Among the mitzvot enumerated in parshat Emor is this one, familiar to us from the Torah reading from many of our holidays: “Do not slaughter a cow or a sheep and its young on the same day” (Lev. 22:28). Maimonides and Nachmanides famously disagree on how to understand this commandment. In his Guide for the Perplexed, the Rambam includes this verse along with the commandment (Deut. 22:6) to send away the mother bird before taking the eggs from the nest. “There is no difference in this case between the pain of man and the pain of other living beings,” he writes. The purpose of both commandments is to alleviate the suffering of the animals.
Ramban disagrees. “The real reason” for both mitzvot “is to cultivate in us the quality of mercy, that we may not become cruel, for cruelty envelops the entire personality of man, as is well known from the example of professional animal killers who often become hardened to human suffering” (Ramban on Deut. 22:6). Where Maimonides sees the purpose of the mitzvot here as focused on the suffering of the animals, Nachmanides sees them as addressing human moral development. Ramban cites the teaching of Abba Gurya in the Mishnah (Kiddushin 4:14), who evaluates a number of unfavorable occupations and concludes by saying “even the best of slaughterers is a companion of Amalek.” Which is to say, killing for a living ultimately leads to cruelty in human relations. (Nechama Leibowitz’s second essay on this parasha develops these positions further.)
Neither Rambam nor Ramban could have imagined a world in which meat came to the mouths of people without some exposure to the process of killing. While death was a more regular feature of pre-modern, and certainly pre-industrial life, its ubiquity also had the effect of humanizing it. It was normal to kill an animal for food, and it was known by sages throughout the ages that too much killing would make a person cruel. Today, however, most of us who eat meat never interact with the animals we’re eating. Indeed, the thought that the beef or chicken on our plate was once an actual living creature grosses us out. We are not used to animal life, and we’re not used to animal death either.
Thus animal-welfare conversations today tend to focus more on the Rambam’s line of thinking: it’s about animal welfare, or animal rights. If we’re vegetarians, or if we simply advocate for greater sensitivity in ritual slaughter or the raising of livestock, we make our arguments in terms of the welfare of the animal. We don’t tend to adopt the Ramban’s line of thinking, because we’ve industrialized the process of slaughter to the point that, like the gas in our cars that we never actually see, the meat that arrives on our supermarket shelves wrapped in plastic is divorced in our imagination from any human process other than stocking it on the counter.
But what if we did? What if the question in our consumption of meat, and food in general, was more about what kind of moral and ethical development it entails and leads to? This, after all, is the Rambam’s ultimate point: the purpose of showing compassion for animals is to cultivate our sense of compassion for all of God’s creation, including human beings. It is to fulfill the Rambam’s understanding of the ultimate imperative of the mitzvot, v’halachta bidrachav, to walk in God’s ways.
That is the greater challenge of kashrut (a challenge which my colleagues at Uri l’Tzedek tirelessly address). God is not mechanized. Our relationship with God, and with one another, shouldn’t be either.
Shabbat shalom.
May 11, 2012 at 4:14 am
Josh,
I don’t understand the nafka minah (practical difference) between the position of the Rambam and the Ramban. They seem to be saying the same thing, just focusing on different aspects: Ramban is pointing out that cruelty towards animals leads to cruelty towards humans, whereas Rambam is pointing out that a truly sensitive person — towards other people — is also sensitive to the pain of animals. The only conceivable difference is that according to Ramban, if there were something that led towards the development of human mercy that involved cruelty towards animals, he would permit it, whereas Rambam would not. But I can hardly conceive of what such a case would be, and in fact the very assumption — that cruelty towards animals is to be avoided because it leads towards cruelty towards people — undermines the possibility of such a case existing!
May 11, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Will, I agree that the nafka mina is subtle at best. Though I would think that something like stunning an animal before shechita, or other measures that are questions of degree rather than kind, might be distinctions. I’m also thinking of David Feldman’s argument on abortion: the question is how you frame the question. If it’s in terms of the animal, that leads to one line of thought. If it’s in terms of the person, that leads to another. So, for instance, how does thinking about euthenizing an animal from one or the other perspective change the process, if not the outcome? Granted, I personally don’t see a need to embrace one at the expense of the other. But I do think it can be a useful thought exercise.
May 11, 2012 at 2:09 pm
Well, you know I tend to focus on outcomes rather than processes, but here the outcome is so deeply intertwined with the process that I fail to see any difference. Take stunning before shehita. Let’s say that the only thing at stake in shehitah is mercifully killing the animal [which I don't think is the case, but I'll stipulate it for the sake of the intellectual enterprise]. Let’s say that stunning the animal makes the slaughterer feel less cruel (after all, isn’t killing something sleeping less cruel than killing something awake?), but that the animal will actually feel more net pain from the stun bolt than from the knife cut. (Or to frame it in terms of scale, that stun bolts miss more frequently than knife cuts.) Once I, as a slaughterer, become aware of this fact, it would make me a crueler person to continue to use stun bolts, even though initially I (erroneously) felt that stunning was less cruel. (This assumes a fundamentally other-focused or net-pain-reducing ethic.) The same analysis would apply to euthanasia of animals in particular situations, although there the issue is clearly much more complex than the narrow question of whether the act is merciful in any particular case.