Talking Turkey with Rabbi Noah Farkas

As the American holiday season begins in earnest this Thursday with the annual ritual of eating too much and watching football, there will be some Jews who will celebrate Thanksgiving without a turkey. For vegetarians this is not a surprise; after all, turkeys are animals and if you don’t eat animals, then no turkey for you.   Food activists might give up on the bird if it wasn’t raised in the proper conditions and treated properly. These ethical eaters could easily go with a heritage turkey, but they might as well eat something more sustainable or just. No, there is another group of Jewish Americans, like my friend and teacher, Dr. Anne Lapidus Lerner, who will abstain from eating turkey this year for no other reason than they believe that turkeys are simply not kosher.

This small group of our collective tribe does not hold a grudge against Turkey, nor do they have any particular love of the flightless bird. Instead they follow a particular substratum of our tradition made popular by one of the leading halachic authorities in the early years of the State of Israel, Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, known as the “Chazon Ish" (1878-1953). Rabbi Karelitz believed that Turkey, a bird native to the Americas, cannot be kosher. How did he come to this conclusion?

In the Torah, there is an explicit list of which birds are not kosher:

And these are an abomination among the birds; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination; the eagle, the bearded vulture, the black vulture, the kite, the buzzard after its kind; Every raven after its kind; the owl, the falcon, the gull, the sparrow hawk after its kind, the little owl, the fish owl, the great owl, the barn owl, the jackdaw, the gier-eagle, the stork, the heron after its kind, the hoopoe, and the bat. All birds that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination to you.  (Leviticus 11:11-20).

From here, you can see that there’s over twenty species of birds which are forbidden to eat. The rabbis tried to extrapolate general principles about these birds. Generally speaking, however, if it’s not on the list or similar to a bird on the list, then the bird is kosher. That leaves a big question however, about how to safeguard exactly which birds not on the list are kosher and which are not. From here, the rabbis believed that a strong oral tradition, called a mesorah, is required to guide religious authorities carve up the good birds from the bad.

Here’s the turkey test: The bird was first discovered in America by Europeans in end of the 15th century. In fact, according to the book, The Turkey: An American Story , Richard MacNeish, a Canadian archaeologist, found domesticated turkey fossils in Mexico dating somewhere between 200 and 700 BCE. That would mean that neither the writers of the Torah, nor the thousands of years of rabbinic writings that came after would have any knowledge of the Turkey. Rabbi Moses Iserless (1520-1572)was the first to say that Turkey is in fact kosher. His ruling was not readily accepted. For Rabbi Karelitz and others, they wanted to safeguard the halachic structure by being a bit more conservative in their culinary choices since there was simply no mesorah about turkey. So they decided to keep turkey off the kosher table.  Now that’s talking turkey!   Happy Thanks giving.