a resolution. It should answer the question: should one observe kashrut? Should one keep kosher? Is this practice spiritually meaningful?
I cannot provide that resolution, because the resolution does not exist.
What I have learned from Esther, David, and Miriam is that the question of kashrut observance cannot be separated from the question of identity, community, and the relationship between individual freedom and collective tradition. These are not separate issues. They are the same issue, viewed from different angles.
Kashrut is not, in its essence, about hygiene or nutrition or even theology. It is about boundary-making. It is about marking who belongs to the community and who does not. It is about inscribing Jewish identity onto the Jewish body through the practice of consumption. It is about the relationship between individual choice and collective identity.
The question is not whether one should observe kashrut. The question is what observance or rejection of kashrut means about relationship to Jewish community and Jewish self. And that question admits of no universal answer. It admits only of perpetual negotiation, perpetual rethinking, perpetual reconstruction in light of changing circumstances and changing understandings of what community means, what tradition means, what freedom means.
Esther has made one kind of choice. David has made another. Miriam has made yet another. And none of these choices is more or less authentically Jewish than the others. They are simply different ways of being Jewish in a world where the meaning of Jewishness is never fixed, never finally settled, never fully contained within any single practice or belief.
The silence that surrounds kashrut, the silence about who observes it and why, about what observance means, about the gap between performance and belief, is not a failure. It is actually the only appropriate response to a question that cannot be finally answered.
We keep our silence, and we keep our various practices. We maintain our boundaries, or we cross them. We inscribe Jewishness onto our bodies in different ways. And we do this knowing that there is no final verdict on whether we are doing it “correctly,” because correctness itself is not a fixed category. It is something we are perpetually negotiating, perpetually constructing, perpetually arguing about in spaces too private or too painful to make fully public.
This is what it means to be Jewish in a world where tradition is alive but contested, where identity is secure but perpetually questioned, where practice means something different to each person who performs it.
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