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Mar 13, 2022
The farce of "One Kashrut"
Rav Shlomo Aviner posted the following series of questions online (this is my translation):
14 questions to the competing kashrut agency1. Who is the great posek and expert in kashrut that is guiding you?2. who runs your kashrut department, who is recognized in Israel and globally as an expert in kashrut?3. How many years of experience do you have in the field of kashrut?4. How many places that had their kashrut certification removed by the Rabbanut due to serious infractions - transferred to you to get kashrut in its place?5. Do you allow products that the Chief Rabbinate does not allow?6. Do you regularly scoff at the Rabbanut claiming its kashrut is flawed according to halacha?7. Did you write a halachic opinion in opposition to that of the Rabbanut? Halachic articles with positions not acceptable to the majority of poskim?8. Did places under your supervision have any of the following issues: bringing in treif food, using regular cauliflower, unsupervised winery, kashrut for a bakery inside a treif restaurant, cooking on Shabbos, importing artichokes infested with bugs?9. Is a mashgiach who receives a salary from the institution owning the factory paying him - is he free to pasken as he wishes even to remove the kashrut?10. will competition of two institutions not cause people to find more and more leniencies with the institutions providing minimal kashrut supervision?11. Is it true that a mashgiach working for the Rabbanut receives 37nis per hour of supervision and by you he receives 73nis per hour - meaning, double? Will this not cause the prices to go up?12. Is it correct that a business pays the Rabbanut fee of between 527nis and 1383nis for the year and they pay you between 18000 and 30000nis per year - and maybe that causes prices to rise (meaning, 120 million for all the businesses together rather than 10 million)?13. is it correct that your entire apparatus is supported by donations reaching the millions, ten times the revenue brought in, and in your opinion is that proper?14. in your opinion is the ideal being one kashrut that everyone can eat from or a multitude of kashrut organizations?[signed off] One Nation, One State, One Kashrut!
I am not sure the individual questions are all that important but maybe I will relate to some of them, after relating to the bigger picture.
It seems clear, to me at least, that Rav Aviner is referring to Tzohar without saying so explicitly. Unless there are specific claims regarding faults in their supervision (which he alludes to in question #8), the rest of it is mostly irrelevant. I dont care about their individual policies or pricing if it brings about the intended results, of reliable kashrut at a price the public is willing to pay [for the final product].
More generally, if Rav Aviner's goal is one kashrut for everyone, he should be opposed equally to all the other kashrut organizations, yet I have not seen him speak out against them (even if, to be fair, he does prefer the Rabbanut). Why is it ok for Eida, Mahfoud, Rubin, Landau, Kehilot, Beit Yosef, OU and others to operate in the field of kashrut but not Tzohar (or whatever organization he is referring to) - Israel is very far from his ideal of "one Kashrut" and as long as other players are allowed to operate there is no reason to not allow one more. The public will decide which of them to rely on and to support and which not.
Now to specific questions-
1-3: Rav Aviner's implication is that they do not have kashrut experts and rabbonim. He might not like them or agree with them but they do. Some of them even left the Rabbanut to work for Tzohar.
4. nothing wrong with this if the infractions were fixed and dealt with or if they were only infractions by not meeting Rabbanut standards but were ok by Tzohar (or other) standards... Plenty of food establishments lose one hechsher for whatever reason and then go to another.
5. maybe, maybe not. They do not have to follow Rabbanut policy. They have to follow Tzohar policy.
6. I dont know if they do or not, but if they do just add them to the list of all the Haredi hechshers that do the same.
7. similar to #5, there is no obligation to agree with Rabbanut decisions. they are allowed to disagree on halachic opinions and formulate their own. Disagreement in halacha is nothing new. Nobody has ever made the Rabbanut the final arbiter in halacha.
8. if these issues are true this is a valid issue being raised and hopefully they will fix whatever policies and workflows led to these problems. no hechsher is immune from this. There is no shortage of similar faults in the Rabbanut system either.
9. I dont know Tzohar policy on this but this is a well known problem and is one that plagues many of the kashrut organizations in Israel.
10. competition is always good. It gives the consumer more choice and makes the providers come closer to what the consumer wants. That might be more lenient or more strict. In the Haredi community the more competition the stricter it seems to get, so I am not sure the claim is proven. It might start a drive for more leniencies, it might not. And if it does and the leniencies are all within halacha, there is nothing wrong with it and people can choose which they want to rely on.
11. I dont care what they get paid. If they can pay the mashgiach more without it causing price increases, even better. if it becomes too expensive people wont but the product and food establishments wont hire them.
12. this sounds ridiculous and I have no idea if it is accurate or not but if they are charging so much more than the Rabbanut it seems unlikely restaurants or food producers would be willing to pay that price and they will go out of business.
13. if they are supported by donations, so what?
14. If Tzohar closes down due to the argument of "one kashrut", will we then have one kashrut? Is Tzohar preventing that ideal from happening? There are dozens of kashrut organizations in Israel. Tzohar is just one more.
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Labels:
kashrut,
Rabbanut,
Rav Aviner,
Tzohar
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He's using a lot of innuendo and code words here. For example, this isn't the only place he says "recognized" and "majority," which is a way of getting around the fact that people he disagrees with on various issues (say, going up to the Har HaBayit) have solid halakhic justifications for doing so. His line about "donations" is meant to put ideas in people's heads about the New Israel Fund or whatever.
ReplyDeleteDe Tocqueville wrote, "[A]ny alliance with any political power whatsoever is bound to be burdensome for religion. It does not need their support in order to live, and in serving them it may die." Boy is that true here.
There's another triplet that goes one this, one that, one other thing, but I've forgotten how it goes exactly. In a language that resembles Yiddish a bit, I think it was ...
ReplyDeleteThere is a very big difference between Tzohar and other organizations. At Tzohar the mashgiach actually works in the kitchen for instance to cut vegetables and check them. That means the restaurant saves on a worker which justifies paying the mashgiach well and therefore getting good people in the role
ReplyDeletejust to focus on the monetary aspect, I'm going to assume that the Rav's actual point was if a business is willing to pay so much more for this group's certification it's because the business can more than recoup the cost by cutting the halachic requirements that the Rabbanut set. Or to be really, really blunt, it's a bribe...
ReplyDeleteUncomfortable little detail: It's not true.
Delete