Jun 5, 2026 · 56 min · 11 segments
We review the basic laws of kashrut, considering the concepts of hekhsher and hashgacha, and attempt to understand the contemporary excesses of the kashrut establishment, including the how and why of…
Adam Zagoria-MoffetHostMaddieGuestWell, I've put a bunch of words on the board that are useful vocabulary words, just to remind myself of things we need to cover.
But obviously, we've gotta start with the question of what kashrut is, right? So kashrut-- What I can tell you first is what kashrut is not.
But kashrut is not food blessed by a rabbi, despite what you might see in contemporary media all the time.
Believe it or not, there is food that is kosher that is not approved by the London Beit Din, which we'll come back to in a little bit.
Kashrut is not about health, not explicitly, nor is it about kind of contemporary medical understandings of, you know, nutrition, nor is it a kind of paleo diet for the enlightened.
Kashrut is a set of laws that are introduced by the Torah about what foods we can eat.
It's essentially a series of restrictions on foods we can eat as Jewish people, and those restrictions largely are about animals.
One has to do with animals, and one has to do with what we call Avodah Zarah or idolatry.
Now, when we talk about animals, there's a couple easy things the Torah lays out for us, where we have a rubric for how to identify what animals we can eat, what animals we cannot eat.
There's three categories, essentially, of animals when we talk about animals.
We can forgive the Torah for being far, far, far before Carl Linnaeus gave us taxonomy as we have it now.
Well, I've put a bunch of words on the board that are useful vocabulary words, just to remind myself of things we need to cover.
But obviously, we've gotta start with the question of what kashrut is, right? So kashrut-- What I can tell you first is what kashrut is not.
But kashrut is not food blessed by a rabbi, despite what you might see in contemporary media all the time.
Believe it or not, there is food that is kosher that is not approved by the London Beit Din, which we'll come back to in a little bit.
Kashrut is not about health, not explicitly, nor is it about kind of contemporary medical understandings of, you know, nutrition, nor is it a kind of paleo diet for the enlightened.
Kashrut is a set of laws that are introduced by the Torah about what foods we can eat.
It's essentially a series of restrictions on foods we can eat as Jewish people, and those restrictions largely are about animals.
One has to do with animals, and one has to do with what we call Avodah Zarah or idolatry.
Now, when we talk about animals, there's a couple easy things the Torah lays out for us, where we have a rubric for how to identify what animals we can eat, what animals we cannot eat.
There's three categories, essentially, of animals when we talk about animals.
We can forgive the Torah for being far, far, far before Carl Linnaeus gave us taxonomy as we have it now.
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