Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [74]
In an exhaustive 3,000-plus-page analysis of Leviticus, Rabbi Jacob Milgrom, PhD, the foremost biblical expert on this issue, shows that if we want to understand the immense importance the Bible gives to the blood prohibition, we have to look back to the beginning of Genesis. “Above all,” Milgrom writes, “it must be recalled that… man was initially meant to be a vegetarian. Later, God concedes to man’s carnivorous desires: his craving for meat is to be indulged, but he is to abstain from consuming the blood.” Milgrom explains that the Bible shows an “uneasiness regarding man’s uncontrolled power over animal life…. [I]t seeks to curb that power. All men must eschew the lifeblood of the animal by draining it…. Mankind has a right to nourishment, not to life. Hence the blood, the symbol of life, must be drained, returned to the universe, to God.”
If that seems surprising, it’s because of how alienated we are from these issues today. As Milgrom observes, this kind of concern about killing was once much more common: “Anthropological and comparative evidence indicates that the reluctance to kill an animal harks back to a much earlier period.” In the end, Milgrom concludes that the blood prohibition is part of a biblical ethic that demands “reverence for life.”
Rather than giving humans carte blanche to eat meat, the Bible saddles the practice with restrictions. And if eating meat even from animals raised back in the good old days before intensive confinement and antibiotics and industrial slaughterhouses wasn’t endorsed, then what does that suggest about our own day, when animals suffer miserable lives on factory farms and painful deaths in industrial slaughterhouses?
In sum: What would Jesus think of a factory farm? It’s one thing to concede that meat eating was temporarily tolerable to ancient herders, but when all you have to do is order something different from a menu or reach for a different part of the supermarket shelf, wouldn’t the Christian thing be to choose the more peaceful option?
My Own Spiritual Path
I suppose I should say a bit about my spiritual path: I was baptized a Catholic and thought of myself exclusively as a Christian for many years. Even though today I also find spiritual sustenance from other traditions, my spiritual journey has never led me to reject anything Jesus taught. Everything the churches I attended taught about the life of Jesus—his love for creation, mercy, compassion, and special concern for the powerless—leads me to think he would never have accepted a diet that contributed to the groans of creation. As the Apostle Paul explains in a beautiful passage, it is not only humans that look forward to salvation: “The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” (Romans 8:22). Animals and all the earth are included in God’s plan.
I also love that in his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul calls on the community to “pray ceaselessly.” I don’t think he meant that we should constantly have our heads bowed, murmuring prayers, but rather that we should live as if we were constantly trying to be the people we are guided to be. Since eating is so central to our lives, it seems to me that eating consciously can be the foundation of our conscious life. It can be our way of praying ceaselessly.
I don’t see how the ultimate Good Shepherd, the Prince of Peace, could be okay with a lifestyle that promotes misery and destroys health. Maybe Jesus wasn’t a strict vegetarian 2,000 years ago, but there sure is something to the idea that he would be today.
Consider the reflections of the Jesuit priest John Dear, who explains that “today Jesus… would want us to change every aspect of our lives, to seek complete physical, spiritual, emotional, and ethical wholeness…. So, when we sit down to eat… we should also choose to adhere to his life of compassion and