[Buddha-l] Insight into Anti-Muslim Violence in Sri Lanka

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 19, 2013, at 20:20, "Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> kashrut laws require painless, instant death. If the animals suffer, the meat will not be kosher.

Is death ever painless and instant? I suppose being vaporized in a nuclear explosion might come close, but the result of that is not kosher meat but no meat at all.

That said, where I live now I find myself surrounded by people who hunt for much of their food. My neighbor hunts elk with a bow and arrow, and he swears when an elk or deer is shot in just the right place, it dies immediately and suffers little. He prays for the animals he harvests (his verb) and is convinced his prayers minimize the animal's suffering. To a non-hunter this sounds superstitious. To a non-participant in Judaism and Islam, kosher and halal sound equally superstitious.

> Conversely, however, halal meat is NOT considered kosher, because the killing and preparations do not meet the kosher standards.

Isn't there another factor, namely, that any food to be kosher must be blessed by a qualified rabbi? I worked once in a plant that processed cooking oil. One line of oil we made was kosher. Every month or so a rabbi came out to the plant and said some prayers over some vats of oil, thereby turning the canola oil (then known as rape seed oil) kosher. That was not so much a matter of purity as of ritual; the kosherized oil was in every other respect identical to the non-kosher oil.

Richard