I’m sure the Talmud contains absolute screeds on the concept and value of sacrifice, and I will at some point be looking at that, but right now I’m confronted with the concept of killing other species one is deemed to own in one’s culture in order to atone or give thanks, and how alien it is to my mindset. Of course the days of animal sacrifice are more or less long gone now in Judaism, and it never got introduced to Christianity.
The difficulty, morally speaking, with the idea of sacrificing a lamb, for example, is that it presumes that the animal concerned has no say in the matter and is merely property. It goes beyond even the heinous institution of slavery to do so and firmly entrenches the idea that lives do not have value in themselves. The sacrifice of a lamb is supposed to be a loss for the farmer, and her life is irrelevant as something which is of intrinsic worth. There are similarities with the idea that men should have a break from labour, more specifically melachot, on the Sabbath because you are really only doing it for your own benefit and it cannot be a spiritual activity, when in fact labour should ideally be undertaken for the benefit of all, including oneself, but sometimes as an actual sacrifice. There seems to be an assumption, in spite of the absence of a concept of original sin in Judaism, that human beings are bent to doing wrong.
Spelling this out formally, you “own” a farm animal who is of some value to you because you can eat their flesh, drink their milk, wear their wool or sell any of that, and could also be bred to produce future generations of livestock, and there’s that word which really has no right to exist. At no point do the interests of the animal come into consideration. You care for them, but that’s an investment which will increase their value to you or in economic terms. Therefore when you give up that animal to the priests, you are losing that value and investment. This is brutal. But is it also true that in the circumstances there was no choice but to abuse other species in this way? Were there any other options? Is it the case that a pasture only has potential for goats, sheep and bovines to feed on it rather than being farmed or foraged for human food? Was human life at that point so tough and short that we had no choice but to blunt our empathy for what we regarded as our cattle? Did it become that way because of something which had happened in the past?
Regarding the Sabbath, if we really are talking about Bronze Age shepherds then their lives were devoted to the exploitation of sheep and therefore in a sense it’s only right that they spend one day a week not engaging in labour to bring them to market, prepare them for eating or shearing their wool, all of which is doubtless under one of the thirty-nine types of melachot. However, melachot are creative deeds. All the creative work that goes into caring for sheep is ultimately for human benefit, and is in a sense destructive.
I can’t pretend, though, that shepherds don’t genuinely care for sheep. For instance, if a gap appears in an enclosure for a flock and they begin to wander out of that gap, they could fall prey to wolves on the other side, and the shepherds don’t want that to happen. I think in fact this is not merely concern for loss or damage to property, but partly focus on the welfare of the sheep. This raises the issue of what happens to the sheep when they’re not being cared for on the Sabbath, and this question has in fact been addressed. There’s a story of a shepherd who noticed there was a gap in the wall on that day, and restrained himself from creating a new section of wall, as ’twere. The next day, a tree had sprung up. Literally true or not, this seems to form part of a theme where G-d will provide, as happened in the wilderness when enough manna would fall during the week to allow the Israelites to feed themselves on the Sabbath without extra work, and by extension during the Jubilee enough food would be available to tide them over for a whole year. This is about trusting in the Lord or Providence.
A little oddly to contemporary understanding perhaps, sacrifice is not always “to” someone. In the Zoroastrian-allied religion of Zurvanism, the primordial being Zurvan makes a sacrifice in order to create a new being, if I remember correctly Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman. Since at that point Zurvan is the only person in the Universe, the sacrifice is more like a magical ritual that leads to a new deity being created, and the act of giving up something is almost karmic, in that it’s compensated for by a possibly positive consequence, although in this case it seems to be the existence of balanced good and evil entities. I find all of this rather inscrutable.
Actual animal sacrifice is, on the whole, a thing of the past in Judaism. However, there is a sense in which the Paschal Lamb is a sacrifice of this nature, where the Zeroa symbolises the goat or lamb sacrificed for Passover in the Seder. But it is a night different from all other nights, so it’s the exception rather than the rule.
In fact I would say the seeds of veganism exist in the written Torah. Thrice it forbids the practice of boiling a goat kid in his mother’s milk, in Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26 and Deuteronomy 14:21. Although this can look inexplicable to some, and there have been attempts to account for it in terms of forbidding a Canaanite ritual, an emotional approach to this makes things pretty clear. It’s simply in appalling taste to take a baby and instead of using the milk that sustains her life to do that, use this precious fluid to cook the corpse. I think you’d have to be very cold and separated from your feelings not to recognise the shocking essence of such a practice. Rabbinical Judaism then extended this prohibition to the mixing of any dairy and animal body parts in food, and millennia later this proved to be extremely useful to us vegans, because it means, for example, that Jacob’s products are often vegan. I don’t think this is a coincidence. It arises from an ancient recognition of the immorality of how we treat other species. Another advantage of kosher food for vegans is that it must not contain bits of insects, which otherwise it often does.
There are certain items the sense of whose names is distorted by the fact that we live in a carnist culture. For instance, the word “livestock” refers to farm animals, but also makes it sound like they’re merely items to be exploited with no interests of their own, and also the property of humans, which they clearly cannot be. Apart from anything else, the concept of property seems to be largely human. Some other species probably do have something like property in the form of territory, kinship relationships and food items, and may feel their personal space is invaded, although it’s all too easy to anthropomorphise. The high concept of property, however, seems unique to humans and as such is merely our custom imposed on an indifferent world. A similar word is “cattle”, obviously cognate with “chattel”. One of the oddities of the English language is that it has no everyday word for a bovine which is not somehow marked in another way. There is no simple concept of “bovine”, even though other Germanic languages often have this. Instead we have “cow”, “bull”, “calf”, “ox” and “cattle”, plus a few rather more technical terms such as “heifer” and “bullock”. This seems to be because we’re too “close” to this species in our quotidian experience to have this word, although this doesn’t explain why other European languages do have this word.
It’s also notable that our words for farm animals are often not regular, or have only been regularised in the past few centuries. The plural of “ox” is “oxen”, the historical plural of “cow” is “kine”, and the plurals of “calf” and “lamb” have been “calveren” and “lambren” in some situations. This seems to have been more durable when the item referred to is more part of daily life, and it’s our association with these species which has led to this irregularity. We have irregular plurals for body parts more often than of most other items, such as “eyen”, “teeth” and “feet”, and also of items which are “closer” to us such as “lice” and “mice”. This is potentially benign, but it’s notable that we still have “cats” and “dogs” rather than maintaining what might’ve been mutation or weak plurals, although they were never in that category. There’s also a zero plural, as with “sheep” and “fish”. Notably, the treyf “pig” has an S plural. This appears to be significant, and may reflect the species we used to share our living space with.
Then there are the inanimate items obtained from other species: milk, eggs and wool. These all have more general meanings, but the usual sense of these words refers to things taken from other species. Milk usually means cow’s milk, eggs come from chicken (another zero plural, although I’m never clear if this is dialectal for me or general) and wool is generally from sheep, although it is also a mammalian body covering. The question arises, however, of what other textures of mammalian fur or hair we lack words for because we don’t encounter them as often. For instance, primate hair is not a mixture of long and short fibres in the same area as it is for other mammalian fur and hair, but we don’t call it something else. Other than even-toed ungulates, all other mammalian hair is generally referred to as hair or fur, even on our own bodies, so far as I can remember. Consequently I feel uneasy talking about wool, because it feels like it’s for human use.
After the Norman Conquest, the English language took to internalising the class structure of the society in which it was spoken by using French words for a higher register and English ones for a lower one. This notably extends to meat. In fact we use a Germanic word whose scope has narrowed to refer to meat as opposed to “flesh”, another Germanic word, but the principle was established by this initial division. Thus we have “beef”, “ham”, “mutton” and so forth, as well as the words for the species. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is to do with disguising what they are conceptually, and it could also be that the more Germanic-speaking peasants were involved in rearing, slaughtering and butchering the animals, who would then appear on the plates of the French-speaking nobles. This is probably the cause, but it seems rather convenient as a way of shielding ourselves from the reality, or rather one reality.
Nothing I’m saying here is meant to be judgemental. I am aware that the ecosystem runs on carnage, and since I consider plants conscious I’m not immune from rationalising my own behaviour. It should be borne in mind that since innumerable organisms are killed as a matter of course for sheer reasons of survival, even by our own immune systems, the impact our own species can make on that is small in terms of the number of deaths and the amount of suffering we inflict compared to the unintentional pain and killing which has to exist for a functioning ecosystem. Nonetheless we have strong signs of distortion in our language resulting from our carnism, and we should be aware of these things. This is particularly evident in the concept of animal sacrifice, which simply has no consideration for the animal concerned as an end, but merely as a means. We need to get beyond this brutal and callous way of thinking, and maybe think about retiring words such as “cattle” and “livestock”. Aren’t we better than that?
A Box Of Chocolates 