what does Kosher mean? how come jewish people cant eat chocolate chip cookies? or hug other woman?

Question

i watched " Hogan knows best" and there was an episode where they went around to the new neighbors and offered them chocolate cookies..and there neighbors said they coulndt eat them because there werent Kosher? why? i dont know any jews so i dont know who to ask so i dont sound dumb. thanks

Answer 1

i dont know either?

Answer 2

Kosher Chocolate Chip Cookies

Answer 3

You don't sound 'dumb' at all. There's no such thing as a dumb question, how else do we learn, if not by asking? :)

Jews don't eat certain foods; pork, seafood, and other types of meat that have not been killed humanely.

Some Jews are very religious and so everything they eat has to be kosher, which I guess is why on the programme you mention the chocolate cookies were turned down.

I am Jewish and I would have happily munched my way through the bag of cookies, though!

Muslims have similar rules; they prefer to eat 'halal' meat which is quite similar to kosher meat. Kosher meat is that which has definitely not come from a diseased animal. It has to be killed with as little pain as possible, also.

As to why some Jewish people don't hug; again, some of the more religious Jews don't engage in physical contact with the opposite sex, even their own partners at certain times (when the woman is menstruating). Again, you can see this echoed in Islam; Muslim women are supposed to lower their eyes and not stare straight at men, I think.... If I'm wrong, someone please correct me on this last point :)

Hope this helps explain things; if not, do ask more questions!

NOOR ALA NOOR - many thanks for the correction :)

Answer 4

There are symbols on kosher products that show if it is kosher or not. The most common is a circle with a U in it, although there are many others

Without that symbol, there is no guarantee that there isn't pork in the preparation. There are very specific rules on preparing kosher food and different levels people follow these rules.

Some Jews won't hug a woman other than their wife because of the possibility of it going further. It's not a commandment. Just a precaution.

Answer 5

I don't know about Muslims, but the cookies weren't prepared in a kosher kitchen. We had some friends who kept kosher, and for Thanksgiving one year, they came to our house. We cooked everything in aluminum foil pans and I bought a new pot to cook some broccoli. We used paper plates and plastic utensils because my kitchen isn't kosher. They don't use the same plates or pots and pans for meat and milk items, and I do. Unless there's lard and milk in the cookies, the cookies themselves wouldn't have been a problem.

Answer 6

Good question. "Kosher" is a Hebrew word meaning "fit," as in "fit for consumption". (In English, "kosher" has also come to mean "acceptable" or "okay" in referring to things other than food.) Something that is not kosher is "treyf" (literally "torn," as in, a limb torn from a living animal - this would not be kosher) The rules of kosher and non-kosher food are called "kashrut" (say: cosh-root). Now, the laws of kashrut are found in the Hebrew Bible as well as in our oral tradition. For example, in the Bible, G-d tells the Jews that they have to slaughter their cattle in a particular way in order for it to be permissible to eat. But only the oral tradition elaborates on what this method is. So, some of the rules of kashrut...

Only the meat of certain animals may be eaten. Beef is okay, lamb is okay, pork is not. Most species of poultry are okay, predatory birds are not. The milk and eggs of kosher species are okay. Fish with fins and scales are kosher, but shellfish like lobster and crab are not. Blood is not kosher, so kosher meat must have the blood in it removed. And in the case of birds and cattle, there is a prescribed manner of slaughter, requiring a trained slaughterer (a "shochet" - that's with a gutteral "ch" like "Bach," not like "chair") with a perfectly-sharp razor blade.

There are lots of other rules, for example, we don't eat meat and dairy products together. After meat, the most widely-accepted custom is to wait six hours before eating dairy. One only need wait between dairy and meat if the dairy product is some sort of hard cheese, whose particles are more likely to cling to the inside of one's mouth.

This is barely the tip of the iceberg - all you really need to know is that "kosher" means that something is prepared in accordance with Judaism's dietary laws. If something isn't kosher, a Jew is not permitted to eat it. (Most Jews today do not keep kosher, and therefore eat whatever they like - but according to Jewish belief, all Jews are technically obligated to keep these laws, though there is no mechanism by which to enforce them... unless you count guilt.)

Now, as for the case with the chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are not necessarily treyf per se. I love chocolate chip cookies, and there is no ingredient that normally goes into them that is fundamentally non-kosher. However, in today's age, where everything is mass produced, and additives come from sources you wouldn't believe. (Example: Gatorade is treyf because the red variety is made using a dye made from crushed beatles! Whenever you see "carmine" color, or some word derrived from that, it's made from bugs!)

So, lots of non-kosher things can wind up in these manufactured foods. And one of the rules of kashrus is that any vessel or cooking device used in the preparation of kosher food must only be used for kosher food, and must be dedicated to either meat or dairy. (Food that is neither meat nor dairy is called "pareve," or neutral, and you can prepare it using meat or dairy vessels. Since a meat or dairy vessel can impart the quality of being "meat" or "dairy" to the food prepared in it, some people do keep a third set of pareve utensils.) Aaaaanyway, as a result of all this, of factories using the same equipment for kosher and non-kosher items, of colors, flavors, and other additives coming from a variety of obscure origins, many of them non-kosher, a company producing packaged foods needs to be certified kosher if it wishes to reach the kosher market, which consists of religous Jews, as well as conscious consumers who associate a kosher certification with quality (in general, the quality standards of a kosher certification group are higher than that of, for example, the FDA - a "non-dairy" food may still contain milk-derrived enzymes and may therefore not be pareve, so a vegan, for example, could trust a "pareve" certification more than a company's own insistence that the product is non-dairy).

In the case of the cookies, it may be that the cookies contained non-kosher ingredients, or were prepared with non-kosher utensils (for example, if the Hogans were offering home-baked cookies), or if they were pre-packaged, it might simply be that that particular brand of cookies lacked a kosher certification that would allow the neighbors to know that the cookies were kosher.

For an extensive list of reliable heksherim ("kosher symbols" - these appear on the packages of kosher-certified foods, often on the front, though sometimes near the ingredients label), see the following: http://www.kosherquest.org/index.asp?theaction=symbols

For more information on kashrut, and kosher certification, check out:

http://www.kosherquest.org/bookhtml/INTRODUCTION.htm
http://www.jewfaq.org/kashrut.htm
http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Kosher_Why.htm

If you have any other questions about Jewish customs and observances, feel free to consider me your friendly neighborhood Jew, and to ask me directly.

I hope you find the above information helpful.

Answer 7

You got some of it right, its the Muslim MEN who have to lower their gaze and not look at the women.