Asalamu aleykum, i.e wishing peace to everyone lol.All religions begin with a noble,highly evolved spiritual being like Moses or Jesus or Mohammed saws who delivers a message from the Divine! Then the scholars get to work to operationalize and theorize about the religion and that’s where the problems begin! As an end result of this process, we find ourselves,in Islam, with burqas and extremists who find justification for killing innocent people;in Christianity with God depicted as an old man with a white beard or as a dead body on a cross or in Judaism wearing paiess(sidecurls) and being careful not to mix dairy with meat! It is the latter aberration that I wish to address here! It has actually been bugging me for decades lol and I decided to look into it this morning at Fajr time! It may seem somewhat banal relative to the two previous mentionned aberations but there is the same corrupting intellectual problem involved.It all comes from “mind-productions” -a very different entity from Revelation and inspiration!
1-So let’s take them one-by-one.Firstly , the issue of not mixing milk and meat.I always sensed there was something quirky and unnecessary about this rule. And that is usually where I start-my initial reaction.Here is the official version if you want to check it out!
https://www.thetorah.com/article/prohibition-of-meat-and-milk-its-origins-in-the-text?fbclid=IwAR3RRlnmwhiGO5_pevoYv-Ua4As5Jfnq9mD2uiZ3mU6Wcp_32gKdPGxF1tI
So we find in the Torah three times the phrase: ” Do not seethe(cook) a kid in its mother’s milk”.Unfortunately the rabbis and scholars who interpreted this did not have the benefit of certain Quranic teachings that came later.But Allah tells us in the Quran that He speaks to us in two ways-either literally (muhakamat) or metaphorically(mutashabihat).Ajib! So in this case, it seems very likely that this is a metaphor of some kind.Even if it were literal all it tells us is to not cook a child animal in its mother’s milk.This is a far cry from having an obsessive need to keep dairy and meat separate-to have two sets of dishes and two sets of electrical appliances in every Jewish kitchen! In fact if you take this statement literally you could cook the kid in the milk of another similar specied mother or in that of another species- like cooking a goat kid in cow’s milk.No problem.Then why can you not have cheese in your meat lasagna lol or milk in your coffee after a satisfying kosher steak lol.This all smacks of obsessionalism-a well-known Jewish characteristic!
On the level of metaphor there may be a few interesting possibilities.One of the things that came to mind was the famous Zidane incident in World Cup Soccer.The Italian player insulted the mother or sister of this Algerian French soccer player who proceeded to head-butt him and get kicked out of the game.So could this statement be a warning not to insult someone about their origins(their mother, their tribe,their nation) because it could cause them to seethe-to boil over.Or could this be a precursor of the psychoanalytic understandinfg of parental internalizations(soaked in the mother’s milk) that cause so much grief in this world?!If you have ever been married,you would know what I mean lol.Or then again we could say it would incite us as children to seek out other inputs beyond the nuclear family environment(the mother’s milk) in order to grow and develop.
The possibilities here are almost endless.However, one of the least likely of all is that God wanted us to have two sets of dishes and two sets of electrical appliances and above all not to put milk in our coffee after dinner lol
2-The wearing of paiess or peiot in Hebrew.That always seemed ugly and ridiculous! And I am convinced that anything that is ugly and unnatural cannot be from God!
Here is the official version:
Why Do Orthodox Jewish Men Have Sidecurls?
Again,this weird practice comes from a Biblical reference.Leveticus 19:27 says”Do not round the corners of your head”.So how do we get from “rounding the corners of your head” to paiess?Well,the first change is to have men with really short hair-not the custom of any of the Old Testament Prophets btw.So first you Westernize Jews as they have done with Muslims.Then you decide that below a certain level the hair is not to be cut.And voila,you have these odd paieseem! You will not find these odd curls in any of the pictures of Jesus or the Apostles all of whom were practising Jews! so it must be a modernist innovation.
Actually I suspect that this prohibition is the same one as we have in Islam-not to shave the sides of our head-because that is a pagan practice.In any case,this unnecessary oddity of grooming is only essential in the minds of its creators lol.I am totally convinced that this was not nor could have been ordained by God.
So there we are.All religions have a tendency to corrupt their original sources.We need to be vigilant at all times and go to the root of the matter-what is essential to our piety,rather than what is arbitrary.
Salaams,Ibrahim
