There is a story told about Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, one of the great ethical minds of nineteenth-century Judaism, that has stayed with me as Passover approaches. Salanter visited a matzah factory to certify it kosher. He spent time examining the ovens. But he spent even more time watching the workers: how tired they were, how fast they were forced to move, how little their dignity seemed to matter to anyone in charge. He declined to certify it. Even though the matzah was technically kosher, the moral dimensions were not.

For Salanter, the two were inseparable. I’ve been thinking about this teaching because I am a committed observer of kashrut, and I have come to an uncomfortable conclusion I can no longer avoid: the observance I love is failing the tradition it was built to serve.

I say this as someone who has kept strictly kosher for all of my adult life. Kashrut is not a quaint dietary quirk. Rather, it’s one of the central organizing practices of Jewish civilization, a discipline that links Jews across continents and centuries. At its best, it turns eating—one of the most mundane human acts—into a daily act of ethical accountability.

Yet kashrut has drifted from a system of moral consciousness into a system of paper piety. The certification has become the point, rather than what the certification was always supposed to represent.

Consider what happens at a typical Passover Seder. Families and friends, strangers and prophets, gather around tables heavy with food, tell the story of liberation from slavery, and declare with genuine warmth that all who are hungry are welcome to come and eat. It is a beautiful ritual, one of the most beloved in Jewish life. It is also, if we are being honest, increasingly disconnected from the realities of how that food got to the table.

The disconnections are easily found. About 40 percent of American food is wasted, and the problem is worse during Passover, when observant homes store separate pantries and set lavish tables. The system we quietly sustain tilts toward excess and waste. The farm laborers who harvest the parsley we lift as a symbol of renewal remain largely invisible. Their working conditions echo – sometimes more than uncomfortably – the bondage we claim to remember. And yet they rarely enter the conversation. Animals processed in factory farms are raised in conditions that no honest reading of Jewish ethical tradition could endorse. If eating is spiritual, industrial feedlots look less like sanctification and more like desecration.

Then there is the strange spectacle of the Passover supermarket aisle itself: rows of ultra-processed, expensive foods proudly bearing religious certification while contributing to the epidemic of heart disease that remains the leading cause of death in the United States. A kosher label was never meant to function as a health halo, but culturally it has sometimes become one.

None of these problems is unique to Jews. They are features of the modern food economy. But Jewish tradition is unusually explicit about the moral obligations that surround food. The Torah repeatedly ties the memory of slavery to responsibilities toward workers and strangers. Rabbinic law contains extensive discussions about the humane treatment of animals. The prophetic tradition insists, repeatedly, that ritual observance without ethical seriousness becomes empty performance.

If any religious system should be equipped to confront the moral contradictions of industrial food production, it is this one. Instead, the institutions that govern kosher certification have largely confined themselves to narrow technical questions about ingredients and preparation, abandoning that ethical terrain almost entirely.

And yet we cannot entirely exempt ourselves. The institutions that shape kashrut reflect the community that sustains them. Still, this is not primarily the fault of individual people. Most people who keep kosher are doing their best within complicated circumstances. Modern life already requires a dizzying number of ethical calculations, so expecting individuals to personally investigate the labor conditions, environmental impact, and animal welfare practices behind every ingredient they purchase is unrealistic.

But when those institutions restrict themselves to legal technicalities, the ethical conversation disappears.

Jewish tradition contains extraordinary resources for this reckoning. Passover, in particular, is designed to collapse the present and the past. The Passover liturgy itself insists that each generation must see itself as if it came out of Egypt.

“We were slaves,” the text says. Not they. We.

That move from past tense to present tense is meant to be morally unsettling. If we truly see ourselves in the story, then the memory of bondage cannot remain a ritual performance. If liberation is the story we tell, it ought to be the story we eat.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)