How storks became non-kosher

When I speak about repugnant transactions--transactions that some people would like to engage in but others think they shouldn't--I don't normally include dietary restrictions of a religious sort, like those which make food kosher or hallal (or vegetarian or vegan) since those restrictions are normally applied by people to themselves, not to others.  Thus most observant Jews don't think that non-Jews should keep kosher, and many vegetarians think that what you eat is a matter of personal preference.

However, within a religious community, what is allowed can be a matter of public discussion.  Haaretz has a (late breaking) account of the discussion of storks, in medieval Spain.  Perhaps storks aren't kosher because of a translation error?

How Rashi Got the Jews to Stop Eating Storks
A young rabbi in medieval Spain, scandalized by local laxness, sparks a bitter battle over bird on the plate
By Elon Gilad Jul 30, 2018

"During the second half of the 11th century, Rashi labored on his commentary of the Bible and the Babylonian Talmud, which became and still are highly influential. It was in these that Rashi identified the khasida with the stork, apparently for the first time.

Rashi could not read Arabic and was thus cut off from the traditions of the Geonim. He based his commentary of the oral tradition he received from his teachers, and his own power of logic.

With regard to the identity of the 20 unclean birds listed in the Bible, Rashi apparently did not receive a precise identification of each one. He writes in his commentary that the anafa, the bird coming right after the khasida in the list, was a heron - “I think.”

He may have been more certain regarding the khasida, since he doesn’t qualify that its identification was based on conjecture, but it probably was.
...
The influence of Rashi’s commentaries was immense. Once Rashi identified the khasida with the stork, this became the traditional view among European Jews with in just a few generations. Over time this tradition spread throughout the Jewish world, and into Christian vernacular translations of the Bible.

The identification of the khasida with the stork began to spread throughout Spanish Jewry as we have seen with the arrival of Asher ben Jehiel and his family at the turn of the 14th century, and Spanish Jews gradually stopped eating the bird.

When the Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492, they took the ban on stork to Jewish communities throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and these communities too stopped eating storks. Eventually all Jews accepted Rashi’s identification of the biblical khasida with the stork and today all Jews accept that storks are not kosher."

Fertility and religion

The Bible encourages reproduction, but puts bounds on sexuality, and so religious couples seeking treatment for infertility need to navigate carefully. For orthodox Jews, the Puah Institute (named after one of the two Hebrew midwives in the story of the birth of Moses) helps with this navigation. Here's a story about rabbinical supervision of medical fertility treatments involving in vitro fertilization: How to make a kosher baby.

Some of the particular issues that arise with in vitro fertilization involve how to be sure, in a legal sense, who the parents are. (This is presumably also one of the reasons behind the restriction of sex to marriage in so many cultures, when sex was the only reproductive option.)

The problem of how to integrate new technological and commercial possibilities with ancient customs, rules, and practices is very clear when those are religious in nature. But similar problems also present themselves in secular society, in dealing e.g. with issues like surrogacy, or compensation for sperm and egg donors in ways that navigate around repugnance.

In only slightly related news (but still on the subject of being fruitful, and making sure your children have the right parents), the cost of arranged marriages is going up among Israel's most orthodox Jews: Haredi matchmaking rates skyrocketing

Market for hand crafted food, continued

When I last wrote about the market for hand crafted food, I focused on a concentration of producers in Brooklyn. The fact that there are several of them in the same vicinity allows them to support each other and a growing common set of retailers and customers.

Around Passover, there's also an export market of sorts, and we recently enjoyed hand made "shmura" matzah from both Brooklyn and the nearby Long Island town of Lawrence (made respectively by the Boro Park Shmura Matzoh Bakery and by Tiferes Matzah). Matzah is unleavened bread, and shmura ("watched") matzah is baked very quickly after the wheat is ground into flour and water is added, to make sure no leavening takes place. The handmade matzot are round, and much bigger and denser than machine made matzah, and we always buy enough to enjoy for several days after the Passover seders.

The market for kosher food is a very interesting one, because while it is a very important one for observant Jews, most commercially produced kosher food in the United States is bought by non-Jews (since Jews constitute such a small part of the population). In some cases, non-Jewish consumers may not even notice that the food is kosher: for processed food, the kosher symbols are often inconspicuous. (The New Yorker recently had an article on the growing export of kosher food from China.) In other cases, e.g. for kosher meat, which is more expensive, consumers may be attracted by the extra steps of inspection. In any event, the fact that there is a wide market for kosher food increases its availability and lowers its cost.

A guest also brought us some handmade goat cheese, from Twig Farm in Vermont. As in Brooklyn, Vermont seems to support a variety of handmade food producers who support each other. Along with the goat cheese from their own goats, came some cow's milk cheese, made by a neighboring organic farmer.