Journal: Trying Kashrut

The new apartment is beautiful. As Yishai says, we're not quite sure what we're going to do with a space that large, but we have ideas.Yishai arrived last night, and turns out to be as cool and fascinating as he seemed in email. We spent much of today first (and again now) at Phoenix Coffee catching up on email, posting, and the like, then went grocery shopping. He's pretty much a loyal Trader Joe's shopper. I got a few things there, but we then went over to Giant Eagle, a local chain, where I got the rest of my groceries.After years of not keeping kosher, I'm trying to do so again. It's proving a challenge. Looking for an appropriate symbol on all the packaged foods really slows shopping down, but I found most of what I was looking for. Fortunately, this Giant Eagle had a much larger kosher section than and of the stores in my part of Berkeley had.Part of sharing the home involves coordinating practice with Yishai on things such as shabbat and kashrut. When I asked him how he wanted to handle kashrut, he said that I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. I told him that I was just getting back into keeping kosher after a long time away, and wanted to go with his practice as a template. So we discussed a few areas on which I was unclear, such as how to consider the kashrut of cheese.This got into a discussion of some of the ideas that my sister had raised in her post and an ensuing email conversation about Orthodoxy and the rigidity of some of the instituionalized religious hegemonies. Kashrut is one of the areas where there is a lot of debate. The current scandals concerning AgriProcessors bring up some of the areas where the letter of the law may be being followed, but important areas involving the avoidance of cruelty to animals and humane labor processors were being ignored. One interesting thing that has risen is the idea of the hechsher tzedek, a sort of certification based on aspects other than the strict laws of kashrut. There are good questions raised about whether this should be labeled "kashrut," on which I don't yet have opinions.Whoops, Phoenix is about to close. More later.