This week’s parsha ends with the laws of kashrut:
יג ואת אלה תשקצו מן העוף לא יאכלו שקץ הם; את הנשר ואת הפרס ואת העזניה׃…יח ואת התנשמת ואת הקאת ואת הרחם׃
Rashi (based on the gemara) identifies the תנשמת:
תנשמת: היא קלב״א ש״וריץ [chauve-souris, bat], ודומה לעכבר הפורחת בלילה.
The problem here is that תנשמת is described as מן העוף. Bats aren’t birds!
Psychiatrist Scott Alexander has an important article titled, The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories, in which he mentions the bat question but focuses on the similar whale question: whales are not kosher, but because of the rules for fish, not the rules for animals. The problem is that they lack scales, not that they lack hooves.
“Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish…
Suppose you travel back in time to ancient Israel and try to explain to King Solomon that whales are a kind of mammal and not a kind of fish.
Your translator isn’t very good, so you pause to explain “fish” and “mammal” to Solomon. You tell him that fish is “the sort of thing herring, bass, and salmon are” and mammal is “the sort of thing cows, sheep, and pigs are”. Solomon tells you that your word “fish” is Hebrew dag and your word “mammal” is Hebrew behemah.
So you try again and say that a whale is a behemah, not a dag. Solomon laughs at you and says you’re an idiot.
You explain that you’re not an idiot, that in fact all kinds of animals have things called genes, and the genes of a whale are much closer to those of the other behemah than those of the dag.
Solomon says he’s never heard of these gene things before, and that maybe genetics is involved in your weird foreign words “fish” and “mammal”, but dag are just finned creatures that swim in the sea, and behemah are just legged creatures that walk on the Earth.
You try to explain that no, Solomon is wrong, dag are actually defined not by their swimming-in-sea-with-fins-ness, but by their genes.
Solomon says you didn’t even know the word dag ten minutes ago, and now suddenly you think you know what it means better than he does, who has been using it his entire life? Who died and made you an expert on Biblical Hebrew?
You try to explain that whales actually have tiny little hairs, too small to even see, just as cows and sheep and pigs have hair.
Solomon says…who…cares whether whales have tiny little hairs or not. In fact, the only thing Solomon cares about is whether responsibilities for his kingdom’s production of blubber and whale oil should go under his Ministry of Dag or Ministry of Behemah. The Ministry of Dag is based on the coast and has a lot of people who work on ships. The Ministry of Behemah has a strong presence inland and lots of of people who hunt on horseback. So please (he continues) keep going about how whales have little tiny hairs.
It’s easy to see that Solomon has a point, and that if he wants to define behemah as four-legged-land-dwellers that’s his right, and no better or worse than your definition of “creatures in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree”. Indeed, it might even be that if you spent ten years teaching Solomon all about the theory of genetics and evolution (which would be hilarious—think how annoyed the creationists would get) he might still say “That’s very interesting, and I can see why we need a word to describe creatures closely related along the phylogenetic tree, but make up your own word, because behemah already means ‘four-legged-land-dweller’.”
Our words represent categories, but lots of things don’t fall into simply into the categories that we want to use, and we tend to get into violent arguments about matters that are just definitions of words.
Fish and mammals differ on a lot of axes. Fish generally live in the water, breathe through gills, have tails and fins, possess a certain hydrodynamic shape, lay eggs, and are in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree. Mammals generally live on land, breathe through lungs, have legs, give live birth, and are in another part of the phylogenetic tree. Most fish conform to all of the fish desiderata, and most mammals conform to all of the mammal desiderata, so there’s no question of how to categorize them. Occasionally you get something weird (a platypus, a lungfish, or a whale) and it’s a judgment call which you have to decide by fiat. In our case, that fiat is “use genetics and ignore all other characteristics” but some other language, culture, or scientific community might make a different fiat, and then the borders between their categories would look a little bit different.
There is a philosophical point here, that goes back to the Greeks.
The theory of Forms…is a philosophical theory of metaphysics developed by the Classical Greek philosopher Plato. The theory suggests that the physical world is not as real or true as “Forms”. According to this theory, Forms…are the non-physical, timeless, absolute, and unchangeable essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations.
Plato was wrong—the “essenses” of things are only models, simplifications of the infinite complexity of the universe. If your model of reality is that your model is Truth with a capital T, you will find that the universe keeps getting things wrong.
A map is not the territory.
All models are wrong but some are useful.
Why is that relevant?
Plato’s Forms are the models we create in our minds to make sense of the observable universe. Rav Soloveitchik’s philosophy (mostly expressed in The Halakhic Mind) was that the Torah defines its own set of models, and the purpose of learning halacha was train our minds to think that way.
To this end [of creating a Jewish philosophy] there is only a single source from which a Jewish philosophical Weltanschauung could emerge; the objective order—the Halakhah. In passing onward from the Halakhah and other objective constructs to a limitless subjective flux, we might possibly penetrate the basic structures of our religious consciousness. We might also evolve cognitive tendencies and aspects to our world interpretation and gradually grasp the mysteries of the religious halakhic act…A new light could be shed on our apprehension of reality…
Out of the sources of Halakha, a new world view awaits formulation.
A halakhic person approaches the world with halakhic laws, a priori, to determine how to structure his reality. Imagine a man as steeped in the Halakhah as R. Soloveitchik, standing in the wilderness. This halakhic man looks around. All sorts of sensory input enter his eyes, ears, and nose. His halakhic mind takes this all in. As he does so, he makes the groupings and distinctions his mind knows how to make: halakhic groupings and distinctions. He first notices that there is no trace of an artificially constructed boundary. So he mentally “creates” a reshut harabbim…out of the landscape he sees. He then notices water collected in the expanse before him. It is of a certain size and it also seems to exhibit no trace of having been artificially amassed. He assesses its volume. He correlates the information the Halakhah gives him about bodies of water, with the water he sees. There is enough water! Lo, this act of assessment creates a mikveh…They may be kosher fruits (as opposed to orlah) not because there are objectively kosher fruits in nature, but because they are material objects that have been cognized by someone who can impose halakhic structure upon them.
In other words, the Torah wants us to think about animals, not in terms of phylogeny, parturition, or poikilothermy, but in terms of their environment. There are land animals, sky animals, and water animals.
Why? We don’t know the טעמי המצוות, but Rav Elchanan Samet points out a linguistic distinction:
ב דברו אל בני ישראל לאמר; זאת החיה אשר תאכלו מכל הבהמה אשר על הארץ׃ ג כל מפרסת פרסה ושסעת שסע פרסת מעלת גרה בבהמה אתה תאכלו׃ ד אך את זה לא תאכלו ממעלי הגרה וממפרסי הפרסה; את הגמל כי מעלה גרה הוא ופרסה איננו מפריס טמא הוא לכם׃ ה ואת השפן כי מעלה גרה הוא ופרסה לא יפריס; טמא הוא לכם׃ ו ואת הארנבת כי מעלת גרה הוא ופרסה לא הפריסה; טמאה הוא לכם׃ ז ואת החזיר כי מפריס פרסה הוא ושסע שסע פרסה והוא גרה לא יגר; טמא הוא לכם׃ ח מבשרם לא תאכלו ובנבלתם לא תגעו; טמאים הם לכם׃…
כו לכל הבהמה אשר הוא מפרסת פרסה ושסע איננה שסעת וגרה איננה מעלה טמאים הם לכם; כל הנגע בהם יטמא׃ כז וכל הולך על כפיו בכל החיה ההלכת על ארבע טמאים הם לכם; כל הנגע בנבלתם יטמא עד הערב׃ כח והנשא את נבלתם יכבס בגדיו וטמא עד הערב; טמאים המה לכם׃…
לט וכי ימות מן הבהמה אשר היא לכם לאכלה הנגע בנבלתה יטמא עד הערב׃ מ והאכל מנבלתה יכבס בגדיו וטמא עד הערב; והנשא את נבלתה יכבס בגדיו וטמא עד הערב׃
ט את זה תאכלו מכל אשר במים; כל אשר לו סנפיר וקשקשת במים בימים ובנחלים אתם תאכלו׃ י וכל אשר אין לו סנפיר וקשקשת בימים ובנחלים מכל שרץ המים ומכל נפש החיה אשר במים שקץ הם לכם׃ יא ושקץ יהיו לכם; מבשרם לא תאכלו ואת נבלתם תשקצו׃ יב כל אשר אין לו סנפיר וקשקשת במים שקץ הוא לכם׃
יג ואת אלה תשקצו מן העוף לא יאכלו שקץ הם; את הנשר ואת הפרס ואת העזניה׃…כ כל שרץ העוף ההלך על ארבע שקץ הוא לכם׃…כג וכל שרץ העוף אשר לו ארבע רגלים שקץ הוא לכם׃
The laws of kashrut are presented in two places in the Torah. One is here; the other is in פרשת ראה. The laws here are not so much to teach us about what we may or may not eat, but to teach us the laws of טומאה and טהרה (see פרשת תזריע־מצורע תשע״ח).
ב או נפש אשר תגע בכל דבר טמא או בנבלת חיה טמאה או בנבלת בהמה טמאה או בנבלת שרץ טמא; ונעלם ממנו והוא טמא ואשם׃ ג או כי יגע בטמאת אדם לכל טמאתו אשר יטמא בה; ונעלם ממנו והוא ידע ואשם׃
או נפש אשר תגע וגו׳: ולאחר הטמאה הזו יאכל קדשים או יכנס למקדש.
There are lots of things that we do not eat. But there are two different reasons for not eating them: שרץ and טמא. I don’t have a reason why we have a concept of שרץ but טומאה only applies to land animals (and not bugs; ואכמ״ל). That is because טומאה is fundamentally a mental concept, memento mori, a reminder of death. And it is the animals that live like us that most remind us of ourselves. That reminder is incompatible with free-willed עבודת ה׳.
But only the death of those creatures who live near and among human beings and whom man deems important can transmit tum’a. Creatures whose lives are considered of “lesser” value or who reside far away from human residence or activity (such as fish and birds), do not generate impurity upon their demise. The death of the human being generates the most severe form of tum’a; a person’s death is the strongest source of ritual impurity. Next come the large, land-dwelling mammals, with whom man shares the earth.
This is the famous perspective of Rav Hirsch:
[Humanity’s moral responsibility] would be endangered by…the fact that man must submit to death and to the superficial limitations which the forces of nature exert on everything including human beings which a dead human body lying before one’s eyes, demonstrate so radically. If the whole human being has succumbed to death…then altogether nowhere is there place for the moral “thou shalt” next to the physical “thou must”.
These forms of tumah [of our parsha] function through their mental associations—and only in the context of entering the Mikdosh and functioning within the requirements of its offerings. The Torah in effect warns that contact with various dead animals sets us thinking in a manner that is inconsistent with the essential message of the Mikdosh—striving to achieve the highest spiritual plane available to Man. This kind of tumah is decidedly impermanent. Because it is symbolic, we feel its impact only when it is immediately associated with the Mikdosh…
In general, the laws of contact-tumah keep us away from the most insidious message of Death. When we witness death, we are likely on some level to absorb the idea that we are nothing but material, programmed to live and dies by random laws of Nature. If we are nothing but dross of an unseeing universe, then we enjoy no moral freedom to make choices and assume responsibility for our inner lives and stature. Contact-tumah applies to the large animals (mammals) that we most resemble…that live in closest proximity to Man.
Bats are not birds. But a תנשמת is an עוף. And that reflects a profoundly different way of looking at the world around us.