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Question: How come we can’t eat meat and milk together?
Answer: The separation of meat and dairy foods is a very important part of the traditional Jewish way of life. We may approach the question either from a textual-traditional point of view or from a critical historical one. I shall try to do both.
At three places in the Torah (Ex. 23:19, Ex. 34:26, and Deut. 14:21) we read, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” To the ancient rabbis, this repetition had to be meaningful, and they derived from it a three part prohibition. We may not eat meat and dairy foods together, we may not cook them together, and we may not derive any benefit from the combination.
I must stress that, although this interpretation is found in the Talmud (Hullin 115b) and not in the Bible, from a Jewish legal point of view, it has the force of Torah law. The Talmud Tractate Hullin also contains three other aspects of our current observance: a requirement that we wait some period of time after eating meat before eating dairy foods, a prohibition of cooking meat and dairy foods in the same pots, and the extension of the prohibition to include poultry.
Characteristically, the Torah does not give us a rationale for its prohibition of boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, and we cannot therefore know with certainty the original reason for the prohibition. In the 12th century, Maimonides, in his "Guide for the Perplexed" (3:48), suggested that boiling a kid in its mother’s milk was an ancient pagan practice. Excavations at Ugarit, in present day Syria, have seemed to support that theory, but the meaning of the inscription discovered there has been disputed. The 12th century Bible commentator Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (Commentary on Exodus 23:19) thought that boiling a kid in its mother’s milk was a particularly cruel practice. In the 1st century CE, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo wrote (De Virtute 13) that it is wrong to use life-giving milk to flavor the meat of a dead animal, thereby mixing life and death. In the 20th century, the American-Israeli Biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom endorsed Philo’s view, and many of my colleagues like that explanation of the practice.
I am not enthusiastic about any of those explanations. Rejecting an ancient fertility ritual may have once been important in Jewish life, but it is not an issue for us today. It is actually no more cruel to boil an already slaughtered kid in its mother’s milk than it is to roast it over a fire, so ibn Ezra’s explanation doesn’t go very far. The idea that we should not mix life and death is apparently attractive to many people, but it leaves me cold. Life is life and death is death, the difference between them is fairly clear, and there is nothing that we can do about it. I think that the real reason why observant Jews separate meat from dairy foods is that that is the way we have done things for hundreds of years. Many people today scoff at the argument, “This is the way we have always done things,” but I think that that, in fact, is the best explanation for the separation between meat and dairy foods today. |
