The Golden Calf, Kashrut, and You

The mitzvah not to boil a kid in its mother’s milk appears three times in the Torah – and from this, the rabbis derive that one is prohibited not to eat milk with meat, not to cook them together, and not to benefit from the mixture. One of the times the commandment is given occurs shortly after Moses goes up the mountain a second time with a second set of tablets and G!d reveals the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy and Moses is only allowed to see G!d’s backside (or the knot at the back of the tefillin G!d wears on the head according to midrash). (This appears in Exodus 34, with the commandment about boiling the kid in its mother’s milk in verse 26.) These events occur after the sin of the golden calf.

I believe this mitzvah and the incident of the golden calf are related.

The golden calf bears no actual resemblance to a real calf. Having grown up in small towns and rural areas, I encountered cows and their calves. They are smelly, they are stubborn, and they don’t care where they go to the bathroom. They are not perfect. We keep them to serve our needs, but they live their own lives and don’t really care about our wellbeing apart from our role in feeding them and giving them shelter.

The idol of the golden calf, in contrast, is an idealized perfect image of a calf that bears no actual resemblance to a real calf. Aaron tells the people, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Exodus 32:8) Not only is this false – the one living G!d actually brought them up – thus creating an idol in place of G!d – but it distorts the relationship to the calf, attributing to it a miracle it did not do – but also making the calf exist only in relationship to the people, only existing to meet our needs, erasing its existence as a being independent of humans with its own life. The idol is a false image of both G!d and the calf.

I would like to suggest that one reason this commandment against boiling the kid in its mother’s milk, which is seen by rabbinic Judaism as a prohibition against mixing meat and milk of any kind, is to give us a constant reminder to recognize that the animals we use for food are creatures independent of us – the calf or kid has a relationship with its mother – and that we must be grateful to it and to G!d, recognizing we are not the center of a universe that revolves around us. Even vegans can use this mitzvah to recall that the plants, too, have existence separate from us, creatures in their own right.

May we merit to remember at every meal that G!d is G!d, we are creatures, and we share that trait with all living beings apart from G!d who have ever existed, who exist now, or ever will exist.