This post is part of a weekly series on the Nishmablog presenting the questions to which he responded and the answers that he gave.
* * * * *
Question: I recently offered to help at the house of a close relative that was sitting shiva for her mother. Both non-kosher food trays and kosher food trays were being brought into the house. The people sitting shiva were not shomer kashrut. I felt uncomfortable with the situation where I didn’t want to serve the people sitting shiva from the non-kosher food trays, and I also didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable or embarrass them during their shiva period. Would it be permissible for me to serve them food if they requested food from the non-kosher food tray? Are there less stringencies if the food tray was dairy versus meat?
I guess in an ideal universe one might set the parameters before volunteering. Let's deal with it as it is. The 2nd question about dairy to me is tangential and so I will treat it separately.
The first query is a "toughie!”. "No good deed goes unpunished". Here is a well-meaning kosher person on the horns of a dilemma, to
A. help out the bereaved and to serve "treif" [Non-kosher]?
or to
B. NOT help out and to avoid serving treif?
The simple answer would be to do both - that is to
help out all one can and yet to serve no treif to fellow Jews. Note that
serving treif to Gentiles should not [typically] pose a halachic
problem.
This principle here is of course easier to describe than it is to manifest.
I'm guessing as a rabbi I would not be expected to handle treief. Were I not a rabbi - I might simply demur and say "let me just serve coffee and not handle the other food". Alternatively, I might try to avoid handling food entirely by claiming "I have a cold"
There is no Halachic way I know to serve treif to a fellow Jew - absent an acute health crisis. Serving a Non-Jew seems fine as far as I can tell
Regarding Dairy- there are many parameters and variables here. If we can reasonable presume that the food is Kosher, then we can probably assist fellow Jews in eating it. Nevertheless, I would avoid representing unsupervised food as being certified as Kosher. This came up in office in which bagels were bought from an unsupervised Bagel Shop. While several Observant Jews would eat the bagels, no one would represent them as having been Kosher Supervised. Rather
they were considered what they were, possibly Kosher depending upon the
nature of the baker and one's own personal standards.
Sources
Leviticus 19:14
No comments:
Post a Comment