JTA — Beth Berkowitz was 12 years old, sitting at Shabbat dinner at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires, when she noticed something she could not unsee: tiny hair-like feathers clinging to the skin of the chicken on her plate. The chicken no longer felt like food, but perhaps another creature’s parent, sibling, or child.

Berkowitz stopped eating meat soon afterward — a decision that would quietly shape her sense of self and, decades later, her scholarship.

For Berkowitz, now the chair of Jewish Studies and a professor of religion at Barnard College, the path between pre-adolescent vegetarianism and ancient legal texts was neither straight nor obvious. But the throughline is what she explores in her new book about animal kinship and Jewish law. “What Animals Teach Us About Families” insists that animals are living beings with family relationships of their own.

What’s more, Jewish laws about treating animals invite a conversation about these relationships and what they mean to leading a commanded and ethical life.

It is a rare book of Jewish scholarship that cites “Bambi” and “Finding Nemo” alongside the Babylonian Talmud and the first-century philosopher Philo, and that also includes a chapter on what readers can do to ensure that animals are treated more humanely.

“The Bible’s animal-family laws do not protect animal families so much as sensitize us to their presence,” Berkowitz writes. “In the culture of ancient Israel and the late ancient rabbis, that meant keeping track of animal genealogies, learning about animal behaviors, and caring about animals who lost their parents to slaughter.”

“What Animals Teach Us About Families” focuses on four biblical laws that all revolve around parent-child relationships among animals.

One (Leviticus 22:28) forbids slaughtering an animal and its offspring on the same day. Another (Deuteronomy 22:6-7) requires shooing away a mother bird before taking her eggs. Exodus and Leviticus include a similar injunction to keep the baby animal with the mother for the first week of its life. The most famous — repeated three times in the Torah — commands: “Do not cook a kid [that is, a baby goat] in its mother’s milk.”

These laws appear in different books of the Torah, from different textual strata, suggesting a sustained concern, rather than unrelated commandments. They also have no clear parallel........

© The Times of Israel