"Are You Religious?"

The following was preached at Erev Rosh HaShanah services at Kolot Chayeinu.

At the beginning of every school year, the students and faculty at Hebrew Union College spend three days on retreat. It’s an opportunity to reconnect with one another after a summer apart and to begin the year with fresh, creative thinking. The retreat is held at the IsabellaFreedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut.

On the last day of this year’s retreat, after waiting in the buffet line to get some lunch, I was looking around the dining room for a place to sit. Many of my classmates were at tables that were already full, and I noticed a person sitting alone whom I didn’t recognize. Like many male students at HUC, he had a short-trimmed beard, was wearing an interesting hat, and looked tired. I figured that he was a first year student whom I hadn’t yet met. So I went and sat at his table and introduced myself.

I quickly discovered that he was not in fact a first year student. His name was Adam, and he was the mashgiach—or kosher supervisor—for the kitchen and dining room at the retreat center. Now, in case you’ve never been to Isabella Freedman, not only is it a beautiful retreat center, it’s also home to Hazon—a Jewish organization that works on food sustainability issues. On the grounds of Isabella Freedman, Hazon runs an educational farm that provides some of the food for the retreat center’s dining hall.

For a few minutes, Adam and I made polite small-talk, until finally I asked him, in a totally leading way, “So, tell me about the kosher status of this kitchen.” I expected him to enlighten me with a personalized treatise on Eco-Kashrut, the growing movement around developing a new kosher standard that is based upon equal parts traditional Jewish dietary laws on the one hand and sustainable, ethical food concerns on the other. After all, we were at Isabella Freedman.

Instead, Adam smiled and said: “Are you religious?”

“I don’t know how to answer the question,” I responded. “I feel strongly identified with the Jewish people. I love Torah study. Sometimes, I’m really into prayer—although right now I’ve kind of got a problem with God. So yes, I would say I’m religious. But, if you’re asking if I keep kosher, I don’t.”

I was surprised to learn that Adam’s role as kosher supervisor of the kitchen had nothing to do with Eco-Kashrut, and was almost entirely technical. He gave me a thorough explanation of the various types of kosher certificates and levels of stringency, all of which were based on classical Jewish dietary laws. When I asked him how much of the food in the kitchen came from the Farm or from other local sources, he had to flag down someone else on the staff to find out the answer. And even then, he reminded me the locally grown food had to be checked extra-carefully to make sure it met all proper kosher standards.

The conversation wasn’t going as I had expected it to. There were only so many technical details that I could retain at one time, and as a person who doesn’t keep kosher, I didn’t find it all that interesting. Although, come to think of it, as a person who doesn’t practice sustainable eating either, I can’t imagine that I would have found the Eco-Kashrut conversation all that much more interesting. Resigned to my lunch conversation fate, I asked Adam what the training is like to become a kosher supervisor.

He told me that it’s not overly difficult—that you have to study the laws of Kashrut, but that at this point, they’re all compiled in user-friendly guide books. And then he added: “But the most important thing is that you have to be religious.”

“How’s that?” I asked. “I consider myself religious, but I don’t think that it particularly qualifies me to be a kosher supervisor.”

“Let me give you an example,” he said. “Let’s say that dinner is supposed to be served at 6:15. And at 6:00, the chef goes to crack an egg, and he discovers that there’s a drop of blood in the egg—which makes it un-kosher. Now in this circumstance, anybody could tell the difference between kosher and non-kosher. I just told you: if there’s a drop of blood in an egg, it’s not kosher. But the difference is, a person who’s not religious might see that drop of blood in the egg and say to himself: ‘Dinner’s in 15 minutes, we gotta get this food out there. Let’s just cover this up—don’t ask, don’t tell.’ Now, someone who’s religious, she sees that drop of blood in the egg, and although she knows that everyone in that dining room expects dinner in 15 minutes, she also knows that everyone in that dining room expects that the food she calls kosher is actually kosher. So she doesn’t cover it up. She goes outside and she says: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize, dinner is going to be late. We had an unexpected hiccup in the kitchen; something doesn’t look kosher. We’re bringing out some snacks in the meanwhile, and we’ll serve you the kosher food as soon as we can.’”

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So while one of us keeps kosher and the other one doesn’t, I think Adam and I agree on what it means to be religious. It’s actually not about feeling a strong identification with the Jewish people, or about study, or prayer—or even keeping Kosher. It’s about conviction. It’s about believing in what you do—and just as importantly, not claiming to believe in what you don’t do. Although I could become technically adept, I would make a terrible kosher supervisor. And that’s OK. Good thing Adam’s out there.

In a sense, Rosh Hashanah asks us the same question that Adam asked me. Rosh Hashanah asks us: “Are we religious?” Do we believe in what we do and do we do what we say we believe? “Ayekah? Where are we?”