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Rabbis Sermon Rosh Hashonoh Day 2 - 5767 (2006)

Rosh Hashana Day 2 – Sermon

Yesterday, we dealt with a big issue in our community – the importance of Jewish education as a condition for our long term viability.

Today, however, I would like to use this opportunity to allow you to leave the Synagogue with greater awareness of an important issue for the Jewish community of Britain. It is something that you all take for granted when you shop in Menachems, Kosher Deli or wherever you but your Kosher meat. It is the issue of Shechita.

In the Book of Devarim, the Torah commands us that if we want to eat red or white meat from a kosher animal, we must slaughter it in a specific way. A trained individual called a Shochet must check that the slaughter knife or chalaf is absolutely smooth and then can slaughter the animal in the area of the neck. I will come a bit later to the more technical, physiological elements of the slaughter process.

Firstly, the very existence of a commandment to perform shechita pre-supposes that Judaism does not feel that Vegetarianism has any absolute value. All the supposed proofs that God would want us to be vegetarian are incredibly shaky – what we can however say is that on a voluntary basis, a person can become vegetarian and they are not necessarily going against Jewish law.

So Judaism does not have a problem with ending the life of an animal so that it can be consumed by humans. This is not at all unethical. In fact the Talmud at one point suggests that a person can only have joy through eating meat or drinking wine!

What I am interested in here is not the issue of killing animals for food – but rather how we actually do it. And there are two ideas behind the shechita Jewish method.

Firstly, it is based on another law that Jews cannot consume the blood of an animal. Since the greatest loss of blood will be from the neck area, this is therefore the best place to undertake the slaughter. A second reason, however is that we should not too much harm an animal. Yes, God has allowed us to slaughter an animal for its food. But that does not mean that we should cause it pain for no reason. In other words – and this is key – God is only permitting us to eat food, because there is a more humane way to actually slaughter the animal – and that way is shechita as outlined in Jewish law.

What Jewish scholars have been saying through history is that Shechita, the Jewish method of slaughter is humane.

However, in the modern era, the populations of Europe have not seen it that way at all.

A ban on kosher slaughter has existed in Switzerland since 1897. A recent attempt to repeal this law met with a wave of protest from animal rights and political groups calling shechita barbaric and calling on Jews to either become vegetarian or leave the country. In Norway and Sweden there are bans on kosher slaughter and in Holland a ban was instituted on older bulls whose skins would be thicker making the slaughter supposedly more difficult.

In English Law since 1990 it has been clear that an animal should be stunned in an appropriate way before it is actually slaughtered. It was deemed that the stunning process would render the animal unconscious and so not able to feel the pain of the slaughter itself. There are three methods in use in Britain:

§         Captive bolt – this is the shot of a bolt to the brain of the animal which is then retrieved and reused for the next animal

§         Electric shock to the brain

§         Gassing an animal by CO2

 Shechita was accepted as an exemption to this rule – but it is important to note that shechita has still not been accepted as a humane way of slaughtering an animal. This has left it open to campaigns by animal welfare groups –and a whole list have been strong in opposition to Jewish slaughter: RSPCA, The Humane Slaughter Association, Compassion in World Farming, Animal Aid, The Vegan Society, Vegetarians International and more. The most difficult opponent of shechita has been a body called FAWC – Farm Animal Welfare Council. They are a non-governmental body that has reported to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs or DEFRA, on many occasions. They are quite adamantly against any form of slaughter that does not incorporate stunning.

In 2003, FAWC put together a series of findings on animal welfare and the slaughter of animals and presented them to the government. Their statements presented the Jewish community with three problems.

Firstly, they opined that slaughter without pre-stunning is unacceptable. IN Jewish law, if any injury at all happens to an animal before the slaughter, this renders it unfit for slaughter and therefore unfit to become kosher meat. Shechita and pre-stunning simply cannot go together.

Secondly, FAWC claimed that if the exemption to shechita would not be repealed, then animals slaughtered by this Jewish method should undergo a stun after the cut of the slaughterer has been made. The problem with this suggestion was that it contained an admission that shechita was not in fact a humane method and was justified only on the basis of religious freedom of expression. If shechita is not humane, stun the animal after to put it out of its misery.

Thirdly, according to Jewish law, the shochet is required to check that his incision has severed the appropriate organs and vessels. This is also an integral part of the shechita process. FAWC completely misunderstood this procedure and claimed that when an animal was not stunned, nothing could be inserted into the cut.

What happened next shocked the British Jewish establishment. In 2004, the government published a draft response to the FAWC report, claiming that:
 “on balance, animals slaughtered without pre-stunning are likely to experience very significant pain and distress”

This was a warning light to the Jewish community to set up a campaign network supporting shechita and rebutting the FAWC statements. Thus Shechita UK was set up as a central campaigning body that would lobby parliament to garner support for shechita.

Shechita UK gathered together the evidence that the Jewish slaughter was in fact humane. Let us look for a minute at some facts:

The rapid and uninterrupted cut made by the shochet immediately cuts the trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries and jugular veins. As a result of this, blood flow to the brain is seriously slowed and the blood pressure in the brain collapses resulting in a loss of consciousness. This loss of consciousness is lost 2 seconds after the cut is made. Claims were made that there were still other supplies of blood to the head, which would give the possibility for some limited sensation. This was rebutted as in vertebrate animals, the direction of blood flow would be away from the brain in this situation. In other words, shechita immediately starves the brain of blood causing irreversible death to the animal. What this effectively means – and this is a critical point – is that the act of shechita includes within it a stun of the animal. It is stunning and slaughtering all in one and so does not need a pre-stun to be administered. What is more, the sharpness of the knife and the smoothness of the incision will minimise the pain felt by the animal on the cut itself.

FAWC themselves ignored much of the evidence that the Jewish community laid at its door, and continued preaching that stunning an animal is the only option. In fact Shechita UK pointed out grave problems with the stunning procedure.

Firstly there are 2.4 million mis-stunned animals each year that need to be re-stunned and then cause great suffering to the animal. Furthermore, if the stun bolt is reused to stun many animals, then there is a constant threat of spread of BSE or Mad Cows Disease. None of these problems exist with shechita.

Thankfully, when the government came out with its final response, it did not accept that animals need to be stunned. But it is not all home and dry. The government accepted that it would be a good idea to give an animal that had not been stunned before slaughter, a stun afterwards. While not agreeing to make this compulsory, the government had still taken on some of the logic that shechita was not humane. Furthermore, the government suggested that all meat from a cow slaughtered by shechita that is sold on the opened market – should be labelled as such. This would be disastrous for the kosher meat sector. It would potentially send the prices of kosher red meat even higher.

The bottom line is this – shechita is presently safe because the government respects the right of minorities to freely exist in their own ways. But it is not clearly perceived as a humane method of slaughter.

Here is an area that we need to be clear ourselves what shechita is, what purpose it serves and why it is in fact humane. We need to be confident in public about discussing such an issue. The battle is not won – the Farm and Animal Welfare Council are now preparing a new set of proposals regarding white meat slaughter which will be soon presented to the government and contain similar arguments against shechita.

We should never forget that one of the first anti-Semitic measures of Adolf Hitler was to ban shechita. In fact when Germany occupied Poland, Goebbels commissioned a documentary called ‘The Eternal Jew’ that would explain to the Aryan Poles the nature of the Jews that lived amongst them. At the end of this ant-Semitic propaganda video there was a scene of the slaughter of a cow and a sheep depicting the Jews around the dying animals as barbarous and blood thirsty.

We need to explain to people that nothing can be further from the truth and that any attempts to depict shechita as cruel and barbarous are based on ant-Semitic intent. Let us use shechita as a touchstone for the society around us that can tell us whether we should fear increasing anti-Semitism. Let us hope this Rosh Hashana, that our fears are unfounded.