[Sca-cooks] Kashrut

[Yehoshua ben Haim haLevi]

On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 11:27, Stefan li Rous wrote:
>   Kirsten Houseknecht said:
> > i would happily come to a kosher dinner if you can deal with a
> > friendly, but non jewish, person. i know
> > enough to sit on my hands when you pass a bottle of opened
> > wine.......
> Okay, why is this? Are women not supposed to drink wine or something 
> else? If everyone sits on their hands, it would seem to be rather 
> difficult to pass the wine... :-)

It has nothing to do with gender, its the fact that she's not Jewish. 

Here's the deal. Wine has a special status when it comes to Kosher laws.
Whey back when pagans used to use wine to pour libations to their Idols.
Now the Torah is very specific on the prohibitions against the worship
of Idols, this is a very big deal. There was an assumption that when a
non Jew made wine they would pour some as a libation to their god.
(remember when much of this was developed there were only Jews and
Pagans). Now since the wine maker has poured some of the wine as a
libation to his god, and dedicated the whole batch as such it is
forbidden for a Jew to use it, as it is the result of the worship of
idols. 

So the Rabbis banned the use of any wine made by non Jews, and even if a
wine was made by Jews and handled by gentiles it is still a problem (its
ok as long as the bottle is sealed). 

To get around this some Kosher wines are boiled and rendered into a
state that is called "Mevushal". Mevushal wines can be handled by a
gentile and its OK. Most Kosher wines made in the USA are Mevushal,
while most of the ones from Israel are not.  

More recently due to the same prohibition of the worship of Idols the
Rabbis have banned wigs with Hair from India. This is the current big
brew-ha-ha in the orthodox world. 

-- 
--Yehoshua ben Haim haLevi
Senischal incipient Shire of Beit Aryeh
MKA: Zachary Kessin Jerusalem Israel
zkessin at cs.brandeis.edu +972 50 780 9717 +1 646 201 9507