People Eat Treyf for Their Own Reasons. They All Think About Their Judaism.

The first piece on Jewish treyf can be found here. The second piece, with your funny stories, can be found here.

A lot is said about Jews who eat treyf. Most of this stuff is said by Jews who keep kosher, who claim that our bacon-eating brethren are somehow unengaged, or not Jewish enough, or somehow wrong. Yet there is not enough from Jews who eat treyf themselves. So as I read the stories of Jews, perfectly engaged and perfectly Jewish, who eat treyf, I wanted to find patterns. Some patterns were pretty easy to find. Location mattered. Treyf had its own traditions. Ham was controversial. And some were harder. I was excited to hear from so many people who had stopped keeping kosher, but was also overwhelmed. Each story was different enough that a pattern, of un-koshering, was not clear. I spent a few days, doodling in the margins of my work notebooks, trying to figure it out. The answer, which was there all along, was only noticed by me when I stopped.

The obvious truth is that there is no one reason people stop keeping kosher.

Grasping stories about kashrut ricochet through the Jewish community like schoolhouse rumors. They tend to rely on tired narratives of rebellion, assimilation, distance, and a lack of commitment. Like the rumors, these tales read at once too much and too little. Some Jews are rebellious, for sure. But is that any different from the ba’alei teshuva who vex their parents by refusing, in their newfound Orthodoxy, to eat from their treyf kitchens? Perhaps some Jews want “assimilation.” But here’s the catch – there is no one that does not assimilate. Some people argue that Israel is a giant project in assimilation. A Jewish state, for sure, but one built along European lines, in a European framework. I am writing in English after study in a solitary fashion, not at a yeshiva or in a chavruta. Hence, assimilation can only be a small-scale explanation. Some Jews probably want to distance themselves from the community. Others find commitments in it too tiring. This idea seems too facile, especially given how many meals happen in the small confines of the home. In all these, where are the people?

Jews are individuals. Treyf eaters have their own reasons for eating treyf. Sometimes these are the reasons I outlined above. Folks leave a community that does not work for them, or want to be more like their neighbors, or cannot keep up. There should be no shame in those types of choices: coercion is not a mitzvah. Sometimes, though, the choices are deeply personal. Maybe a treyf food is something that lets one be closer to a partner, Jewish or not. A job may require one to eat treyf. If you do keep kosher, imagine yourself in this situation. If you are a restaurant short-order cook, you may not have choice in what you taste. If you are an archaeologist working on Classic Maya sites in Campeche, you are both way cooler than me, and hard-pressed not to eat pork. A few people told me about eating treyf to not offend a relative they adore, or a relative they would rather not cross. And then the most boring answer is sometimes the truth: now and again, someone just wants to eat a shrimp. I have come quite close to throwing my version of kashrut out the window for the orgasmic delights of linguini with clams.

Sure, there are common trends. These touch on many different experiences. Many Jews stop keeping kosher when they realize they cannot afford it. Like it or not, keeping kosher is way easier when you have wealth. A friend of mine did a calculation that, to keep a kitchen kosher enough according to some Orthodox authorities, one must spend $12,000 a year. For many people, that sum is impossible. Many people start eating treyf when their beliefs about halacha or what Jewishness is changes. My own form of kashrut became far more liberal when I realized that, frankly, the specifics of halacha are not important to my Judaism. Many converts resume eating treyf to make interactions with their family easier. That does not make them less Jewish, it makes them a Jew with a deeply Jewish experience. Born Jews have this experience too. There are those who begin eating treyf when they move to a new place, far from other Jews. These experiences seem common, but are always deeply personal, and different between people. Everyone eats treyf for their own reasons.

Really, the one big commonality is how much thought people have given to their Jewishness. This is no disconnected, unengaged group of unrepentant bacon eaters. Jews who eat treyf confront their contradiction with tradition every time they eat treyf, with every bite. As a result, what Jewishness means in practice to treyf eaters is something that requires a lot of work. How does one insert themselves into the tradition? What are the parts that make Jewishness Jewish for them? And how do they engage with the community, if they choose to do so? I received many answers, from treyf eaters who attend Orthodox synagogues to those with no communal involvement at all.

But not one has simply not thought about their Jewishness. Hand-wringing pessimists who spin tales of assimilation tragedy assume otherwise. These people claim that those who assimilate in any way do not give real thought to their Jewishness. I see this pattern with religious zealots jumpy as a Golden Retriever for the faith of the fathers. Secular Yiddishists mirror them, while speaking a stilted Yiddish few actually speak, and hacken a Tschainik for all us “uneducated” yokels. Hipsters go with them, and seem to think adding elitist buzzwords reinvents a millennia-old practice. In every case, they are full of shit.

If a Jewish person does not do the “traditional” thing, it does not follow that they have not thought about their Judaism or are uneducated. In fact, the person doing the untraditional thing has often thought about their Judaism a great deal more than the person hawking tradition. In any case, no one is immune from assimilation, as I noted earlier. Your unassimilated Jew does not exist.

Besides, we cannot talk about Jewish cuisine without assimilation, or without treyf. Communities have always adapted the local cuisine to Jewish needs, and incorporated what was there. Other than kashrut, Jewish cuisine was not always that different – and sometimes, the kashrut was not there either. So many Jewish dishes, like cholent, p’tcha, and albondigas, derive from ­treyf ancestors. It is highly unlikely that those dishes were not developed partly by Jews who ate treyf. Jews encountered the food of the rest of the locale all the time. They saw these foods in their trading, in their farming, in their homes, when they went to the market, when they went to the court, and even, when they went to the brothel. Many communities said that treyf was unwelcome, yet willfully ignored that many members did, in fact, eat treyf from time to time. For itinerant traders, those far from other communities, or the very poor, it was probably unavoidable. We do not know it now, because our communities would rather us hear about the kitschy, suspect stories of the peddlers who brought their own pans and the maids who would rather die than eat pork with their employers. Those stories, like other lies, do not do much good for anyone.

There are all sorts of reasons people eat treyf. Maybe we should listen. We can learn a lot about the Jewish community, about foods, and about the people around us who we love. We can build a more inclusive Jewish community, one that is truly welcoming to all Jews and anyone who wants to join us. Kashrut can finally be a choice, and celebrated, and not something that is forced, mandatory, or insincere. And most of all – we can ask ourselves, “why do we do this?” The answer might not be what we expect, or what we want to hear. Maybe, under the religiosity we perform, we do not want to keep kosher. Maybe, under the secularism we preach, we do. Most likely, we are more in-between than we want to be. Which is okay: Judaism is often about the in-between. We eschew defined dogmas and boxes, and it makes us beautiful. If we can express and listen to each other’s in-betweens, we can make the in-between better, and a place for building.

Thank you everyone for your stories about treyf.