As per a bit of myself getting carried away about the kosher dietary laws in the comments to my last post (sorry, Mominem...I did go a bit berserk on the detail), I now feel the need to share one of my favorite stories concerning kashrut, a story that involves a little examination that happened in NYC a little before we moved back down south:

A glassful of cold New York City tap water not kosher? It may be true — and just in case, restaurants and bakeries operated under Orthodox Jewish law were advised Tuesday, June 1, (2004) to use filters that can ensure water purity.

The problem: tiny harmless creatures called copepods. The nearly microscopic organisms are crustaceans and therefore not considered kosher.

As stores in heavily Orthodox Brooklyn reported a run on water filters and rabbis considered whether additional measures were necessary, the Central Rabbinical Council issued its edict for businesses.

“We have given out a ruling that they should filter their water,” said the council’s Rabbi Yitzchok Glick. “We are still in the middle of deliberations about exactly the issues and the Jewish law.”

Under Jewish law, the eating of crustaceans — aquatic animals with skeletons outside their bodies, including shrimp, crabs and lobsters — is barred.

I personally don't keep strict kosher. About the only thing we don't do in our own home is cook pork or shellfish in our kitchen, or mix milk with meat (no cheeseburgers, no butter in meat recipes, that kind of thing), or buy food that doesn't have a hechsher on it. Maintaining completely different sets of dishes and pots and pans - indeed, even appliances, in some cases - to separate milk from meat isn't part of my food preparation and serving at home.

The devilment in the details of separating the kosher from the treif is what came to a head here, and it's one that had my husband giggling a little. From a Jewish blogger commenting on comments that she'd read concerning the dilemma the Orthodox in NYC were faced with:

Another commenter protested that the ruling was based on a misinterpreted definition: The claim being made was that the crustaceans were visible to the naked eye of anyone who’d been trained to see such things, but, said the commenter, if one had to be trained in order to see the crustaceans, then, by halachic/Jewish law definition, the crustaceans weren’t visible to the naked eye, and, therefore, did not render the water treif/non-kosher. Yet another commenter complained that, next thing you know, the rabbanim/rabbis will find something in the air that will make them declare that treif, too, after which we won’t be allowed to breath without face masks.

A good link found at the On The Fringe blog post examines this tendency for the orthodox to make their interpretations of Jewish law more stringent than they have ever been and comes to this truism about any and all religious life today:

A tireless quest for absolute accuracy, for "perfect fit"—faultless congruence between conception and performance—is the hallmark of contemporary religiosity. The search is dedicated and unremitting; yet it invariably falls short of success. For spiritual life is an attempt, as a great pianist once put it, to play music that is better than it can be played. Such an endeavor may finally become so heavy with strain that it can no longer take wing, or people may simply weary of repeated failure, no matter how inspired. The eager toil of one age usually appears futile to the next, and the performative aspiration, so widespread now, may soon give way to one of a wholly different kind, even accompanied by the derision that so often attends the discarding of an ideal. Yet this Sisyphean spirituality will never wholly disappear, for there will always be those who hear the written notes and who find in absolute fidelity the most sublime freedom.

For the record, my egalitarian Conservative rabbi in Queens said it's okay to drink the NYC water. I drank it anyhow because 1) it's good water and 2) running around and going berserk over filters for water just isn't my idea of observing halakhic precedent. We do indeed need to get to back to the meaning of why we do these things and get a better, more resonant answer for ourselves and for future generations than "because this is how our ancestors did it." At the very least, we as Jews can encourage an ongoing journey of spiritual discovery that resonates much larger than filtering microscopic crustaceans out of drinking water.

Oh, and mazel tov to LSU on their BCS champeenship win last night! The SEC totally, totally rules. Period.