Why Eat Kosher? Parshat Shemini - Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair

[Music] There aren't a lot of similarities between working in a sound recording studio and refueling jet aircraft. In a studio, you get a chance to meet a lot of very ordinary people whom fame has made their breakfast cereal the subject of serious media analysis. And in an airport, you get to meet a lot of large metal airplanes. They do have one thing in common, however. Working in both can cause you to lose your hearing. It's a slow process, but it's inevitable. The advantage of working in an airfield, however, is that you can wear sound excluders. In a studio, the band would be most insulted to find their producer working on their latest masterpiece with large yellow mufflers, much as their masterpiece may deserve mufflers, and the larger the better. Eventually, after many hours sitting in front of giant loudspeakers, listening to electric guitars with enough treble on them to part your hair at six feet, you'll start to lose the sensitivity of the high frequencies of your hearing. Then you start to lose the ones lower down and so on. The interesting thing, however, is that you don't notice that you can't hear those frequencies anymore. In a sense, that's the saddest kind of loss, a loss that you don't even know about. It's not true that what you don't know can't hurt you. Eating tray food is the spiritual equivalent of losing your hearing. It cuts you off from life's higher frequencies, the higher things in life. The Torah in this week's portion when talking about non-coosher food uses the word venit mason which means lest you become contaminated. The spelling of this word is unusual. It likes an alf and thus it can also be read as venam which means lest you become dulled. In our search for holiness and meaning in this world, one of our greatest assets and aids are the laws of kashwut. Kosher food is soul food. Food for the soul. Food that feeds our spirituality and gives us the ability to receive holiness. Spirituality is a delicate thing. It doesn't take much to jam the broadcast from upstairs. On the other hand, a little bit of holiness goes a long way. As the Torah teaches, you shall sanctify yourselves and you shall become holy. When we sanctify ourselves by controlling what goes in and comes out of our mouths, God will elevate us to become his holy nation.