Keeping Kosher for Good Health

Question

Dear Rabbi,

I have heard that we are to keep kosher for health and food-safety reasons. Is this true?

Thanks in advance.

0

Answers

  1. The Just Ask! - AskTheRabbi.org Team

    The Midrash explains keeping kosher with a parable:

    A doctor sits in his office and doles out prescriptions. For one patient, he prescribes a detailed diet, allowing him to eat one thing and forbidding another. This patient leaves the office with a long list of rules, restrictions and regulations. Another patient gets a free pass to eat whatever he wants. Upon being asked, the doctor explains: the first patient can be cured if only he adheres to his strict diet. The second patient, however, is closer to death than life, so what difference does his diet make if he is about to die anyway?

    This parable calls for explanation. How does keeping kosher “cure” us?

    Often, we may feel like we’re paying a price for eating kosher, for passing up the cheeseburger. But in this parable, our Sages from millennia ago teach that the truth is exactly the opposite. For eating kosher, we not only earn a mitzvah, but we merit a cure and access to good health as well.

    Granted, eating kosher foods in an intelligent manner may provide certain physical health benefits due to strict supervision requirements. However, our Torah commentaries teach that the “cure” and good health facilitated by keeping kosher refers to spiritual health achieved by a “kosher body.” A Jew who keeps kosher has made the physical body a fit receptacle for earning spiritual health and reward for at least the soul.

    While this world might try to tell us otherwise, the goal of our life in this world is perfecting of our spiritual selves, our non-physical aspect. To perfect, or even access this aspect, to achieve the “cure,” we are prescribed a detailed spiritual medicine, one that will eventually cure us of the focus on the physical and allow us to access and be impacted by the spiritual.

    Best wishes from the AskTheRabbi.org Team