The year is 70 C.E., and Jerusalem lies in ruins. The magnificent Temple, once the heart of Jewish spiritual and communal life, has been reduced to ashes. With its destruction, the ancient sacrificial system came to a sudden, devastating end. No longer did priests perform sacred offerings upon the flaming altars. No longer did the music and wine flow to accompany the thanksgiving feasts of meat. For the surviving remnant of the Jewish people, a heavy shroud of grief settled over everyday life.
In the wake of this national catastrophe, many mourners found themselves drawn to the margins of society. Ascetic cults, which had quietly existed for generations, suddenly found themselves thrust into the center of the cultural mood. Groups like the Nazirites, Rechabites, Essenes, Therapeutae, and Zadokites offered a path of profound, structured grief. To express their sorrow over the lost Temple, these sects turned to fasting, celibacy, and above all, the complete refusal to eat meat.
To these grieving ascetics, the logic was clear. Feasting on meat had always been the joyful sequel to a sacred Temple ceremony. Since the altar was in ruins and the priestly slaughterers were scattered to the winds, eating flesh felt like an act of betrayal. They chose to withdraw into monkish, isolated communities, trading the physical pleasures of life for an existence of quiet deprivation.
Yet, the leading rabbinical sages of the era watched this growing movement with deep alarm. The very survival of the Jewish people as a cohesive group seemed to hang in the balance. If the nation succumbed to a wave of celibacy and extreme self-denial, it would slowly fade out of existence. Judaism had always been a religion of life, built on the belief that human beings are meant to find joy in God’s creation rather than treat the gift of life as a sin.
The rabbis also observed the harsh physical reality of this ascetic lifestyle. The vegetarianism of these post-destruction sects was often a maudlin, unscientific practice. It left its adherents undernourished and visibly weak, showing clear signs of deficiency diseases and stunted growth. For a community looking to rebuild itself and raise a healthy new generation of children, these sickly, frail figures served as a grim warning of where total abstinence would lead.
In the lively debates preserved in the Talmud, the sages wrestled with how to balance the deep, natural need for mourning with the imperative of survival. Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha and Rabbi Joshua argued that the community could not bear regulations that were too onerous. While it was impossible not to mourn at all, imposing a perpetual ban on meat and wine would demand a level of self-denial that ordinary people simply could not sustain.
Rather than outlaw meat entirely, the sages chose a path of compromise and sanctification. They designated a brief, nine-day meatless period preceding Tisha B’av, the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, as a temporary communal expression of grief. For those living in the holy city of Jerusalem, some advocated a perpetual vegetarian lifestyle. But for the wider Jewish world, the rabbis sought to bring the sacred elements of the Temple directly into the home.
They accomplished this by transforming the act of eating itself into a daily ritual of remembrance and atonement. The community slaughterer, the shochet, was introduced as a direct replacement for the Temple priest. This highly trained specialist was required to be a scholar of deep piety, skilled in the precise and compassionate methods of animal slaughter to minimize pain.
Furthermore, the rabbis elaborated a complex system of dietary laws. The careful salting, soaking, and draining of blood became a way of returning the life essence to the Creator, acknowledging the moral weight of taking a life. By surrounding the dinner table with these meticulous rules, every ordinary home became a sanctuary, and every meal became a holy offering. Through this brilliant adaptation, the ancient sages rejected the slow death of ascetic withdrawal and chose instead to hallow the everyday act of living.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Vegetarianism and the Jewish Tradition
- Subtitle: Relating Biblical and Rabbinic Thought to Modern Nutrition, Anthropology, and Psychology
- Author: Louis A. Berman (Professor of Psychology and Staff Counselor, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle)
- Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
- Publication Year: 1982
- Edition: First Edition
- ISBN:
- Hardcover: 0-87068-756-5
- Paperback: 0-87068-285-7
- Historical Period Covered: Biblical Origins (approx. 3000 BCE) through Talmudic/Rabbinic Antiquity, Medieval Codification (Maimonides), early Diaspora, Victorian/Modern Vegetarian Movements, up to the early 1980s.
- Main Subject Areas: Jewish Ethics, Kashrut (Dietary Laws), Shechita (Ritual Slaughter), Biblical Animal Welfare (Tza’ar Ba’alei Chayim), Comparative Anthropology of Food, Evolutionary Psychology, Biochemical Nutrition, and Jewish History.