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Beth A. Berkowitz, "What Animals Teach us About Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature" (U California Press, 2026)
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A
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network hello.
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A
And welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motilla, and today we're talking with Beth Berkovitz about what animals teach us about families, kinship and species in the Bible and rabbinic literature. The book's title is a play on the affect theorist Brian Misumi's book what Animals Can Teach Us About Politics. Misumi, in that book, suggested that, paradoxically, the way to become human is to embrace our animalities. So he's not just saying like animals, they're just like us, so we should be nice to them. Well, there is that. It's a book that asks readers to think about what he calls the politics of instinct, of the way animals kind of play and feel their way into relationships without recourse to abstractions. They don't have written laws or rigid identities, but they do find ways to live together. And Misumi asks readers to cross that species divide because in crossing, what gets revealed is that one, there's not really like an ontological gap between humans and animals to begin with, and two, we often kind of fall into this trap of having to choose between total sameness or radical difference, that we're either just like animals or they're totally different than us. When, you know, a kind of playful, messy middle gets us closer to reality. The truth. Or at least the best way to learn about the truth, he argues, involves refusing those extremes. And as other philosophers have pointed out kind of what humans say separates us from animals. Thought, emotion, self, reflection, subjectivity, whatever it is, often reveals a lot more about us than what, whatever animals we're talking about. We're not the only species to have any of those things. And Dr. Rubitz argues that we're not the only species to have families either. Families were the kind of basic unit of the social world of late antiquity. But to understand what they meant by families, we'd do well. At least we'd do well to take a bit of a detour. The category of the family is kind of, it's like too familiar. It's overdetermined. And to see what ancients meant by families, we might need to see how they actually talk about animals. And by paying attention to animals, Dr. Berkovitz argues, we're going to start to feel our way towards perhaps other forms of families in the present as well. What we get in a book like this is the hope that we can learn how to read like the rabbis, that we can pay attention to the animals as we read. And what I mean by that is that we can stop just hunting for analogies with humans. Like we can stop looking at animals so that we can use them as an example in a sermon and instead notice like how animals interact with each other. And that, that detour, that kind of attentiveness to animals, it's going to require some, some new habits of noticing, some modes of paying attention. And the rabbis can be really helpful here. Animals were, were a part of everyday life for lots of people in antiquity. Sometimes they were pets, but. But often they were, I don't know, like animals. They were kind of like humans. I mean, we're animals too, but they were kind of not. And what many of the rabbis noticed was that animals had families for Maimonides, kind of only humans have reason, but animals had families too. And he, like plenty of ancients, noticed how mothers nursed children and they cleaned and protected them. They noticed that animals had families and that separating from a family was really traumatic. And that's not just projection. It's like one of those observations that could just make clear how wrong common sense around how different animals and humans are can be. Often people in the Roman world, if they mentioned like one thing about Jews, they discussed their dietary practice and it was controversial enough that the first century Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria had to make some comments about it. And Philo, when he's talking about it, he focuses on this prohibition against separating a kid from his mother's in the first Week of Life. And he sees in that this kind of sacred arrangement of the family. He says, like, if there's this law, what we can tell is that the family is a kind of sacred unit. And what he's doing there, he's emphasizing kind of human virtue in the animal laws. Right. He's saying, like, you know, why do we have these rules around food? We have these rules around food because they're good for humans. And that kind of logic shows up all over Christian literature also. People like Clement Alexandria will do that, and Jewish and Christian leaders will talk about laws in that way. But this book has a different lesson for us also. It's a book about what animals can teach us about families. And it's a book. A book about ethics. But if you're looking to build up kind of animal ethics around rabbinic laws, you run, I don't know, like, pretty quickly into some pretty serious problems. Like, it's great that ancients were thinking at least a little bit about animals and, you know, but not killing an animal on the seventh day and then killing it on the eighth day is, like, not exactly the revolution that Peter singer imagined. Right. Dr. Berkovitz instead shows us that the rabbis, in their own technical way, they offer a different way to think about humans and. And animals and families. And so it's not just the content of what the rabbis are saying. It's their kind of style of thinking that might break our ontologies or give us different ways to divvy up reality. Just to say this upfront, this is a book that is going to ask readers to go vegan. It is that kind of book. But even if you're, you know, not going vegan, I think once you start looking at the animals in these sources, it's hard to see them, the sources and the animals in the same way. We may not think about rabbis as, like, the source for animal rights, but I don't know, after reading this, perhaps we should. Dr. Beth Werkvitz is professor and Ingerberg Renner chair of Jewish Studies at Barnard College. Before this book, she has written many others, including Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud. So, Beth, hi. Thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you, and how'd you get interested in writing about animals in the Rabbis?
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B
Yeah. Hi, Mike. And thanks so much for inviting me to be on this podcast. So you. You told the audience, I'm a professor of Jewish studies and religion at Barnard College. I specialize in rabbinic literature. You can tell that from the book. So I Got interested in animals while I was working on a project about Jewish difference. And what I mean by that is I was interested in this question of how do Jews differentiate themselves as Jews? Like, Jews breathe, Jews sleep. But that doesn't, like, differentiate them from other people. So how do Jews figure out which things make them different and separate them out as a group? So I ended up tracing the history of interpretation of this biblical verse that says to the Israelites, like, don't act like the other people. Don't copy their practices. And so I was curious how Jews over time interpreted that injunction to be different. And what I found is that animals came up a lot in that project. It turns out this may not come as a surprise, that animals are a really great way of asserting human deference, which is why I tell people who aren't particularly interested in animals that they should be. Since you can't understand the animals. I mean, you can't understand people without getting into animals. If you think just like a really common example, unfortunately, common example, think of a woman being called a bitch. A bitch is a female dog. So we use animals just all the time. We don't even think. Think about it as a way of relating to each other and differentiating from each other. And I also happened to be a vegetarian since I was very young. And speaking of difference, that always gave me a sense of difference from majority culture. I had the sensitivity to animals that I could see, like, most people around me didn't share, which. Which just got me curious, actually. So I ended up writing this book about the Talmud's perspectives on animals. And I found that the Talmud had insights about animals that I didn't even see in our own contemporary conversations, or at least they were, like, just coming on the scene for us today. And, you know, once you're studying animals in classical Jewish literature, it's not long before you come across the particular laws that are the focus of this recent book, what I call the animal family laws. They appear in different parts of the Torah. But, you know, I'm not the first person to view them kind of as a unit. Since antiquity, people kind of read them in conjunction with each other, and they get used as this, like, parade example of how Judaism dictates compassion towards animals. And I was really not persuaded or by that perspective. I was kind of bothered by it. And that was the genesis for this book.
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A
Book, yeah, yeah. And we will get to those. Those laws, I promise. But before we get there, like, I, you know, as I was reading this, I was thinking about, like, there's A way of presenting animal rights or, or even like caring about animals as if it's something that starts with like PETA or Peter Singer or something like that. Right. Or like the way you put it, like, like, you know, we have stories today about, you know, Bambi or Finding Nemo, and it's like totally common for someone to like fall in love with an animal and to identify with them. And that feels like very, very modern. I don't know, like a person in antiquity might turn to a donkey in a story, but I don't know, it's hard to imagine them writing Charlotte's Web. Except that when you sit with a book like this for long enough, you start thinking about other animal stories. We've got Aesop's Fables and Aristophanes and Christian Saint lights are just filled with animals. And as you point out, there's lots in the Bible and an urbanic literature too. So we'll get into the, the difficulties and the sources that you're talking about, but you really invite us to think about care for animals and the kind of intimacy that people had with animals, especially in antiquity. It's common today to separate animals from humans. Maybe your dog sleeps in your apartment or in your house, but the chickens and the goats stay outside. But in antiquity, that kind of barn house distinction didn't really exist in the same way. Can you just start us off by telling us about the kind of intimacy that people in antiquity would have had with animals?
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B
Yeah, I think that part of the story is so important, but I should just point out that my dog Bird, who's in Newfoundland, definitely does not sleep on my bed. There would be no room left for me. But yeah, ancient Israelites and then Jews, you know, depending on who they were, when they lived, where they lived, there were differences, but they interacted with animals generally in far more intimate ways than we do. If we go back to ancient Israel, you have nomadic or semi nomadic herders where they're wandering around the land with their animals and they really lived off their animals. They live with their animals. Even in more sedentary settings and agricultural settings, people would keep their animals in the bottom floors of the house and would live in the top floors. Some people would hire shepherds, like in the right season to take their herds out. But some people even did it themselves and spent a lot of time with their animals. So they would have seen animals give birth, they would have seen the babies. They would have seen animals nursing those babies and raising those babies, like, you know, teaching them how to behave, which Happens with animals, too. So that family drama would have, like, unfolded right in front of people. And I think that was probably less so in more urbanized settings, which are really the ones described in the Mishnah and the Talmuds. But I think even there, animals you could see just from, you know, if you read across the Michigan Talmuds, like, animals were around. Even if people were, like, buying and selling, selling them in the marketplace and keeping only a few around, they were still really, you know, part of the fabric of life.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, the temptation might be then to, like, think, like, well, they had, like, more intimate relationships with animals, so they were probably nicer to animals. But that's not really the case. And it's not the case then or even now. Right. And you open the book with this, like, really amazing discussion of Bambi. So can you tell us, like, what does Bambi teach us about kind of what to expect or how to read the rabbis?
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B
Yeah, and I think there really pays to distinguish between Disney's Bambi and the original book by Felix Saldan. And part of what attracted me to the book was that he was a Jewish writer. And so there's a lot of Jewish resonances to Bambi that I think a lot of people really don't know about. So if you read Bambi, it's really not that sentimental a work in the way that the Disney version is. Felix Saldan was a hunter. He was really interested in real animal behaviors. You could see he was really interested in the bonds among animal families, not just deer, but all the other kind of supporting animal characters in the story. So that's very similar, I think, to the ancient rabbi. So that was part of the connection, I thought. And Sultan had respect for those bonds and curiosity about those bonds, as the rabbis did. And in just the same way that Sultan's curiosity and respect didn't stop him from killing animals, neither did it stop the rabbis from killing animals and using them for all sorts of purposes. For me, being cognizant of animal families entails not eating them, as you talked about, or their products. But I don't necessarily think it means that for everyone. It didn't mean that for salt and. Or for the ancient rabbis. And I think a lot just really depends on context. Our context is industrial animal agriculture, and that's, you know, a very specific context to be living.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, another part of the introduction lays out kind of contemporary science showing that animals, it's just they have feelings, but they have, like, filial or parental feelings. Like what, what is a filial feeling? And maybe like, I don't know, like if somebody thinks, like, you know, who cares if you separate the baby sheep from its mother? Like, does the sheep really know who the mother is? Like, like, can you like, walk us through the science part of this?
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B
Yeah, sure. The disclaimer is I'm not a scientist, but I did try to, to familiarize myself with the scientists scientific work as opposed to could. And it seems just very, very clear that separating animal mothers from their babies is incredibly traumatic. The uncomfortable thing about a lot of the science is that they're writing it. It seems it depends on the journal, but in order to support animal agriculture, it makes sense. When animals in industrial settings don't thrive, it's bad for business. So the veterinarians are working really hard to mitigate, to study and then mitigate the stress of separation. So they're writing about the harmful health effects so that it doesn't lose money for the agricultural companies. But I should say a lot of the veterinarians, actually there's ethical literature that the veterinarians write where I think for them it's a point of conflict of conflict where on the one hand they're dedicated to animal welfare, but on the other hand they're working within these systems that don't support animal welfare. So ancient people worried about animal feelings too. I think for a lot of the same reasons that where it's really hard to disentangle the economic interests from other sorts of interests. Like nobody wants their animal to die from trauma, even if it's only because the animal is really valuable. It costs a lot of money. But in terms of thinking about the complexities and about like, well, how sensitive were they to animal affect? My favorite illustration that Asian people thought about, I really like though you call it sheep feeling, but in my case it's actually cow feeling is this image from ancient Egypt, which I show in the book, where there's this sarcophagus. It's from, you know, really, really long time ago. I think it's the 21st century BCE that shows this milking scene. And it's supposed to show how luxurious the queen's life was, who's buried in the sarcophagus. And it shows that she had these like, special beautiful cows that were providing her with fresh milk that she always had on hand. But the portrait of these cows is really interesting. You can see the cow being milked by a person. There's like a pouch that the person's gathering the milk. But then next to this cow is a young cow who's tied up, and he's actually tied up to the leg of the mom, the mom cow who's being milked. And the calf appears to be, like, tugging at the robe, like he clearly doesn't like being tied up. And then the really amazing part of this image is if you look really closely, there's this single tear dropping from the eye of the mother cow who's being milked. And the scene is clearly meant to dramatize the impact of the milking of the mother on her, on the baby and to show that when people milk cows, it's traumatic for the mother and baby cows. And the artist who created this image is clearly interested in that emotional health impact and in that drama. And just to be fair, I don't see a lot of that kind of affect in the biblical or rabbinic sources that I discuss. But I do see sensitivity to these family bonds and a wish not to egregiously violate them, or at least to look like one is egregiously violating them. So as in the Egyptian image, if people are going to drink milk and eat meat, they're going to be violating these bonds. But there's this, like, real awareness that they're doing so and this kind of sensitivity around it.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a. It's a nice kind of distinction there. And it's. I mean, people should get the book. Like, it's a. It's a really stunning image. Yeah. You know, just to. Let's get into these laws.
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B
Right.
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Like to get us on the same page. Like, there's these kind of four biblical laws that address parent, child relationships and dietary ones. What are the laws? Yeah.
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B
Okay, so here's the basics. So there's four laws in the Torah that feature animal, parent, child bonds. These laws are so the most famous. Do not cook a kid in his mother's milk. When I teach this, I have to be really careful because when I say kid, students think I'm talking about, like, kids, but I'm actually talking about young.
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A
Also a good idea. I mean, just for the record.
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B
Exactly. So that appears a few times in the Torah. In. In none of those cases is there any explanation or any real context. It's kind of a mystery what this prohibition is doing there. The second law is leaving a baby with the mother for the first week of life, not taking it before the end of that time period, that law appears twice. And then there's a prohibition on not slaughtering a parent and child on the same day. That Appears only once. And then finally a law in Deuteronomy that one should chase away the mother bird before taking her eggs or ticks from the nest.
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A
Yeah. Okay, so we got those four. And kind of within that, you talk about how there's these kind of different ways of thinking about how these laws work and the different kind of rationales. One is what you call the humanitarian, humanitarian rationale, which, if I'm reading you right, is kind of the more common way that this happens. And then there's another kind of strand of rabbinic literature that has a different rationale, but let's start with the humanitarian one. So what's the humanitarian kind of rationale?
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B
Yeah, so that's what I call the humanitarian rationale. And I take that language actually from modern Bible scholarship. But the basic idea is that these laws are motivated by compassion for animals. So out of respect for the parent child bond among animals, you refrain from these behaviors that seem to violate it. So Philo is kind of the Lucas classicus for this approach. The first century Jewish philosopher where he talks about it as cruelty and savagery. To, for instance, he talked about all four of the laws to like separate mother and child immediately after birth, or when he's talking about slaughtering an animal, parent and child on the same day, he describes that as the height of savagery. And he's basically saying you have to have a heart of stone and be a really cruel person kind of driven by one's appetites to just like grab, you know, taking the case of the Deuteronomy law, just like grab this baby bird straight out from under the mother, or to like lively cook a baby animal in the milk that's like meant to nourish that animal. So there's different versions of the humanitarian rationale. It's not just like one thing. There's kind of different spins that different people on different times put on it. And they're kind of speaking to different contexts. But it's usually some combination of like, civility or compassion or empathy or humaneness. And there's usually like some agenda at work. Like for Philo, he was trying to combat certain anti Jewish stereotypes of Jews as kind of misanthropic and selfish. And so he was using these laws to show that the Torah is, you know, full of virtue and compassion. When the medieval commentator Rushbaum talks about these laws, he uses language he borrows from contemporaneous ideas of Christian civility. When Maimonides talks about these laws as motivated by compassion, he's drawing on contemporaneous Muslim ideas that you see like Abicena or the epistles of the Brethren of Purity. Like you see some of the same ideas about animal parent child bonds. When you start to get into modernity, I think it's really interesting to look at the language of like, humaneness and humanitarianism because it mimics a lot of the language of like the ASPCA and kind of the early animal rights activists groups, as well as a lot of the human rights language that became really central for a lot of Jewish figures in modernity. So it's really kind of interesting to both identify this kind of rationale that runs through history, but then see how every commentator kind of gives their own stamp to that rationale. Dripping in gold. That's cool. Dripping in Velveeta's supremely creamy golden cheesiness. That's respect. Elevate your drip with Velveeta's range of outrageously delicious dips and dishes. Shells, cheese, melty blocks and heat and eat queso that go all in on indulgence. Flex on your fam with a creamy cheesy masterpiece and go all in on what you love with Velveeta. Respect the drip and satisfy your cravings. Bring home the drip with Velveeta. We heard you.
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A
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B
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A
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B
Oh, now he's into Cooper's food. Wow, he is loving it. What do you feed Cooper?
- [26:28]
A
Blue Buffalo Life protection formula. He never leaves a crumb. I love it because it's made with high quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and veggies and wholesome whole grains.
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B
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- [26:48]
A
Yeah, yeah. Another example. You give this. You quote this passage from Proverbs 12:10. It says, A righteous one knows the soul of his animal, but the compassion of the wicked is cruel. And this is, I mean, you know, I must have read that passage at some point before. But, like, it's a real, like, brain breaker. Like, we got animals that have souls. We got, you know, compassion being something that the wicked ones have and that it's cruel. Like, how were the rabbis thinking about that passage?
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B
Yeah, I agree. It's a tough Verse. And I think the rabbis thought it was a tougher. And that's. I think they tend to. To generate a lot of midrash, like a lot of exegetical activity around a verse, around verses that are particularly like brain breaking, as you say. So I think this verse has a lot of potential for thinking about animals, but it's hard to know exactly what it means. So the exegetical material that I treat comes from the collection Leviticus Raba, where the midrashic author there, Rabbi Levi, just like gives this really extraordinary reading of the verse and connects it to the animal family laws and, and actually the righteous person who knows the soul of his animal. In Rabbi Levi, in Rabbi Lev, he's reading, that's actually God, and that's what allows him to connect it to the animal family laws, that it's God who gave these laws. And so God knows the soul of his animal. Now, I don't actually think Nephesh here, that's the idea of the righteous person knowing the soul of its animal. I don't think it really does mean soul. There's a huge debate in religious studies and among religions about whether animals have souls. I think here Nephesh just has a wide range of meanings. Here it's actually often translated as like a righteous person knows the needs of his animal, or, you know, something like that. But I think this, what was interesting to me about this midrash as it really presents the animal family laws as highlighting themes of kinship and care that are actually coming straight from God.
- [29:03]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. So, you know, the kind of humanitarian side is one explanation of like, you know, like, you should do this because it's good for you. And then there's this other kind of non humanistic way of understanding these. And part of the trickiness here is that the laws, like you said, they're not really a group, they're kind of siloed. And so people, you don't get discussions of bird nests right next to meat and dairy, and they don't explain the rationale for all four of the laws in a unified way. And so you said that it's not exactly the content of what the rabbis are saying, that it's more the style that you see is something kind of really helpful here. Can you tell us about the style kind of broadly, and then we'll get into specifics later?
- [29:44]
B
Yeah, I do think this is the trickiest part of the argument. I just gave a talk about the book to some Jewish studies academics, and someone asked me at the End. Aren't you really arguing that these laws are about compassion? In the end, haven't you kind of gone with the humanitarian rationale? And I did tell her I don't really think so. I really think that the rabbinic law is doing something very different. There's so. I think this is what makes rabbinic loss so challenging and also alienating is that often there's just so little affect, so little empathy, so little of anything that seems like ethics, that it's, you know, pretty alienating to us today. It's just very, very technical in the treatment. And I think it's completely clear they don't see compassion, the rabbis, as the motivation for these laws, or they just wouldn't be able to be so technical about it in the way it said they are. And I can give a couple examples. So according to the Mishnah, the tractate, it's called chulin, if you violate the prohibition on slaughtering an animal parent and child on the same day, you can still actually eat the meat, even if you also get punished for violating the prohibition, which suggests, like, they're just not that troubled ethically by what's happened. Then there's also a Mishnah there that says that if you slaughter an animal parent and child on the same day, but they happen not to be animals that you're allowed to eat, for instance, but they're like trafa. Their trafe, then you haven't violated the prohibition. At least that's according to one opinion. Or if you slaughter an animal parent and child and it gets invalidated for eating for some technical reason, then also you haven't violated this command. So I think they're just, you know, it's just very technical. If the ethics were what were motivating this, then I think they wouldn't exempt you in so many different ways from having violated. So I just. I see zero interest in ethics in the. In these, like, technical discussions of when you have or haven't violated the prohibition. And in the fact that it's like, totally fine for you to eat the meat even if you have killed an animal parent and child on the same day, you can still then go have dinner with that animal parent.
- [32:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That. It's like. I don't know, it's like, more important to engage the arguments about. About these things than it is actually to not eat the meat. There's something about. There's a communal sense of you gotta be in these fights more than. I don't know exactly what you do with them. Yeah. I think this gets clearer, too, as we get through some of these examples. The third chapter, it looks at grandmother's genealogy and animal affect. More specifically, you're looking at the prohibition against killing a mother and child on the same day and the kind of implication there is that to follow that law, you actually do have to know, like, the animal's genealogy. And the Mishnah presents these really interesting cases, like, if both a mother and a child are purchased for slaughter by two different people, then who's supposed to get killed first? Or, like, what about if there's three generations, if there's a grandmother and mother and child, then what kind of order should this go in? And specifically, you look at this passage in the Mishnah, where an animal seller on the eve of Sukkot or Passover or Shavuot or Rosh Hashanah has to announce, I sold her mother for slaughter. I sold her mother for slaughter. So the guy's, like, going and announcing that. Why are they doing this announcement? And even more broadly, why do they care about that kind of genealogy of an animal?
- [33:43]
B
Yeah, that's a good question. So this particular Mishnah that you were just mentioning directs the seller of an animal four times. It's like these particular four times a year that to make this public announcement of the sale, they give you the script, I sold her mother for slaughter. I sold her daughter first slaughter. And the idea is that these are, like, festive times of the year when, like, everyone's slaughtering their animals. I think of it as like a July 4th barbecue. Like, that's when everybody's, like, slaughtering, you know, grilling up their meat. So at these times of year, it might come to pass that a person who bought an animal would decide to slaughter it on the same day. The person who bought that animal as mother or daughter might also decide to slaughter it. And if that were to happen, these two people, kind of in conjunction with each other, would be violating this prohibition on soldering parent and child on the same day. Now, in imagining myself, and I do use a lot of my own imagination into trying understand. Trying to understand ancient romantic literature, even if there's a lot of pitfalls and trying to, you know, make connections. But in thinking about this, like, busy marketplace where people are buying and selling these animals, some of whom are related to each other, what really hit me is that people had to know who their animal's parent was, and they had to know who their animal's child was, whether they were selling it or whether they were buying it. And that to observe this biblical prohibition, that's like a big deal, a biblical prohibition. You had to keep track of your animal's family tree. And the contrast between that and today, where we don't even know that our animals, like, have families, barely, much less who those families are. Certainly not for the meat that we're buying. That just, you know, I sat with that for a while. Like, what does that mean? But again, I would just make the point. I don't see compassion here. Like, no one's feeling bad or guilty about anything or trying to be virtuous. Nobody's sad about killing animal mongers and children, but what they're doing is recognizing animal families and taking them seriously. There is a kind of cognizance of these animal families that, I wonder, may be more useful than compassion. And I guess that's like an undercurrent of the book, which may seem counterintuitive, but I think it's some skepticism I have about compassion as a powerful motivating force.
- [36:26]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that. That the point isn't to feel bad. Exactly. Like, like. Like it just didn't seem like. Like, if you're in that crowded marketplace, like, you know, like, you're. If nothing else, like, people are, like, bumping into you. Right. Like, you're not gonna, like, have time to, like, you know, sit down and contemplate and, you know, we weep over your. Your poor eating habits, but. But you are being, like, forced to remember that this animal had a family.
- [36:53]
B
Right? Like, they're putting systems. They're putting systems in place that kind of make you think about these things.
- [36:59]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you have this great line. I think you're riffing on Charles Payne here, saying animal family history for the Mishnah is something that happens when the butcher shows up and stops when he leaves. Can you tell us about that? Like, how does the butcher kind of help make. Make these families public?
- [37:17]
B
Yeah, that's also a really good question. And it really just has to do with the substance of these biblical laws, is that you have to be aware of animal families at these moments of slaughter or cooking or separation. So that's what I meant, that it's only when the butcher shows up that you have to, like, think about these relationships. And that's just the framework of the biblical laws. They all come into play when you're, like, sacrificing the animal to God or cooking it or slaughtering it. They all revolve. There are other laws in the Bible that are not focused around these moments, but the Four animal family laws really are all revolving around these kind of dire moments, these like sort of very high stakes moments for animals. That's when animal families become relevant.
- [38:14]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm realizing I'm kind of like picking examples that I just find, like great stories of just kind of these like really vivid images. And I'm going to go for another one here. But like, you know, like, the previous chapter is about what happens when we really do look at animal families. Right? Like someone's saying, you know, I slaughtered this daughter, I slaughtered this mother. And the next chapter is about what happens when we don't look at the animals. So chapter four, it's about the prohibition against cooking a kid into mother's milk. And you look at different reasons for why the rabbis say God might have commanded this. And you point to a few kind of test cases or edge cases. Like, is the udder an udder? Like, is it milk or is it meat? And at one point, we end a story with a rabbi on the edge of a city on the eve of Yom Kippur, kind of like wolfing down an U, which is like, again, quite an image. So what's going on in that story? What does that kind of edge case help us clarify? And you have this idea about the absent reference. Can you tell us about that and kind of how it helps us understand what's going on in the story?
- [39:22]
B
Yeah, so I was really intimidated by the particular prohibition of not cooking a kid in his mother's milk because you get into really technical legal discussions about milk and meat and what happens if, like a little bit of meat falls into a pot of milk. Like, I just didn't want to get, you know, completely lost in it, in all these, all these halachic dilemmas where I wasn't sure what was going to come out of it. For me, that felt interesting. But then when I looked at the Talmudic material on the prohibition of milgamy, I found some really fascinating material. And I knew, like, this is, this is what I have to look at. So this is the material where they talk about eating animal udders. So, okay, first of all, I had never heard about anybody eating an animal udder. Like, that was just not something I'd come across. So it stood out. But the other thing is that once I started thinking about it, it's an organ with a lot of symbolism. It's basically a breast. So eating an udder is like eating, you know, if we put it in human terms, a woman's breast. So imagine conducting an entire Conversation about the rules that surround eating a woman's breast. Like, you'd expect some interesting things to come out of that, and they do. I found a lot of you said a really, like, strange materials happening in that section of the Talmud. You get this rabbi's wife who wants to eat udders because it's, like, her only way of being able to eat milk and meat together because otherwise it's taboo. You get stories about women in the marketplace, and it's like, strangely titled town called Tattlefish. And they seem like they've never even heard of the separation between milk and meat. You get, like, images of people, like, crisscross slicing up an udder and, like, smearing it against the wall to try to get the milk out. You have stories about, like, rabbis having dinner together, which is, of course, always fun, and then having a debate about an udder gets served at the dinner. And they have a debate like, can we eat this? And then the story you mentioned, you have this, like, wild story about this. This guy named Rami, who visits one of the major rabbinic towns or cities, Sura, where they don't eat utters. Apparently, like, each city had a different tradition about whether you can eat utters or not. And like he mentioned, he, like, chows down on all these utters that everybody had thrown out because they donate utters. And it's, like, about to be Yom Kippur. And he has this back and forth, like, this sort of, like, funny and weird back and forth because he gets, like, hauled in to the local rabbi who starts challenging him. So I found this material, like, very weird, interesting, meaningful. And I wanted to get to the bottom of that and see what light it could shed on this prohibition. And where I landed was that the udder was bringing up some deeper, I thought, kind of repressed themes in Kashrut, in, you know, kind of the basics of Jewish dietary laws, where the separation from milk and meat is, like, a very key principle. And I think the utter just speaks in this very specific way to the maternal function of the animal. It defines being a mammal. So the utter kind of makes it impossible to not think of the maternal aspect of an animal. And that's the very thing that the rabbis suppressed in this area of law. They really kind of obscured this relationship that's at the heart of the biblical law between a particular mother and a particular child. And so that's where that absent referent comes into play. And I want to thank the philosopher Carol Adams. She's just, like, really brilliant and really cool. So she talks about that as like the thing that's like both there and not there. It's. For her, it's the animal that, like, nobody wants to recognize. That's the meat. And for me, I just like extended it a little bit to say it's the mother animal that nobody wants to recognize as a mother. And the udder, to me kind of seems like the perfect absent reference. Like you kind of can't help thinking about animal motherhood with this utter. But at the same time they're just talking about it like. Like it's just another piece of meat. But then again, it kind of pros. Poses all these problems too, because there's like milk inside of it, potentially. And then you've got milk and meat together and it's creates all these legal issues.
- [44:42]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, we could see, right, in that story, like you're. The way. The kind of technical stuff is not like the opposite of ethical, but. But that there, there is a way of like. Like, I don't know, policing tone or not policing, but just like. Like the. The kind of. The way that you can speak about this thing kind of. It obscures that reference, right? You can't have the super intense conversation that some of this material seems like it's begging for in the form of these stories. That's how you end up with these kind of crazy stories in the middle of quite technical discussions. Am I getting that right?
- [45:27]
B
Absolutely. And there's so much great thinking these days on the role of story and the Talmud and interaction between law and story. And I fully agree. What's happening here is that certain symbolically fraught dimensions of the utter that can't really rise to the surface. And the legal discussions do rise to the surface in the stories. And that's what makes the stories here kind of so colorful and interesting. And they're like, interwoven with legal discussions.
- [46:00]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. One other type of show kind of like how rabbis give us a way to understand a problem that we might otherwise miss. But this one kind of goes the other way, right? It's like full of rabbis arguing about things that never quite work. Like all the arguments, you're kind of like, is that right? But one of the nice things about the fact that the arguments don't work and in the text they don't work. It's not just like me, you know, 2,000 years later saying that is that it gives an opportunity for other non rabbis to. To actually like, speak in these stories, like kind of convincingly. Can you tell us About Yalta and her point about law and desire.
- [46:39]
B
Yeah, I'm so glad you asked about Yalta, because she is just an incredible character in the Talmud. She's one of the few named women in the Talmud. She's most famous for getting really pissed off at someone and smashing 400 bottles of wine. I taught a Talmudic narrative se semester, and one of my students found online like a dramatic reenactment of the Alta story. And it showed a woman, it was sort of like, you know, performance art where she just bashed like one bottle of wine after another, after another. 400 bottles of what? And when you actually see it played out, it quite something to watch. So I think what's going on here with Yalta and the other really famous named woman character in the Talmud is Bruria. And I think you see a lot of the same dynamics with Bruria too, is an internal critique of the rabbis that these women characters voice. And that I think is really, for me and for a lot of people, one of the more appealing dimensions of the Talmud is the way you get this kind of self satire and self critique built into the Talmud, especially into the stories where you kind of get the sense that the rabbis are kind of onto themselves and onto certain tricks that they've got or certain problems that they've got. So Yalta asking to eat utters, she kind of imperiously demands to her husband Ravnachman, she's like, bring me utters. And that comes at the end of her talking about all these different ways you can kind of circumvent Jewish law. Like say if you want to eat pork, there's a kind of fish that tastes like pork, you can eat that. And it's about all the different ways you can find loopholes around Jewish law. And so for her, the udder is kind of the ultimate loophole. You get to eat milk and meat together, but it's permitted. Although we actually find out in the rest of the Talmudic materials that some towns actually some people won't eat udders for this very reason, because. So there is kind of like a fraught status to the utter. But the idea with Yalta is she's basically saying, we rabbis, we can find a way out of anything. The law can really be manipulated if you're creative enough. Which I think speaks a lot to us today, especially in the US where I think we see, you know, crafty lawyers, you know, making a case for pretty much anything. You know, that's. That I think is. Is a challenge we're facing as well. So I, I see Yalta and the other stories here in this section pointing to this clever slate of hand that's at the heart of Kashru, which is this obscuring of the mother child relationship and of the theme of this biblical law where the rabbis just like took it in this direction, where you can't even see that theme anymore. Like, they've been so creative in their lawmaking that you no longer even see why they were making the. These laws to begin with. So when Yalta brings up the utter. I think she's really pointing to this, like, very fraught symbol of rabbinic legal creativity. And I think it's not coincidence. You have a woman pointing this out, like, who better than a woman to notice how women are being suppressed by creative rabbinic logic, which is what we're seeing in this area of Kashrud and in the interpretation of this biblical prohibition.
- [50:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. The next chapter is about birds, right? And you bring up this idea of indistinction. Can you tell us about indistinction and the mother bird Mitzvah?
- [50:45]
B
Yeah. So philosopher Matthew Calarco, he created this idea of indistinction and it's really taken off. I was just writing a book review of a collection called Ask the Animals, which is about. It's different kinds of Bible studies that are on animals in the Bible. And the whole collection is organized according to Matthew Calarco's categories, where he divides all of animal studies into studies that emphasize identity between humans and animals, this difference between humans and animals, and then something he calls indistinction. And it's very indistinct what he's talking about. It's kind of fuzzy. I'm still not sure I fully understand it, but like, everybody's just flocking to his idea of indistinction. But I think what it's about, like, my understanding is it's about not starting every project with human centered questions. It's about not assuming a binary distinction between humans and animals. It's about both seeing how animals are like us, how we're like animals, and I think also just about creating and appreciating like real relationships that humans have with animals and just appreciation for animals for who they are. So what I noticed in the materials in the Talmud that treat the mother bird commandment is just how focused on bird lives those materials are. And it kind of makes sense if you think about it, if you're going to get. It kind of mimics what I was saying before about some of These other lots. If you're trying to observe this mitzvah, you have to get into the details of birds and bird's nest. And, you know, if you're going to take this stuff seriously, as rabbis do, like, biblical law is their thing. That's the core of everything. You have to know something about animals to be able to observe these laws about animals. So for the Mother Bird mitzvah, you have to know where birds make their nests, what they make them out of, how they sit in them, for how long, who's in them. Those are all relevant questions if you're trying to figure out when the mitzvah applies and when it doesn't app. So the law really forces people to get to know animals, and otherwise you just, like, literally can't follow the law.
- [53:26]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the last big chapter is about orphans, and orphans are, you know, they're all over the Bible and rabbinic literature. But. But orphaned animals don't. Don't get that much attention. But in these. These stories, we get some of them, and they're again, like, pretty vivid and disturbing. But the chapter, it opens with this. This pretty big claim that I want you to tell us about. You write that in the way that the Dystopia of Wall E delivers an environmental critique and that the Handmaid's Tale delivers a feminist critique. The strange and disturbing images in Talmudic stories cast a critical eye on the treatment of animals. The Tami Seal actually shows up earlier in the book, too. But can you say a little bit more about the way the Talmud kind of delivers a critique similar to those big stories?
- [54:12]
B
Yeah, so I'm definitely creatively reading here, but hopefully it's a compelling reading. So what you get in the material on Animal or Fence is you run into this tall tale or a series of tall tales where what happens is really strange. You get these giant birds. You also have, like, giant trees and giant vegetables. And. But in the case of the birds, you have these giant birds. The Baryuhani bird, it actually has a name, a species name, and it drops its eggs, which are like giant eggs, and it kills the people of 60 cities. So, like, what to do with his story like this? It's kind of a cross between, like, Apocalypse, maybe comedy. It's like Return of the Killer Animals. I also think of it, like, as I was thinking about it today again, like. Like, maybe like black horror films in that you have these characters who are, like, exploited, in this case, animals. And, you know, you see that really egregiously in the relevant Law where it talks about a. A mother cow who dies and you flay her skin and wrap the baby in her skin and. And then say that it's not actually an orphan because, like, her skin is still there. It's very weird. It's very weird. So then just immediately after, in these tall tales, you have the animals turning around and, like, wreaking unimaginable havoc on human beings. So it felt to me like this can't be unconnected, that you go from this, like, very grisly halacha to this kind of apocalyptic, like, animal revenge fantasy. So I wanted to think about, like, what's the connection? And the way I saw it is really as a vision of power dynamics getting entirely turned around. A kind of, like, dystopian imagination of, you know, what if the violence we do against animals just gets flipped and it's, like, gets committed against us? So that's what. That's what I was seeing in those tales.
- [56:46]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a way. I mean, like, with Hammy's Tale or Orth Wally, like, it's an exaggerated story. Like, I am. I hear, like, I. I'm assuming that there's not a lot of people who are actually, like, flaying the. The cow and then wrapping the kid inside of it.
- [57:02]
B
That is a great question for anyone listening to this podcast. If you have information about it, contact me.
- [57:10]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And tell me too. But. But, like, I mean, it's like such a. It's such a big story. Then you can see the kind of, like, smaller, everyday violence, right? Like. Like you read Haman's Tale, and then you can see the sexism everywhere kind of move. Like, is it. Like, what. What kind of social order do you see a story like that revealing? And maybe you. You give the example of. From Rabbi Ishmael Ben Satrill. Like, can you tell us kind of that. That story and kind of how it reveals this kind of social order?
- [57:38]
B
Rabbinic literature, to me especially stories like this is kind of like modern art. Like, you look at it, you let it sink in. You try to figure out what's happening. You consider the composition, the effect. So I think in thinking about Rabbi Joshua and then Yishmael ben Satriel, where you have Rabbi Joshua saying there's this practice of skinning a cow who just died giving birth and wrapping the baby in it. Like, maybe it's just a legal idea, I don't know. But what it suggests to me is really this anxiety about the death of the mother and about the Vulnerability of this infant who needs. I mean, at the most basic level, needs warmth to survive. So clearly they were worried about what would happen to this newborn infant. And then the law also suggests that they want to resist the idea that this animal is an orphan and deny it and say, well, if the skin. This is. Rabbi Joshua. If the skin's there, we don't consider the animal an orphan. So there's this kind of, like, opposing forces in this material where on the one hand you've got this concern for the animal orphan, and then on the other hand you've got this wish to kind of deny and dismiss that status.
- [59:04]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I can imagine. I don't know, I'm, like, convincing myself now. Maybe they did do that. But it is the kind of thing that you can make the human analogy eventually, but you do have to kind of sit with the horror of the image for a little while.
- [59:20]
B
Yeah. And. And to. Actually, I think I didn't, like, pull it around to your question. I think because making animal orphans is so endemic to animal domestication, it kind of raises questions about all the practices that rely on animal domestication, like sacrifice, like eating, like buying into, like, pretty much all the ways we use domesticated animals.
- [59:45]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the book ends by kind of flipping your title, something. What do Families Teach Us about Animals?
- [59:53]
B
Yeah, so I think just a lot of ways to get at this question, which is why I like it. Some things that jump out at me. Families teach us that animals have full lives like we do. Family is such a powerful construct for us. So I think for us to extend it to animals, it allows us to relate more to animals as having bonds, as having intimacies, as having dramas of attachment and separation. And that's kind of Calarco's in distinction is kind of seeing these connections going different ways. And then if we kind of move it in the opposite direction, I think animals are teaching us about how our family experiences are not unique. It's a shared experience of having a family that's throughout the animal worlds. The, you know, different species. Even, like, cockroaches, you know, like, animals we don't think of as having families. So. So I think it's about both expanding our concept of family, expanding our concept of animals, which is two sides of the same coin. So since this is a book of biblical studies and Jewish studies and families play such an important role in the Bible and in Jewish culture and history, I kind of started with the family, but then wanted to end with animals and new perspectives on animals?
- [61:30]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the book kind of ends with some kind of, like, ethical calls. And I mean, this is a. I don't know, like the. It's a book that shows the way we interact with animals is. I don't know, it's like, it's more ethically important than what typically happens on a show on new books on late antiquity. But we are like a, you know, late antiquity show. So maybe I can end by asking you, how has sitting with animals changed the way you read the way rabbis? Like, animals were a big part of the ancient world, but I don't know, sometimes hard for you to know what to do with the reality that they were such a big part of the ancient worlds. You spent a lot of time now thinking about animals and rabbinic literature. Yeah. How's it changed your thinking about them?
- [62:15]
B
Yeah, I really appreciate this question for, you know, I think I spend a lot of time trying to change our contemporary relationships with animals, but I think it's also really important for the field of rabbinic and changes what we do as rabbinic scholars. And I think the most helpful way to get at that question is to think of the analogy to feminist work in rabbinics. And when I start to think about, well, how has feminist work changed rabbinics? I could think of, like, a number of different ways. Like, it's. It's allowed us to realize how much more material there is that we hadn't noticed before we realized how much we were reading from men's perspectives, kind of taking those as normative and not shifting perspectives to what does this material look like from a woman's perspective? I think we weren't aware of how much of an active project of marginalization and setting up of hierarchies is happening in these texts. And then also, and this is really important too, that the texts aren't actually as sexist and misogynist as we think. So realizing that as well, not apologizing for the text, but just recognizing the complexity when it comes to women and gender, it gives us a point of comparison with other cultures. Like, people are looking a lot at Syriac Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and kind of looking at how sexuality or gender issues play out similarly or differently. So it's. It helps with comparative work. And then also just seeing that gender is not just our concern, it was the rabbi's concern too. So it allows us to see this concern in rabbinic literature. And now I would just like, translate everything I just said to, like animals and species in that it allows us to see how much material there is about animals that people have kind of bypassed. It allows us to maybe look at these texts, like, from an animal's perspective a little bit more. What was life like for animals? And I think it just gives us a more holistic picture and that there is a certain status of animals that's not just normal or assumes, but that's being actively set up in these texts, that the texts are actually not as anthropocentric and species as you might imagine. I think that's often the kind of assumption as a starting point, but they're actually pretty complicated. We can also compare the way the rabbis think about animals and live with animals to the way other groups did at the same time in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Persia. And then finally, species and human animal difference is something the rabbis cared about. So it's tapping us into a concern that's not just a contemporary concern that we're imposing on rabbinic literature, but it is something that they were processing, too.
- [65:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Okay. Always ask question, what are you working on next?
- [65:36]
B
Yeah, so I've got a few things, some smaller, some bigger. The thing immediately up next is a roundtable that's going to be published in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion that's going to recap a session we had at the SBL devoted to this really wonderful Bible scholar, Sebastian Dohan, who is in Montreal. And he wrote a book called Reading the Bible in a Time of Environmental Crisis. And a number of us kind of had a lot of different thoughts in response to his book. So they're starting a new genre in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion of a kind of, like, review roundtable sort of thing. So we're doing that in about a month. I'm going to be writing a chapter on halacha for the Oxford Handbook of Rabbinic Literature. So that'll be really fun for me. Like, not about it. I'm sure I'll sneak animals in somehow, but just to, like, sort of think more broadly about how to articulate the project of halacha and the way they define it for the rabbis. Okay, so then also totally unrelated to animals, a project I've been wanting to do for a while is I want to ask the question, is the Talmud fat phobic, like, kind of in the age of ozempic, thinking about eating disorders? There's Boyaran. Daniel Boyaran was one of the pioneers of cultural study of the Talmud, and he has a lot of work on something he calls fat rabbis. There's a story about these, like, obese rabbis. And I've always thought I wanted to return to that material and think about it with, like, more of a critical edge about fat and fat bodies and just explore a little bit more. What are the different ways the Talmud imagines skinny bodies, fat bodies? What are the different associations with fat? And then so, yeah, maybe animal. I bet animals will somehow come up there too. But finally, I also, like, this is more of a long, long range project. I'd like to do a more general project on animals in Jews and Jewish culture, Jewish history, like writ large, kind of like a keywords in Jewish studies kind of work where it looks at animals in different contexts and where I kind of move outside of rabbinics and because there's so many different things happening in Jewish studies these days. I was just in a session at the AJS on animals and Kabbalah. There's a lot of work on animals in modern Hebrew literature, modern Germanophone, Jewish literature. So Hasidi, Ashkenaz, like medieval Pietists. So to try to bring some a ton in the Bible. So to try to bring some of this together and synthesize it for someone who wants kind of not a single statement on animals in Judaism, but something that's like a more comprehensive collection. So that's the plan.
- [68:49]
A
Oh, those all sound so great. Yeah. When they're out, I hope you come back on and we can talk about it.
- [68:54]
B
I love that.
- [68:55]
A
All right. Thank you so much for talking.
- [68:58]
B
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- [69:35]
A
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