Part 18 (1/2)
Preservation of personal health.
Seeking peace.
Because of these teachings, it is no coincidence that there have been three vegetarian chief rabbis in 25 years of the state of Israel's existence, as well as Rabbi Kook of the pre-Israel era. Four percent of the population in Israel is vegetarian, which, outside of India with 83% of its 680 million people who are vegetarian, is the largest percentage of vegetarians in the world. Prominent Jewish thinkers who are or were vegetarian include: Martin Buber, one of the greatest Existential philosophers; Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 n.o.bel Prize for Literature; Shmuel Yoseph Agnon, n.o.bel Prize recipient; Rabbi David Rosen, the former Chief Rabbi of Ireland; and Sher Yashuv Cohen, the Chief Rabbi of Haifa.
In the Talmud, Rabbi Yishmael said, From the day that the holy Temple was destroyed it would have been right to have imposed upon ourselves the law prohibiting the eating of flesh. But the rabbis have laid down a wise and logical ruling that the authorities must not impose any decree unless the majority of the members of the community are able to abide by it. Otherwise the law and those who administer it get into disrepute.
Perhaps this is the crux of the issue for why meat-eating has been allowed by many of the major religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and even Buddhism. Out of compa.s.sion for the limitations of their followers, the essential compa.s.sion for all life found in all religions needed to wait until people were ready I wonder if we have been waiting too long.
Compa.s.sion and Noncruelty to Animals and World Peace.
COMPa.s.sION TOWARD AND NONCRUELTY TO ANIMALS are directly linked morally and spiritually to world peace. Killing an animal for food is still a violent act. There is no compa.s.sion in it for the animal. There is also a connection between justifying slaughtering animals for food or profit and taking the next step in the violent process, which is the killing of one's fellow human beings for some sort of ”good” reason.
George Bernard Shaw once said in his poem, Song of Peace: Like carrion crows, we live and feed on meat.
Regardless of the suffering and pain
We cause by doing so. If thus we treat
defenseless animals for sport or gain,
How can we hope to attain the
Peace we say we are so anxious for?
We pray for it, o'er hecatombs of slain,
To G.o.d, while outraging the moral law,
Thus cruelty begets its offspring-War.
Today, the cruelty extends beyond the ma.s.s killing of animals to a systematic, antilife, antihumane treatment of animals from the time they are born until they are harvested as if they were a cash crop. They are systematically deprived of their natural habitat and life cycle for the expediency of the meat industry Individual killing of animals for food is the first step of cruelty (hunting, fis.h.i.+ng). The profit-motivated industrialization of nature's living animals, as if they are inanimate and without any rights, feelings, or soul, is an example of the next step of the expansion of cruelty.
People in the US and Canada consume over 200 pounds of animal flesh per person a year. In one year, four billion cattle, calves, sheep, hogs, chicken, ducks, and turkeys are slaughtered. In a lifetime, a Canadian or US meat-eater eats: 11 cattle, one calf, three lambs and sheep, 23 hogs, 45 turkeys, 1,100 chickens, and 826 pounds offish. The Hebrew word for meat is ”basar.” As explained by the Talmudists, it is composed of the letters ”bet” (shame), ”sin” (corruption), and ”resh” (worms).
The famous Talmudic jurist and Rabbi, Moshe ben Nachman, who lived in the eleventh century, said about compa.s.sion for animals: ...for cruelty expands in a mans soul, as is well-known with respect to cattle slaughters.
This is a prophetic comment in that a current struggle exists around the destruction of the tropical rain forests in which the cattle farmers and other forces who want to level the forests have been involved indirectly and directly in shooting people who oppose them. The most infamous of these money-, flesh-, and l.u.s.t-a.s.sociated killings was the a.s.sa.s.sination by cattle ranchers in Brazil of Chico Mendes, a leading environmentalist working to prevent the destruction of the Amazon rain forests. This killing of Chico Mendes forms a direct link between first killing animals for personal food, to raising animals to be killed for profit, to the next level of cruelty and violence which ”expands in a man's soul,” the killing of humans to preserve profit from killing animals.
The connection between the violence of killing animals for food and the violence of killing humans has been established by philosophers and religious teachers for hundreds of years. Quaker leader Thomas Tyron (1634-1703) points out that the violence of killing animals for food stemmed from the same source of ”wrath” as the killing of humans. Maimonides felt that the Torah's emphasis on compa.s.sion was to protect us from acquiring the moral habits of cruelty. The violence of killing animals for our dinner table comes from the same rationale of justifiable violence that leads humans to kill humans. Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and philosopher, once said: As long as men ma.s.sacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
One of the most elegant yet simple statements about the connection between the killing of animals and human violence and pain comes from the enlightened monk, Swami Prakasananda Saraswati. In 1987 he gave this answer to the question of the connection between vegetarianism and peace: Every animal that is slaughtered for human consumption brings the pain of its death into your body. Think about it. The animal is killed with violence. That violence causes the animal to experience very intense pain as it dies. That pain remains in the meat even after you prepare and cook it. When you eat that meat, then you eat pain. That pain becomes lodged in your body, heart, and mind. That violence and pain which you consume will eat you also. It consumes you so that you must experience the same pain in your own life also.
The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. (Psalms 24:1) This is the Torah teaching: that we are to help, as G.o.d's co-workers, preserve and improve the world. It is essential to the teaching of Tikkun, in which the Torah instructs that it is part of one's role in life to help heal the substance and soul of the planet. This means that we are to protect the resources of the Earth as well as the animal and human inhabitants.
A flesh-centered diet that many follow results in just the opposite. For example, according to John Robbins' book, Diet for A New America, livestock use approximately 50% of all the water in the US. Livestock produce twenty times the excrement as the human population of the US. This increases the nitrate/nitrite water pollution. Extensive water use for livestock is pus.h.i.+ng us closer to a clean water shortage. It requires 60-100 times more water to produce a pound of beef than a pound of wheat. Robbins estimates that if everyone were vegetarian, there would be no need for irrigation systems in the US. Livestock require excessive water usage because the land needed to grow grain for livestock takes up about 80% of the grain produced, and because water is needed for the animals. When one considers the water needed for this extra grain and for the care of the livestock, a flesh-food diet creates a need for 4,500 gallons per day per meat-eater as compared to 300 gallons per day for a vegan. A vegan saves approximately 1,500,000 gallons per year as compared to a flesh- and dairy-eater. Much of this information is found in a greatly expanded form in Diet for A New America.
The destruction of the rain forests for grazing land and the resultant greenhouse effect is another example of the deleterious effects of a flesh-centered diet on our ecological system. In Deuteronomy 20:19 it says, ”You must never destroy its trees ... you may eat of them, but you shall not cut them down.”
This statement in Deuteronomy is one of the bases of the Talmudic laws which prohibit willful destruction of natural resources or any sort of vandalism to the natural resources, even if it is by those who have a deed to the land. An article in Vegetarian Times estimates that rain forest destruction causes the extinction of 1000 species per year. For each fast-food, quarter-pound hamburger, 55 square feet of rain forest are destroyed. One hundred species become extinct for every two billion fast-food burgers sold. The effects of livestock land use in the US account for about 85% of the four million acres of topsoil lost per year. A pure vegetarian diet, on the other hand, makes less than five percent of the demand on the soil in this country.
The ratio of food productivity per acre of land from livestock versus vegetarian food reveals a tremendous disparity from the same amount of natural resources. For instance, one acre of land yields 20,000 pounds of potatoes versus 165 pounds of beef. An acre of grain gives five times more protein than beef. An acre of legumes gives ten times more and an acre of leafy greens produces twenty-five times more protein than one acre of beef. Grain for 100 cows will feed 2000 people. Neither land, water, atmosphere, nor animal populations are safe from the resource-intensive destruction that results from a meat-centered diet.
We simply cannot escape the fact that raising animals for meat and dairy has a disastrous effect on our ecological system. US livestock regularly eat enough grain and soy to feed the US population five times over. More than 80% of the grain grown in the US is to feed livestock. This includes 80% of corn and 95% of oats. The total world livestock regularly eat about twice the calories as the human world population receives. By cycling our plant protein through the beef, the conversion to beef protein is between one-tenth and one-twentieth of the plant protein yield. This is a 100% loss of complex carbohydrates and a 95% loss of calories when plant protein is cycled through livestock. This is a significant waste of protein, complex carbohydrates, and calorie resources when so many people in this world suffer from malnutrition. It is an ecological shame to realize that meat-eaters, according to Diet for A New America, use three and one-half acres per year to supply their meat and dairy consumption lifestyle, whereas vegans require one-quarter of an acre of land. In other words, approximately 14 vegans can live off the same land and water supply that it takes for one meat-eater. A nondairy and nonmeat diet saves one acre of trees per year because of how few resources the diet demands. On our planet, with ever-increasing shortages of land and water, this is a tremendously significant amount of resources wasted.
A vegetarian diet also helps to conserve the world's fuel energy and total raw material resources. Seventy-eight calories of fossil fuel are required for each calorie of protein from feedlot-produced beef. Grains and beans require approximately .6 to 3.9 calories of fossil fuel to produce each calorie of vegetarian food. About twenty times more fossil fuel energy is needed to produce one calorie of beef as compared to one calorie of vegetable protein. The energy required to produce food is about 16.5% of the total energy requirements of the US. The value of the raw materials consumed for livestock production is greater than the value of all the oil, gas, and coal produced in this country. Raw materials needed to support the livestock industry const.i.tute one-third of the value of all the raw materials consumed in this country. The Earth resources demanded by a flesh-centered diet are enormous as compared to those required by a vegetarian diet. A flesh-centered diet is a significant stress on the Earth's ecological balance. It is an unnecessary h.o.a.rding of resources.
Feeding the Hungry.
NEITHER HUMANS NOR ANIMALS are safe from the collective effects of a flesh-food diet. Approximately sixty million people starve to death per year on this planet. The reasons for this terrible state of affairs are a.s.sociated with many political, economic, and natural disasters, et cetera. However, the fact remains that a flesh-centered diet creates an overextended use of water, land, energy, and other resources. It is estimated by nutritionist Dr. Jean Meyer of Harvard that if meat-eaters ate just ten percent less flesh per year, the resources saved would be enough to feed all these sixty million who starve to death.
The number-one health problem in the world today is chronic malnutrition. The United Nations estimates that one-half the world's population suffers from malnutrition and 700-900 million people are seriously malnourished. Twenty-five percent of the world's children suffer from a lack of food. Forty-two thousand children die per day from malnutrition. That comes to 15 million per year or 30% of all the world's deaths per year. In the last ten years, more people died from malnutrition than from all the wars, revolutions, and murders of the last 150 years.
In the Jewish tradition, the Talmud teaches that providing sustenance to the hungry is as important as all the other commandments of the Torah combined.
To loose the chains of wickedness, to undo the bonds of oppression, and to let the oppressed go free.... Is it not to share thy bread with the hungry? (Isaiah 58:67) The Midrash-a highly respected compilation of commentaries by rabbis on the five books of the Torah-says that whenever we give food to the poor it is as if one is feeding G.o.d. The feeding of the hungry extends even to ones enemies.
If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat. If your enemy is thirsty, give him water to drink. (Proverbs 25:21) The ethic of feeding the hungry can be seen directly in Leviticus 19:910: And when you reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corner of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather the fallen fruit of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and the stranger.