Moses: Eating Meat is Lust
As the Israelites are readying themselves for their forthcoming entry into the promised land, Moses, as we see in this weekly portion of Torah, Reh-eh, envisions ordinary farmstead meat consumption in the land, apart from the elective sacrificial priestly protocol that availed meat to the participants.
Yet, he associates repeatedly such mundane eating with “an obsessive desire” – (it could be also rendered as “craving” or “lust”) – rather than viewing it as an essential or normative human need. This word Ta’avah (or ‘Avat) that Moses invokes in conjunction with meat eating (Deut 12: 15, 20-21) has profound negative associations.
We first meet it in “the garden” when the woman observing the forbidden tree found it ‘’to be desired by the eyes” (Gen 3:6); God warned the Israelites not to go about after “your own eyes” (Num 15:39). And when the Israelites demanded meat from Moses while traversing the Sinai wilderness, God’s anger was evident.
Though providing them quail for meat “the angst of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord smote the people with a very great plague. And that place was called Kibrot hataavah [the graves of the craving], because there they buried the people that lusted [for meat]” (Num. 11: 33-34).
No wonder why Rabbi Elazar ha-Kappar bound together ”Envy, lust, and [excessive] ambition” as the three vices that “shorten a person’s life” (Pirkey Avot 4:21). It is rather clear that Moses veritably associated meat eating with one’s lust – a definite negative attribute.
Thus, as I write in my new book: Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible, “the medieval commentator Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (thirteenth–fourteenth century CE), known as Baal HaTurim, ignores the common rules of Torah punctuation and reads Moses’ restrictive rules on consuming (secularly slaughtered) meat outside the sacrificial system, as a call to stay away from eating meat altogether”. Accordingly, when any of the Israelites says: “ ‘Let me eat meat,’ which elicits Moses’ comments: ‘for your soul craves to eat meat, whenever your appetite’s craving may be, you shall eat meat, [yet, let it be] far away from you.”
While Moses’ actual words refer to the great distance between the meat craver’s domicile to ‘the place’ where the meat of sacrifices would be available, the creative commentator Baal HaTurim “coerced the text to express his own frowning on meat in general by ascribing the distance not to the cultic altar, but rather to the eating of mundane meat per se (Deut 12: 20–21).”
All in all, once we get into the fine print of the Torah, beyond its sanctioning of eating meat and its attendant taming protocol (as in Lev 11 and Deut 14), it is quite possible to notice the overarching sense that (the licit) slaughtering of animals for food is flawed in principle, if not in practice. “The Torah tries to curb and minimize the consumption of meat by allowing livestock meat to be consumed as rarely (or as often) as an average Israelite hunter would indulge in eating game meat: ‘And you may eat in your cities according to your full heart’s desire, just as the gazelle and the deer are eaten, so too may you eat [farmstead meat] (12:20–22).
Hence, even as the Israelite was permitted to burn the midnight oil and hunt on occasion ‘deer, gazelle, and roebuck, wild-goat, ibex, antelope, and mountain sheep’ (14:5), the Torah wants him to match the rate of his mundane livestock meat eating with his infrequent consumption of such game. For indeed, harvesting venison for Israelite hunters was not an everyday occurrence.”
When you set the Torah’s ambivalent view of secular slaughter alongside its two major restrictions on meat consumption—the ban on blood (vv. 16, 23), which also required hunters to keep game alive until its blood could be drained and covered with earth, and the prohibition against serving meat and dairy together (14:21)—the conclusion becomes unmistakable: the Torah treats meat eating as an expression of human lust.