Behind the Scenes of the World of Kashrus: From the Shochet in the Shtetl to Educating Children at Home | Rabbi Aharon Volkan #016

00:00 Speaker 1 What’s the difference between the Badatz of the Eidah Hachareidis, Chasam Sofer, Rabbanut Mehadrin, and the regular Rabbanut? Here, when we talk so much about education, we’ll also be talking, above all, about educating ourselves. What standard of kashrus do I choose to bring into my home? To help make sense of it, I sat down for a fascinating conversation with Rabbi Aharon Volken, director of the Mehadrin Committee at Tnuva and an expert in food kashrus. We talked about the whole history of kashrus, from the shochet and the rabbi in the town to all the kosher certifications we have today. A fascinating, enriching episode with a great deal of practical information. I’m Meir Vishnapsky, and you’re listening to On Chabad Education. Rabbi Aharon Volken, welcome.

00:33 Speaker 2 Glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

00:35 Speaker 1 Thank you for making the time and coming. Today we’re going to talk about kashrus. I think that’s the title of our episode. But first, let’s introduce you to our audience, our viewers. Where are you now? What do you do today? How did you get into it? We’d love to hear.

00:52 Speaker 2 I’ve been working in the world of kashrus for thirty-five years. I began as an inspector for the rabbinates of Or Yehuda and Holon. Gradually, I joined Tnuva for the first time, and from there I was responsible for fish kashrus throughout the country. Then I moved to the Eidah Hachareidis, where I managed its fish kashrus department for several years. From there I returned to Tnuva, and today I manage the Mehadrin Committee at Tnuva.

01:27 Speaker 1 Tnuva—that’s all dairy products, or do they have a lot more today?

01:31 Speaker 2 Tnuva is the largest food company in the country. It has a large slaughterhouse, a plant for doughs and sauces, Sunfrost frozen vegetables, and, of course, the dairy division.

01:45 Speaker 1 So dairy, you’re saying, is just one niche.

01:47 Speaker 2 A division, not a niche. It’s a big niche, but it’s a division. Tnuva has two large divisions: the food division and the dairy division.

01:54 Speaker 1 Okay, so Tnuva goes beyond—

01:56 Speaker 2 Yes.

01:57 Speaker 1 Good. So, kashrus. Let’s talk a little about the concept. I’d like to start with the history. We know that once, every Jewish town had its shochet and inspector and its rabbi, and milk came from the milkman. Today it’s become stamps and all sorts of kosher certifications. I’d appreciate it if you could help us make sense of it. What exactly is the situation today? How did it develop into what it is now?

02:20 Speaker 2 First, we need to start with the halachic foundation. The halachic principle is that one witness is believed in matters of prohibited foods. What does that mean? In practice, we learn from shechitah that if I come to your house, see a piece of chicken, and you tell me it’s kosher, I can eat it. Why? Because you’re one witness, and you’re believed in matters of prohibited foods. It’s not like monetary cases, where you need two witnesses—“on the testimony of two witnesses.” For prohibited foods, one witness is enough. So I come to your home, there’s a piece of chicken, and you offer it to me. You’re a G-d-fearing Jew, you know what kashrus is, and you know that I’m particular about kashrus too. So I rely on you. There are two rules for testimony, two conditions for you to be believed. The first is that you must not have a financial interest. The moment you have a financial interest, your testimony loses its credibility.

03:21 Speaker 1 Meaning, if I stand to lose something if I...

03:23 Speaker 2 Right, and you don’t have that here. The second thing is that you must actually know what you’re testifying about. When someone goes to court today, the judge asks, “What qualifies you to give this testimony?” There’s [unclear].

03:37 Speaker 1 Yes.

03:38 Speaker 2 He asks, “What qualifications do you have? What did you study that enables you to testify about this?” So for your testimony to be reliable, you need to know two things. First, you need to know that I eat mehadrin. And second, you need to understand the subject. You tell me, “Listen, this vegetable is clean.” But do you really understand—if you don’t, then your testimony is worth nothing here. So in the past...

03:57 Speaker 1 We said you can’t stand to lose anything, and you have to understand kashrus in the first place.

04:01 Speaker 2 What it is you’re testifying about.

04:01 Speaker 1 Yes.

04:03 Speaker 2 So now let’s go back into history a little. Our ancestors lived in small towns and hardly ever traveled from one town to another. There were merchants, and caravans of camels and donkeys traveled between towns, but most people lived in their own town, worked there, farmed there—everything was within the town. Everyone knew everyone, and they exchanged food. One person grew vegetables, another grew tomatoes, another had a chicken coop, and another had a few cows. They traded with one another. Everyone knew who the dairy farmer was, who raised chickens, and who farmed. They knew everything. Only one thing required a professional: shechitah. So there was the rabbi and there was the shochet and inspector. Those were the two religious positions involved in kashrus.

04:52 Speaker 1 Yes, the Frierdiker Rebbe sent many people out in Russia; he trained many people to be shochetim and inspectors in those fields.

04:59 Speaker 2 That was a little later.

05:01 Speaker 1 Yes, that was later.

05:01 Speaker 2 That was a little later, but essentially, that was how Jews lived. If you look through the early rabbinic authorities, most of the responsa deal with shechitah. There weren’t other questions; there weren’t questions about the mitzvos dependent on the Land of Israel, and there wasn’t awareness of insects. Everyone knew everyone. There was no candy and ice cream industry like there is today. Basically, as they say in Yiddish, there was the bakery and there was the milkman. That was it.

05:27 Speaker 1 Yes.

05:30 Speaker 2 Over the years, some trade began between towns, though still on a small scale. There would be a fair in Leipzig and a fair somewhere else, and people would travel and trade. More oil, more wine—those sorts of things. And we already begin to see in the Gemara discussion of some kind of oversight of trustworthiness, because people were bringing oil and wine from one place to another. That’s where it started. Later—and by “later,” I’m taking you back about four hundred years—somewhat more substantial trade began between villages. There was an institution called the Council of Four Lands. It met in Eastern Europe and brought together rabbis from Russia, Lithuania, Poland, and the surrounding areas. It would convene twice a year to enact regulations as life changed from year to year. Twice a year, when there was a fair somewhere, the rabbis would come just as the merchants did. They would gather and enact regulations as needed.

06:45 Speaker 1 Give us an example of something they enacted.

06:46 Speaker 2 One of the regulations they enacted...

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07:36 Speaker 2 Since trade and the transport of food between villages were beginning, and since people were losing their credibility when they made it a business, every business had to have a kashrus certificate. That was a regulation enacted by the Council of Four Lands. Throughout those years—

07:55 Speaker 1 About how many years ago was that?

07:57 Speaker 2 Around four hundred years ago.

07:58 Speaker 1 Four hundred.

08:00 Speaker 2 It was still on a small scale. Again, there wasn’t an industry like there is today. But if someone brought something from another place and people didn’t know him, he needed a kashrus certificate. And here I want to bring that into the present day, for example. Let’s say you ask me whether I’d come to your house after the recording for a cup of coffee and some cake. I say okay. You ask me what kind of cake I like best, and I tell you I like chocolate cake with chocolate chips. You go home and say, “I’m bringing Aharon Volken home. He likes chocolate-chip cake. Can we make him one?” You check at home and find there are no chocolate chips, so you say, “Sorry, he’ll have orange cake.”

08:52 Speaker 5 Whatever we have.

08:53 Speaker 2 That’s what we have.

08:54 Speaker 5 Yes.

08:55 Speaker 2 If I come over and you give me a cup of coffee, and I see there’s orange cake, I’ll say, “Thank you very much. That’s good, this is good, everything’s fine.” But let’s say your family has started a business selling Shabbos cakes to the community in Tzfas. I come to you and say, “Listen, I’d like to order five chocolate-chip cakes.” Now you get home and there are no chocolate chips. Your family won’t say, “We’ll make orange cake.” I didn’t order orange cake; I ordered chocolate-chip cake. So they’ll run to the first store, and it has chocolate chips—but not with the kashrus you use at home. Will you withstand that test and not buy them? I’m telling you, the answer is no. You’re building a business, you want it to succeed, and you’ve received a nice order. You want me to order again, so you’ll give me what I want. And when there’s money at stake, you’ve lost your reliability. I encounter this a lot. I’ve seen it happen many times. I’ve seen people cut corners with leafy vegetables because none were available. Once I saw a family that makes salads for Shabbos. They had also prepared liver, and they had a sort of stall at the shul every Friday, with salads and so on.

10:32 Speaker 5 That they sell to the community.

10:33 Speaker 2 That they sell to the community. Everyone knows them and so on. And I knew that week you couldn’t get liver anywhere in the country with either the Eidah Hachareidis or Rabbi Landau’s kashrus.

10:46 Speaker 5 And they were selling it there.

10:47 Speaker 2 They were selling liver.

10:48 Speaker 5 Wow.

10:49 Speaker 2 I made very thorough inquiries, and I found out where he bought it. It turned out he had bought it with a much lower standard of kashrus than what people in our community buy for Shabbos. The pressure not to lose a sale is very strong—stronger than you think. That’s why it was established that the moment you have a financial interest, you’ve lost your reliability. And I have to tell you, with great sorrow, that there is more kashrus fraud in the Chareidi community than in the secular community.

11:32 Speaker 5 What do you mean?

11:33 Speaker 2 Sometimes I catch a secular Jew who has falsified something about kashrus, and he starts crying: “How can I show my face in shul?” Thank G-d. When you catch a Chareidi Jew, one of our own, committing kashrus fraud, he never regrets it. “Wait, have you lost your mind? But it’s cold; it doesn’t impart flavor.” He’s already—he’s learned the arguments. He has all the explanations he prepared for himself. He doesn’t even feel guilty about it. You have to understand: knowing him from the community, from yeshivah, from the beis midrash, or from some other activity he does does not give him a stamp of reliability in kashrus. It’s not for nothing that the rabbis ruled, as a matter of halachah, that you buy food only if it has a kashrus certificate.

12:29 Speaker 5 So what are the differences between them? Of course, everyone will take what we’re discussing here and decide for themselves what they learn and understand from it. But in general, what are the differences between the standards? We know—and I think this is common in most homes; it was like this in my home—that Badatz and Landau are the kashrus standards we eat, and there are many certifications I don’t— My challenge, and the reason I asked us to sit down, is that when I got married, I reached a point where I had to understand that I needed to decide what I would and wouldn’t eat in my home, and there are so many certifications. So what are the general differences between them? What’s the difference between the stricter and less strict certifications? Why does it matter, seemingly? Okay, this has a stamp, this has kashrus. What’s the difference?

13:11 Speaker 2 You’ve asked a lot of questions at once, so let’s try to break them down into several parts. First, let’s begin with this: we understand that we need a kashrus organization to supervise.

13:22 Speaker 5 Right.

13:23 Speaker 2 What is a kashrus organization? Here we first need to divide them into two categories: a local community organization and a large international kashrus organization. They’re two completely different things. We’ll start with the local one. And we’ll divide that into two parts, like everything in Judaism.

13:51 Speaker 5 Everything divides into two, and then in the end there’s a third level.

13:54 Speaker 2 First, every place has a local rabbinate.

13:58 Speaker 5 Meaning a city rabbinate.

14:00 Speaker 2 A city rabbinate, yes. Here in Tzfas, for example, we have Rabbi Bistritzky, the mara d’asra of the community. I still remember his father in Tzfas—a truly outstanding Jew. We have no doubt that his kashrus is among the best. I’m telling you as someone who has examined it: it’s one of the best certifications there is. But let’s break this down for a moment. What is the role of the kashrus department in a local rabbinate? And what is the role of a community kashrus organization in the United States? We need to know one thing: basic kashrus relies on every permissible leniency when there’s no other choice. I’ll tell you a story. Many years ago, I was a supervisor for the rabbinate in Holon, and I heard a report about the owner of a pita bakery: at four in the afternoon on Shabbos, he would go in and light the oven. Why? Good pita is baked on stone, and heating a stone oven takes several hours. So, to be able to start work half an hour after Shabbos ended, he would go into the bakery on Shabbos afternoon and light the oven. He would just go in, turn on the gas and leave. When I heard this, I spent Shabbos in Bat Yam and walked to the bakery that afternoon. I watched, and sure enough, at four o’clock I saw him go in. As soon as he entered, I went into the bakery right behind him. He was stunned to see me. I took the kashrus certificate off the wall, put it in a bag and went back to where I was staying. I didn’t speak to him or say anything. After Shabbos, I called the city’s rabbi at the time, Rabbi Landman, and told him the story. We arranged for me to come to the office on Sunday morning. I came and brought the certificate. Rabbi Landman said something very important to me, which helped me understand, years later, the role of basic kashrus. He said, “Aharon, listen. If we take away

16:26 Speaker 2 his certificate, I’ll back you completely. But let’s say we do take away the kashrus certificate. As of tomorrow—as of this Sunday morning—the bakery no longer has kashrus certification. What percentage of its Jewish customers do you think will stop eating there?” I said, “Thirty percent, right?”

16:45 Speaker 6 Yes, the rest will keep buying there.

16:47 Speaker 2 Seventy percent will keep buying from a bakery where the flour isn’t sifted, where there are worms and cockroaches, where challah isn’t separated, and where we don’t know what ingredients are used. In other words, from now on we would know that seventy percent of its customers, residents of Holon, would be transgressing Torah prohibitions.

17:08 Speaker 6 I see.

17:09 Speaker 2 It’s a very serious dilemma. I said to the rabbi, “We’re going to give him the certificate back now.” We put additional rules in place and added another lock. Every Friday, the mashgiach would put a lock on the door so he couldn’t open the place. We made rules and added supervision hours, but we didn’t revoke the certificate. Why? Because first of all, we have a mission to save Jews from as many prohibitions as possible. Unfortunately, many, many Jews—good, traditional people—want to eat kosher, but they’ll buy the food even if it isn’t kosher.

17:48 Speaker 6 Mm-hmm.

17:49 Speaker 2 We have to protect them. That’s why a level of kashrus was developed in Israel that sets aside many of our customs and many things we’re particular about. Not matters of halachah, not Torah prohibitions—but it isn’t the standard of kashrus we ourselves observe.

18:11 Speaker 6 That’s the kashrus that’s—

18:13 Speaker 2 Basic.

18:13 Speaker 6 The city’s, right—the local certification.

18:15 Speaker 2 So sometimes there’s a city rabbi whom we know to be G-d-fearing, one of our own, but the kashrus standard he provides isn’t one he himself would eat.

18:25 Speaker 6 Mm-hmm.

18:27 Speaker 2 That’s why each city also established a mehadrin certification.

18:32 Speaker 6 Yes.

18:32 Speaker 2 And what’s the problem with that? By law, a mehadrin rabbinate has to accept anything labeled “mehadrin,” including certifications we don’t really believe meet that standard. The very fact that it says “mehadrin” makes it mehadrin. So they created a third level, a Badatz, like the Tzfas Badatz in Tzfas. If you want to bring in all sorts of other mehadrin certifications, you have the mehadrin level; it isn’t designed for people in our community.

19:00 Speaker 6 Mm-hmm.

19:01 Speaker 2 So when you live in a particular city and there’s a rabbinate there, you need to know what levels of certification it offers and what each level means.

19:11 Speaker 6 So the basic level will always aim to permit things—to make it possible for as many people as possible—

19:16 Speaker 2 Without transgressing Torah prohibitions.

19:18 Speaker 6 Exactly, yes.

19:19 Speaker 2 But to protect as many Jews as possible.

19:20 Speaker 6 Yes. So that they’ll eat kosher food and won’t come to—

19:23 Speaker 2 That’s the basic goal.

19:24 Speaker 6 Yes.

19:25 Speaker 2 But it isn’t for us.

19:26 Speaker 6 Right.

19:26 Speaker 2 Now, there’s something we need to know. I get asked many kashrus questions. I can receive two hundred questions about kashrus in a day.

19:35 Speaker 6 Wow.

19:37 Speaker 2 When the war started three years ago, I was getting six hundred, seven hundred questions a day from soldiers. You have to understand that when I give a person an answer, it won’t always be the same answer—even if it’s the same question. You have to know the situation.

19:55 Speaker 6 …

19:57 Speaker 2 A soldier serving at headquarters won’t get the same answer as a soldier who’s now at the staging area, and a soldier at the staging area won’t get the answer I’d give a soldier inside Gaza or Lebanon. You have to understand the situation. A fellow from our community called me on Friday because he’d bought skinless fish with very weak kosher certification. When I get a question like that twenty minutes before Shabbos, I have to know that shalom bayis is also at stake. When I trained to answer people’s kashrus questions, I spent many hours with Rabbi Bloy of the Eidah Hachareidis. He gave me a very clear rule: “Never say ‘forbidden’ if you aren’t capable of saying ‘permitted’ nine times.” When you answer someone’s question, you need to understand the whole situation around it and know whether, in this situation, you can perhaps be a little flexible about a particular custom this time, or something like that. You need a lot of wisdom to say “forbidden,” and a lot of wisdom to say “permitted.” So sometimes—someone once called me with a question about fish and said, “Listen, someone in my kollel spoke to Rabbi Volkan and said it’s forbidden. How can you say it’s permitted?” Of course, he didn’t know he was speaking to Volkan, and for half an hour he lectured me: “Volkan said this, Volkan said that.” Eventually I lost my patience. I told him, “Listen, I’m Volkan, and I’m telling you it’s permitted. I don’t know what he asked me. I don’t know the situation or all the surrounding circumstances. You’re asking me.” So when we guide people on kashrus, first of all we give them the highest standard. Before they buy something, we guide them on how to buy the food and what to look for. Of course, if a person has already bought it, once

21:55 Speaker 2 Rabbi Bloy told me, “Always, always remember that alongside Yoreh De’ah there’s also Choshen Mishpat. When you tell someone to throw out food, know that if you could have found a way to permit it, you’ve committed theft.” So when someone asks a question, you need to know the whole situation, understand it, and answer accordingly.

22:19 Speaker 7 So I want to go back a little. We spoke about... about certification by municipality, by city, the local certification, and community kashrus.

22:27 Speaker 2 Right.

22:27 Speaker 7 Right. Now—

22:28 Speaker 2 Now there’s kashrus run by a very specific community for its own members. Usually they wouldn’t do that in Bnei Brak, because there’s Rabbi Landau’s certification—he’s the city’s rabbi—and everyone knows it’s exceptionally mehudar. But there are outlying places with a concentration of three or four hundred families from our community, and they want to establish local kashrus. Now, what does it mean for them to establish local kashrus?

22:53 Speaker 7 Give me an example.

22:53 Speaker 2 After all, they don’t have the resources.

22:55 Speaker 7 A community living in Eilat, just as an example, or in... not Eilat, in Arad.

22:58 Speaker 2 Let’s say Arad.

22:59 Speaker 7 Yes.

23:00 Speaker 2 Yes, in Arad today there’s a commu... community kashrus organization. It doesn’t have the resources to provide certification. It doesn’t have the resources.

23:07 Speaker 7 Because it’s not through the rabbis, because it’s not—

23:08 Speaker 2 No, it doesn’t have the resources or the knowledge.

23:10 Speaker 7 Mm-hmm.

23:12 Speaker 2 So it can set a very basic rule. Say I’m supervising a pizza shop. I’m the community kashrus organization in Arad now, and I want to supervise a pizza shop. I can set a rule: “Listen, you may bring into the shop only ingredients bearing the stamp of Badatz Eidah Hachareidis.” That’s what I supervise.

23:32 Speaker 7 Mm-hmm.

23:32 Speaker 2 In other words, I don’t know how to supervise tomato paste, and I don’t know how to supervise basil. I don’t know any of that. The one thing I know is how to check, at the shop entrance, that everything coming in has Eidah Hachareidis or Rabbi Landau certification.

23:43 Speaker 7 Mm-hmm.

23:44 Speaker 2 That’s all. There’s a vegetable shop in the community that wants to sell vegetables to the community. The only thing I do is supervise to make sure all the produce coming in has Eidah Hachareidis certification. That’s all. I don’t have the ability or the knowledge to supervise orlah or terumos and maasros. I don’t know how, so I don’t get into it.

24:01 Speaker 7 I rely on the certification—

24:02 Speaker 2 Exactly. So we’ve set a policy that the shop accepts only Rabbi Landau and Eidah Hachareidis certification. That’s what I supervise.

24:10 Speaker 7 And as far as the shop’s certification stamp goes, that’s where my role ends.

24:12 Speaker 2 I, I—yes.

24:13 Speaker 7 I—

24:14 Speaker 2 The community trusts me on that.

24:15 Speaker 7 The Arad community.

24:16 Speaker 2 Exactly.

24:16 Speaker 7 I understand.

24:17 Speaker 2 And I rely on those certifications. Why? I don’t have supervisors all over the country, and I can’t supervise large factories for the sake of one small shop.

24:24 Speaker 7 Right.

24:25 Speaker 2 It could be that, for certain practical reasons, they also allow Rubin, for example, or another certification. Again, every decision needs to be weighed—why are we doing it? But that’s the general rule. My supervision consists of checking what comes in at the shop entrance.

24:47 Speaker 7 Okay.

24:48 Speaker 2 Let’s say they want to open a shop selling Lubavitch shechitah in Chatzor, and I’m the Chabad shliach in Chatzor. Just as an example—it isn’t the shliach. Let’s say I’m the shliach and I give the shop certification for Lubavitch shechitah, but I don’t slaughter animals and I don’t have a slaughterhouse. So what does my supervision consist of? I know where the meat is coming from, and I put someone at the shop entrance to check that it comes from Kfar Chabad, that it comes from [unclear], that it comes from a slaughterhouse.

25:17 Speaker 7 Yes.

25:18 Speaker 2 Everything that comes in is Chabad shechitah. That’s where the supervision begins and ends. It’s easy.

25:27 Speaker 7 Yes, it’s simple. It’s not, not, not—

25:28 Speaker 2 It’s simple, and here we have no questions. The questions begin with more complex things, and that brings us to worldwide kashrus certification. We need to understand that this is a complicated undertaking. It can’t be a kashrus organization built around one person. Most of the certifications we see, all those different stamps, are one person: he’s in charge of the money and payments, he’s the supervisor and the halachic authority, and he’s responsible for orlah and for insects. He’s responsible for everything. It’s all one person. We need to understand that kashrus is a very complicated undertaking. It isn’t a one-person job.

26:10 Speaker 7 What does international kashrus mean? Let’s try to simplify it a little.

26:17 Speaker 2 I always ask a question.

26:18 Speaker 7 Okay.

26:19 Speaker 2 What do you think is harder to supervise: shechitah or a candy?

26:29 Speaker 7 Shechitah, what—

26:30 Speaker 2 Shechitah.

26:31 Speaker 7 Yes.

26:31 Speaker 2 There are lots of sections in the Shulchan Aruch; you have to know a lot of things. But there’s nothing easier to supervise than shechitah.

26:39 Speaker 7 Really?

26:40 Speaker 2 Why? It’s very simple. You set up a slaughtering operation and assemble a team. You have shochtim, inspectors, people who prepare the knives, and a supervisor who checks. You decide how fast the conveyor belt will move. They slaughter, package and sell. It’s all right there in front of you.

27:04 Speaker 7 It’s all in one space, in one place.

27:05 Speaker 2 It’s all in front of you. The questions arise there, the halachic authority is there, whatever you reject is there—everything is right there. A candy can have three or four hundred ingredients, each coming from a different country.

27:24 Speaker 7 Wow.

27:24 Speaker 2 For every item, you have to travel, supervise it and see that it’s okay. That’s worldwide kashrus.

27:31 Speaker 7 And that’s the candy we have in stores today.

27:33 Speaker 2 Of course.

27:34 Speaker 7 Wow.

27:35 Speaker 2 You look at the ingredients and see a blue coloring, usually listed as a number. That blue coloring can contain a hundred and forty raw materials, one coming from the Philippines and another from China.

27:49 Speaker 7 The candy’s coloring can be—

27:51 Speaker 2 Yes. Now we need to understand one thing, and this brings us to the halachic concept of bittul.

27:57 Speaker 7 Yes, all the—

27:57 Speaker 2 Let’s unpack that for a moment. We know about nullification in sixty. We always say, “What does ‘nullified in sixty’ mean?” It’s a familiar expression: “nullified in sixty.” But there are rules for nullification in sixty. Say I’m making a pot of cholent for the whole... for the whole yeshivah, a huge pot, and I’m also drinking instant coffee while I’m doing it. I shouldn’t be, but that’s what I did. So I knocked it, and a few drops of coffee fell from my cup into the pot. Is the pot now forbidden? No. Why? Because I have sixty times the volume.

28:41 Speaker 8 Compared with the drops that fell in.

28:42 Speaker 2 Compared with the drops that fell in. Now, there are a few rules about this. First, did I want the milk to go into the pot?

28:48 Speaker 8 No.

28:48 Speaker 2 No. Can I see it? If I look into the pot now, can I see the milk?

28:51 Speaker 8 No.

28:52 Speaker 2 I can’t see it. And will those drops give the soup a flavor—the cholent? They won’t. If I want something to add flavor, it isn’t nullified in sixty. If I want it to be visible, it isn’t nullified in sixty. So in a huge pot, if I add a few drops of food coloring and it gives the food color, it’s never nullified. For example, red coloring is made from insects.

29:22 Speaker 8 The red coloring we eat in—

29:24 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. And it isn’t nullified. It’s never nullified.

29:29 Speaker 8 So what—

29:29 Speaker 2 So when blue coloring is made from dozens of subsidiary ingredients, none of them is nullified. Every ingredient has to be kosher and have kosher certification.

29:41 Speaker 8 Wow.

29:43 Speaker 2 I know only five or six people in the kashrus world who understand and are familiar with all the flavorings and colorings. The other organizations rely on those same five people.

29:52 Speaker 8 All the kashrus systems rely on those same five people who simply...

29:55 Speaker 2 Yes. There’s one at the Eida Hachareidis, one at OK, and there was Rabbi Landau—he retired, and I don’t know who replaced him, right? There’s one at OU. There are just a handful of people. Everyone else relies on them.

30:10 Speaker 8 Wow.

30:10 Speaker 2 This really is an extremely difficult area to supervise—much more than meat, poultry, or a bakery, or whatever you might think. It’s the same with ice cream, the same with cakes. Even bread today has thirty or forty ingredients, and each one comes from somewhere else.

30:33 Speaker 8 So how do you actually do it?

30:33 Speaker 2 As the industry develops, the questions get harder. I want to give you an example of something that seems very, very simple. Supervision isn’t just about the ingredient; it also has to cover the factory where it’s made. Why do I say that? Sometimes I meet people who pick something up and say, “Oh, it’s natural. It’s all natural.”

31:05 Speaker 8 Meaning some product that’s entirely natural.

31:07 Speaker 2 So I want to tell you two stories. I was sent to supervise a factory that makes natural lemon juice. Natural lemon juice—they package it in little lemon-shaped bottles and sell it as 100% natural. It comes from Eastern Europe. Does it need supervision?

31:26 Speaker 8 Lemons don’t.

31:26 Speaker 2 No.

31:27 Speaker 8 Lemons don’t need it.

31:27 Speaker 2 Outside Eretz Yisroel there are no terumos and maasros, no shemittah, nothing. It’s eaten raw, so there’s no issue of cooking—there’s simply nothing. They squeeze it, pasteurize it, and package it. And if it has a rabbinate certification, surely there’s no problem.

31:44 Speaker 8 Right.

31:44 Speaker 2 I traveled abroad, and they told me to do a routine annual inspection at the factory, an hour or two. What do I see when I get there? Sometimes, when you fly somewhere, you have siyata d’Shmaya and arrive at exactly the right moment. The factory was very busy, extremely busy. It had lots of orders and no time to package the lemon juice there. So what did it do? It squeezed the lemons, pasteurized the juice, put it into stainless-steel tanks, and sent it by stainless-steel tanker truck to another factory to package it. It’s very common in the food industry to use factories that happen to have less work at the moment, and so on.

32:32 Speaker 9 Right.

32:32 Speaker 2 What’s the problem? The tank they were using had carried milk from a dairy farm to a dairy two years earlier. And lemon is a sharp food; it’s like cooking.

32:46 Speaker 9 So it draws out—

32:47 Speaker 2 Dairy lemon juice.

32:51 Speaker 9 And you arrived and saw the...

32:52 Speaker 2 I saw it. Look what can happen with something natural. I’ll tell you another story. Canned tuna. You know that in the food industry, nothing gets thrown away. They do something with everything. That’s why every sizable tuna factory in China and Thailand has a plant next door that also makes cat food. They send all the leftover tuna there, add other meat to it, add shrimp and all kinds of non-kosher things, mix it together, and seal it. Cat food. Is there a problem?

33:33 Speaker 9 Apparently not.

33:34 Speaker 2 Right. The problem is that the two factories share a steam system. The steam that just heated the non-kosher food now goes in to cook the tuna, carrying its flavor. When there’s serious supervision—and not everyone does this—they shut down the cat-food plant for the week of the supervised production.

34:03 Speaker 9 Meaning, during the week they produce the kosher tuna.

34:06 Speaker 2 For the mehadrin-certified tuna, the cat-food plant is closed.

34:09 Speaker 9 Wait, so I’m asking about all the certifications—Badatz Landau, the more, uh, the ones that aren’t community-based, not like—

34:14 Speaker 2 The serious ones.

34:15 Speaker 9 The serious ones.

34:16 Speaker 2 No, not all of them.

34:16 Speaker 9 How many like that are there in Israel?

34:18 Speaker 2 Now, look.

34:19 Speaker 9 What?

34:20 Speaker 2 I don’t want to stand here with a list of kashrus organizations and, uh...

34:24 Speaker 9 Give, uh...

34:25 Speaker 2 Grades.

34:26 Speaker 9 An accounting, yes.

34:27 Speaker 2 But let’s talk about what we expect and what we consider a kashrus system to be.

34:32 Speaker 9 Mm-hmm.

34:33 Speaker 2 As I said, a kashrus system has to be something very, very substantial.

34:38 Speaker 9 Right. It’s not a one-man operation like you described.

34:40 Speaker 2 So first of all, a kashrus system needs a finance department that operates separately. The people handling kashrus must not also handle the organization’s finances. Obviously, a kashrus organization needs income: it pays salaries, has expenses, and has laboratories. There are many, many expenses in kashrus, so it must have income. But the supervisors must not have financial considerations. That’s why the financial side has to be separate from the kashrus side.

35:15 Speaker 9 Mm-hmm.

35:18 Speaker 2 At the head of the system there must be rabbis who are genuine Torah scholars and who know the food industry. I come across rabbis who deal with all kinds of kashrus questions but don’t understand what happens on the ground. They don’t know how things are actually done, and their rulings can sometimes be a bit embarrassing.

35:43 Speaker 9 Meaning, he studied it, but he isn’t connected to it on the practical level...

35:46 Speaker 2 He learned the theory. He didn’t learn the practical side. Can someone who’s learned only the theory drive?

35:50 Speaker 9 No.

35:51 Speaker 2 You have to learn the practical side.

35:51 Speaker 9 It can make a difference.

35:52 Speaker 2 You have to understand steam, cooking processes, how to kasher industrial-scale machinery, and whether it can be kashered at all. You have to understand industry, understand what a factory is. We go into factories with seven or eight thousand workers. It’s not that you just— You have to understand the significance of every pipe there. At the head of the system, you need rabbis with a great deal of experience in this field. Every question is brought to them for a ruling, and they decide. And that is the rabbis’ job. They don’t have other things to do. That is their job. And under the rabbis—

36:32 Speaker 10 Sometimes those rabbis will have to travel to these places and see them.

36:35 Speaker 2 Of course. How else would they know?

36:37 Speaker 10 You mean flying to factories all over the world?

36:39 Speaker 2 Of course. Rabbi Levi was quite elderly, and he still traveled tirelessly through China, the Philippines, and Thailand.

36:48 Speaker 10 Wow.

36:50 Speaker 2 Under that rabbinic body, there need to be two groups. One is a team of professionals, each in their own field. You need an agronomist who knows how to supervise fields and crops. You need someone who is an expert in the mitzvos that apply to produce grown in Eretz Yisroel. At the Eida Hachareidis, that person is one of ours, a Chabad chossid. You need a shechitah expert, a fish expert, an expert on insects, an expert on ingredients. For each of these areas, you need a person whose sole specialty is that field.

37:33 Speaker 10 Both halachically and professionally.

37:34 Speaker 2 Halachically and professionally, so that he can present the question to the rabbis accurately in both respects and bring it to the point where they can decide. That’s what each one needs to have.

37:49 Speaker 10 Rabbis, and professionals in their respective fields.

37:50 Speaker 2 In their respective fields. Beyond that, there needs to be a national supervisor over the entire kashrus organization. His pay must not depend on the number of businesses the organization certifies. In other words, if his salary is set at, say, twenty thousand shekels a month, he gets the same twenty thousand whether there are two certified businesses or five thousand. That way, if he decides to remove certification from a place because it hasn’t behaved properly, it won’t affect his income. Financial considerations must play no part at all in those decisions. The same goes for all the professionals we mentioned: they receive a monthly salary.

38:45 Speaker 10 That isn’t tied to it.

38:45 Speaker 2 That isn’t tied to it. I headed the fish kashrus department at the Eida Hachareidis for five years.

38:51 Speaker 10 So you were the rabbi who specialized in that area.

38:53 Speaker 2 Yes.

38:53 Speaker 10 Wow.

38:55 Speaker 2 It made no difference how many importers I worked with or how many fish stores there were. My monthly salary stayed the same. I removed certification from some places and added others; it didn’t change anything. Money is not a consideration here at all.

39:10 Speaker 10 So it won’t be a factor or get in the way.

39:13 Speaker 2 That kashrus organization also needs a laboratory—a serious laboratory for checking insects—that can examine vegetables and determine whether to approve them, and check fish for parasites. It needs a serious laboratory. So when you ask me which certification you can rely on, you need to check which kashrus organizations meet the conditions I’ve described.

39:38 Speaker 10 That the money is separate from the...

39:41 Speaker 2 Exactly. There are many kashrus organizations, both in Israel and around the world, where the certifying rabbi is also the one who handles the money, the one who travels, the one who rules, the one who goes out and inspects, and the one who understands it all. He does everything. I’ll tell you a personal story. A few years ago, a relative of mine, a law student who had studied at the Chevron yeshivah, this fellow...

40:12 Speaker 10 Not there.

40:14 Speaker 2 Listen, Aharon, I’m going to Italy for Pesach. What do you mean? Some businessman hired me to be the hotel’s kashrus supervisor for Pesach. I said to him, “I don’t remember us ever talking about kashrus. Do you know anything about kashrus?” “What do you mean, know about kashrus? You have to bring meat. There’s [unclear] money for the whole... the whole kitchen. The whole kitchen. You heat it up as much as it heats up, and that’s it.” What? I don’t know what my mother does at home? Was I born yesterday? I was stunned. I was anxious, in shock. I said to him, “Tell me, do you know how to supervise kashrus? Do you know what an institutional kitchen is? Do you know what hatmanah on Shabbos is? What cooking involves? What about non-Jewish kitchen staff? What? This isn’t a home.” Well, three days later he calls. “Listen, I’m in the kitchen. Honestly, this too, and that... I don’t know where to begin, how to do things here.” “I don’t understand, but the person organizing it is a chareidi man from Bnei Brak, isn’t he?” “Yes.” He hadn’t hired a rabbi to be there. He hadn’t hired any rabbi; he’d hired me, and he was advertising that a rabbi was providing supervision. I called that rabbi, and he told me, “Listen, he took two hotels, and I’m only at the other hotel. I’m not taking responsibility for another hotel, even though there will be a lot of bookings. So he rented another hotel and hired a supervisor for it. I have nothing to do with it.” So he advertised him as supervising a hotel he had nothing to do with. Yes. I could see this was going to be quite a mess. I said, “Listen, let’s make a WhatsApp group, and I’ll add a kashrus expert. Photograph everything you see. Ask about anything you come across. I’ll try to help you.” And that’s what I did. I added an expert on insects and an expert on steam.

42:18 Speaker 2 And an expert on cooking, and an experienced hotel supervisor. I added them all to the group. I said, “Listen, as a friend, I’m asking you: I know it’s Erev Pesach and we’re all busy with kashrus. Help make sure Jews don’t stumble.” Wow. And that’s how it went; everything was handled through the... I have to tell you, after two days, we discussed it among ourselves. We said, “Listen, it won’t be kosher for Pesach, but let’s at least make sure there’s no treif food there.” That was the level we were at. That was the level. Wow. There were chassidim there, people wearing shtreimels. Yes, as far as they were concerned, they’d come on vacation. The questions were so difficult, the problems so serious. On the first day of Chol Hamoed, I told him, “Listen, you can’t do any more than this. Tell the guests you’re going home. You can’t supervise the place.” It ended with violence from the organizer. He quickly brought in someone from the Tzohar rabbinate to take over. Under that man’s supervision, you couldn’t even drink a glass of mineral water. He continued supervising there. Someone extremely lenient—so lenient that I wouldn’t have drunk mineral water under his supervision. Wow. So when you say “a kashrus organization,” I constantly see advertisements: this person’s name, this rabbi, that rabbi, another rabbi. But there are so many questions. You know, I’ve worked in kashrus supervision for thirty-five years. I’ve supervised in forty-seven countries and hundreds of factories around the world. Do you know how often I’m asked to supervise hotels? I don’t dare take it on. I’m afraid. Do you know how many kashrus issues there can be on Friday night? I once went to inspect a hall on Shabbos and saw a non-Jewish worker pouring sauce over chickens in a warming cabinet. I asked the supervisor, “Tell me, has this sauce been cooked already?” I said to him, “Now he’s going to cook the chickens together with the sauce.”

44:32 Speaker 11 There are so many details.

44:34 Speaker 2 There are so many details, so many questions, and you see people’s seals of approval in the newspapers on vacation packages and so on. You have to understand that there are professional kashrus organizations for whom this is their job, and they need everything that goes into running a kashrus organization. Twenty-five years ago, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel contacted me. There were rumors about a certain kashrus organization in South America that was bringing a great many products into Israel.

45:09 Speaker 11 What does that mean? It certifies products there, and the kashrus authorities rely on its certification.

45:13 Speaker 2 The Chief Rabbinate relies on it, and it has a Yiddish-sounding name and a very convincing seal. Really. People were eating those products. They flew me to that country and said, “Check whether this certification is actually reliable.” So I went there, and no one knew why I’d come. I stayed for three months. During the first month, I just went around getting a feel for things, talking, listening and looking.

45:42 Speaker 11 In factories and in general.

45:44 Speaker 2 I went to factories too, I went to factories too. And I’m telling you, a chareidi Jew would eat food with that certification just because of its Yiddish-sounding name and the attractive seal it had made. But I’m telling you, there were violations involving meat and milk.

45:59 Speaker 11 In products it had certified.

46:00 Speaker 2 After two months there—after a month there—I approached him, and then he learned that I had come to inspect his operation. He gave me a list of three thousand products, a kind of list he put together, that the community in that country could eat without any concern. When I checked, that meant something like six hundred factories. Now, in that country it isn’t like here. Here you drive to an industrial area and have twenty factories close together. There, each factory takes a full day.

46:33 Speaker 11 Right, one is here and another is there.

46:34 Speaker 2 Exactly. You have to travel. I said, “Listen, looking at this list—you don’t work on Friday, right? And I hope you don’t work on Shabbos. On Sunday the factories are closed. That leaves you three days a week to travel. How many supervisors do you have?” He said, “No, I’m the supervisor. My son helps me sometimes.” By my calculation, you visit each factory once every two years. And you want everyone to eat these products? I went to some of those factories; I managed to visit four or five of his. I returned to Israel and disqualified his certification. For many years he was forbidden to bring goods into Israel, and we arranged different supervision there. We brought in people from [unclear] to supervise, and built a different supervision system there.

47:30 Speaker 11 On those trips, you must have met a lot of shluchim.

47:33 Speaker 2 That’s right.

47:35 Speaker 11 And [unclear].

47:36 Speaker 2 I also helped build a Chabad House in Illinois.

47:38 Speaker 11 Yes. Where, in Chicago?

47:40 Speaker 2 Near Chicago.

47:41 Speaker 11 Oh? So if you could tell us a little about that, about those experiences with... You get to out-of-the-way places all over the world, I imagine. And tell us a little about the challenges shluchim brought to you—the kashrus challenges you’ve dealt with together with shluchim.

47:56 Speaker 2 First I want to give an introduction, a very, very important introduction. What is a shliach’s role in the place he’s sent to? Here we need to divide shluchim into two categories.

48:14 Speaker 11 As usual, we’re splitting the...

48:15 Speaker 2 Right. There’s a difference between a shliach of the Rebbe in Jerusalem and a shliach of the Rebbe in Morocco. Correct?

48:28 Speaker 11 Yes.

48:28 Speaker 2 There’s a difference between a shliach living in Tzfas and one living in some remote village in Belgium. A shliach in Jerusalem or Bnei Brak doesn’t deal with kashrus.

48:45 Speaker 11 Right, he’s involved in spreading the wellsprings.

48:47 Speaker 2 Right. Kashrus is outside his field. Is he the rabbi of Bnei Brak? Can he be Rabbi Landau? Every... there’s no Jew there who has a problem obtaining kosher food. That’s not the issue.

48:59 Speaker 11 That’s not his shlichus.

49:00 Speaker 2 Exactly. He’ll spread... tefillin and Shabbos candles. He has plenty more to do besides kashrus. Even a shliach in the United States doesn’t face major kashrus challenges. Why? He calls a friend who lives in New York and says, “Listen, load up such-and-such a number of cases of beef for me,” and so on. They put it on a truck and it comes to him. But there are places where it’s hard to get ingredients, and I’ve been to places like that. Now let’s look at a town somewhere. There’s a university in this town. At that university there are three hundred Jews.

49:51 Speaker 11 Who come there to study.

49:52 Speaker 2 They come to study for five or six years. Are these students going to fast for six years?

50:00 Speaker 11 No, they’re going to eat.

50:02 Speaker 2 They’re going to eat what’s available. And now the shliach’s job is to get them to eat kosher food. For them to eat kosher food, it has to appeal to them. It has to look good—no less appealing than the food available in the marketplace. Right?

50:21 Speaker 11 Yes.

50:24 Speaker 2 The shliach himself, until he builds a system for himself, will make do with instant meals and cans of tuna sent to him from Israel, and things like that. I want to tell you that I’ve seen Chabad shluchim with tremendous mesirus nefesh. Sometimes we don’t understand what a shliach’s mesirus nefesh means. He misses family events; he’s stuck in some remote place; he has to teach his sons and daughters the whole curriculum. He has to start with the alef-beis. That’s why I said we have to distinguish between a shliach in an established place and one somewhere else. They’re completely different situations. A shliach who lives in Tzfas deals with his children’s education like any other father.

51:07 Speaker 11 Right, he sends them to the...

51:08 Speaker 2 Without... that. And tomorrow morning he needs to find kosher food, at least at a basic level. Chabad shechitah isn’t always available, unless he knows how to shecht himself. I saw that even Rabbi Blau of the Eidah Hachareidis saw Rabbi Wilhelm’s shechitah in Canada, in Thailand, and said it was shechitah of the highest standard. But the shliach has to start bringing in food, and he can’t always bring in the best hechsherim.

51:41 Speaker 11 Mm-hmm.

51:42 Speaker 2 But every Jew, every Jewish soul who eats something kosher rather than treif for lunch today because of him—he has saved that person. He has saved his soul; he has saved his heart. We know what food can do, what dulling of the heart means. We need to reach every soul, and that’s his job. Shluchim have always told me, “I’m not here to arrange a kashrus supervisor for your meals. You’ll manage; you won’t eat treif. But I have students here, I have travelers here.” So a Chabad House isn’t always the answer for food.

52:16 Speaker 11 In other words, for someone who is careful about—

52:18 Speaker 2 Exactly.

52:18 Speaker 11 For us, going to a Chabad House isn’t always the answer.

52:20 Speaker 2 Right. He should contact the shliach in advance. The shliach will ask him, “Are you one of Anash? Are you one of us?” Then he’ll know this person is particular and can tell him, “Listen, you can eat this; as for that... I couldn’t make it work.” Just because something comes from a Chabad House doesn’t mean it has a stamp saying he can eat it. We need to understand that. The various lists, too, were made for Jews.

52:47 Speaker 11 So if I’m flying, let’s say, to Europe, I hope there are lists going around on WhatsApp or something, all the—

52:51 Speaker 2 When they established the OK and the OU in the United States, they didn’t establish them for our people. They established them for American Jews, to save them. The Rebbe of Bobov—I’m a Bobover chossid—the Rebbe of Bobov came from Poland to the United States after the war. There was a camp on the East Side of Manhattan where everyone was taken in. Everyone came to the East Side of Manhattan. On the first Shabbos that the Rebbe of Bobov walked down the street, he saw a synagogue where Jews were sitting and putting on tefillin on Shabbos. It was Shabbos, and he saw a full synagogue, with all the Jews davening in tefillin. It was very strange. I mean, if you’re Reform, as I understand it, you wouldn’t put on tefillin even on a weekday. But what was this—standing there on Shabbos putting on tefillin? So he couldn’t hold back. He went into the synagogue, saw someone who looked like an important person, and asked him, “Tell me, what—

53:40 Speaker 11 What’s going on here?

53:41 Speaker 2 Why tefillin now?” The man said, “Listen, we’re in America. We have to go to work on Shabbos.” You know that in the 1940s, if you didn’t work on Shabbos in America, you didn’t have a job; you had nothing to eat. “We have to work on Shabbos, so we don’t have the sign of Shabbos. At least let us have the sign of tefillin.” That was the level of the Jews in the United States. It was for them that they created a kashrus organization to provide them with food. After all, as you know, Reb Moshe Feinstein permitted non-Jewish powdered milk after the war, though we are careful not to eat it. There was nothing else. So what would you give them? Have them consume non-Jewish milk outright? That’s even worse. So—

54:21 Speaker 11 The Rebbe, in letters to people who said their child wasn’t feeling well, would often say to check that there wasn’t—

54:28 Speaker 2 For children.

54:28 Speaker 11 Yes, to check that there was no non-Jewish powdered milk, to make sure there wasn’t.

54:31 Speaker 2 For children. For adults, it wasn’t even a question. So we need to understand that these basic kashrus organizations abroad were established first and foremost to save Jews, before they became a way of providing supervision. We are serious, G-d-fearing Jews, careful to avoid dulling the heart because of the kind of soul we want to have. Why do we eat kosher? Why do we need kosher food at all? Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave us a sign. Hakadosh Boruch Hu told us why we need kosher food. He said that eating non-kosher food dulls a person’s heart. What does “dulling the heart” mean? You say “dulling the heart,” but many people say, “The main thing is the heart. My heart is Jewish.” Everything, everything, everything is the heart.

55:24 Speaker 11 Right. Practical mitzvos—the main thing is what’s in your heart.

55:27 Speaker 2 The heart, the heart. Once, at work, I saw a secular Jew of forty who had suffered a heart attack. I went to visit him. He said, “I don’t know why Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave me such a punishment, that I’ve already had a heart attack at forty.” I told him, “Listen, it wasn’t Hakadosh Boruch Hu; it was you. If you loaded all the mitzvos onto your heart, your heart couldn’t survive it. I have mitzvos on my arm, on my head, in my wallet—there are lots of mitzvos. I spread them out. You loaded everything, everything, everything onto your heart. Your heart couldn’t take it.” I see two Jews who look the same. They studied in the same yeshivah, were even in the same group—everything was the same. You see one of them enter the beis midrash, the shul, with fire and enthusiasm. How does he run to the mikveh? How does he immerse? How does he approach davening? He won’t leave before he’s opened a Chassidus text. You see the fire, the fire. Then you see the other one, who looks just the same, but he’s cold. As someone once told me, some people wake up in the morning and thank Hakadosh Boruch Hu for giving them the 613 mitzvos. They give thanks every moment; [unclear] every moment.

56:47 Speaker 12 You can really see it in them.

56:49 Speaker 2 And others wake up in the morning with 613 problems. Every little thing they have to do: “Oy, oy, now I have to daven. Oy, this is hard.” What’s the difference between them? It’s the dulling of the heart. When you look after your heart, you have fire for mitzvos. When you see someone who is cold, know that this coldness comes from laxness in kashrus. It’s written in the Torah. I’m not making it up. So when we approach food, we need to see it as maintaining our engine. A person buys an expensive car, and the manufacturer tells him, “Every ten thousand shekels—every ten thousand kilometers—you need to use a particular, expensive oil.” Would he use a different oil?

57:45 Speaker 12 No.

57:45 Speaker 2 But why did the manufacturer specify that particular oil? He doesn’t ask; he doesn’t know. That’s what the car manual says, so that’s what he uses. He wants the engine to last for many years; he won’t put in some substitute. Hakadosh Boruch Hu said: this is what maintains the engine. Your heart is maintained by kosher food. The more you improve what you put into it, the better the engine will perform. When you go into a shul and look at a Jew, you can say, “This one is very particular about kashrus; that one is less particular.” You can see it all in the way he approaches the table with his siddur.

58:21 Speaker 12 What, what a responsibility.

58:22 Speaker 2 Exactly.

58:23 Speaker 12 Right. So we were talking about shluchim.

58:27 Speaker 2 Yes.

58:28 Speaker 12 So we were saying there are lists. Sometimes you fly somewhere and someone sends you a list on WhatsApp.

58:35 Speaker 2 Then you need to check with the shliach which items on the list actually meet your standards and which don’t. You can’t just connect with the local community there and say, “Here I am at Chabad.” You need to know what really meets your standards and what...

58:51 Speaker 12 Like you said at the beginning, the rabbi’s job is to adapt himself to the...

58:56 Speaker 2 He needs to keep moving upward, and that’s what the shluchim do. Year after year, they raise their standards, but it doesn’t happen in a day. He can work with what’s available around him, but his focus isn’t on the traveler arriving from outside. He’s looking at the students there and asking, “How can I lift them higher? Look, I lit Chanukah candles with them; I read the Megillah there.”

59:20 Speaker 12 So when it comes to kashrus, what are the basics that shluchim generally provide?

59:24 Speaker 2 First of all, don’t violate halachah. We start with halachah. After that, there are various other things, practices that were adopted later, and those come at a second stage. First of all, don’t violate halachah, obviously. He’s not going to permit nonkosher meat, right? Halachah comes first. But there are leniencies, various leniencies. With cooking, for example, there are different leniencies. So he needs to reach a point where he’s increasing in holiness, but that isn’t always practical for us.

59:55 Speaker 12 Do shluchim call you to consult about a lot of things?

59:57 Speaker 2 All the time. We have a WhatsApp group for shluchim with kashrus experts, and questions come up about ingredients and all sorts of things—what can be permitted and what can’t. Questions about fish. We get lists from each person who arrives somewhere, lists of the fish available there, and I have to explain how to check for scales, which fish have scales and which don’t, which are kosher and which aren’t. I want to tell you a story. A story that crossed continents. There’s a fish called kingklip. That’s what it’s called.

1:00:35 Speaker 3 Kingklip?

1:00:36 Speaker 2 Yes, that’s the name of the fish. And in South Africa they’re used to eating this fish. They eat it.

1:00:47 Speaker 3 Right. Is that mainly where it’s found?

1:00:50 Speaker 2 No, but there’s a lot of it there, and they eat it. One day they decided they wanted to open a serious kollel in South Africa, and they brought a head of the kollel from South America to strengthen it and build it up. A Jew, a great Torah scholar. In South America there’s a fish called kingklip, and it’s known there as a nonkosher fish that you may not eat. So in his first week, he goes to buy food for Shabbos. He walks into a fish store and sees kingklip for sale. He says, “Master of the Universe, how many nonkosher creatures are there in Africa? What? Everyone knows this fish isn’t kosher!” And he immediately started talking to the community. As happens among Jews, they split fifty-fifty: half said kosher, half said not kosher. Notices and posters went up and, you know, they were practically blocking Highway 4 in Africa. In short, it became quite an uproar.

1:01:51 Speaker 3 Right.

1:01:53 Speaker 2 The community leaders saw that they had brought in a head of the kollel to strengthen the community, and instead there was now a dispute in the community—the opposite of what they wanted. They called him in and said, “Listen, we’re asking you to go back. This isn’t what we wanted.” And he went back.

1:02:12 Speaker 3 Back to South America.

1:02:15 Speaker 2 Yes. He went into a store there and bought a kingklip, put it in one of those Styrofoam boxes, and traveled with it to Bnei Brak. He came to the home of Rabbi Nissim Karelitz, who was one of Bnei Brak’s leading dayanim, brought him the fish and said, “Listen, they eat this in Africa, but it’s a nonkosher fish.” Now, checking whether a fish is kosher or not is the easiest thing.

1:02:38 Speaker 3 Right, scales.

1:02:39 Speaker 2 What else is there to investigate? Who slaughtered it, who didn’t? You take a ruler or a knife, run it from the tail along the whole fish, and look. Do you see scales? Don’t you see scales? There’s no...

1:02:51 Speaker 3 Right, it’s not complicated.

1:02:53 Speaker 2 And they did check it, turning the fish over, and there were no scales. So Rabbi Nissim Karelitz issued a letter saying that this fish was not kosher. They were selling kingklip from South Africa in Israel, so notices went out here to collect the fish and destroy them. They sent Rabbi Nissim Karelitz’s letter to Africa, and the half who sided with the head of the kollel made huge posters out of it. Every Friday, all over the place in Africa: this fish is not kosher. The community was stunned. They went and bought fish, put them in a cooler, and traveled to Bnei Brak.

1:03:28 Speaker 3 To Bnei Brak. They arrived at—

1:03:29 Speaker 2 They brought it in, put down the fish, took a knife—and there were scales. No, this one is kosher. Perhaps the scales had fallen off the other one in the sea? So he asked for another written ruling, and by then it had become a mess. That’s when they called me. I said, “Gentlemen, this is the one case where two different fish have the same name.”

1:03:52 Speaker 3 In the whole world.

1:03:53 Speaker 2 Of all the sixty thousand kinds of fish people eat, this is the only one where two different fish share a name: one has scales and one doesn’t. I brought books—I have books on all the fish in the world—and showed them the map in the book marking the fish with scales, found in Africa, and the fish without scales, found in South America. They’re different fish. This one really is kosher, and that one isn’t. Now let me ask you a question. If a merchant, a businessman from Africa, traveled to South America and went into a store, would he buy kingklip or not?

1:04:30 Speaker 4 A merchant?

1:04:31 Speaker 2 Yes, just an ordinary person, a businessman.

1:04:34 Speaker 4 He would buy it.

1:04:35 Speaker 2 Exactly. He knows kingklip is kosher.

1:04:37 Speaker 4 Right, he eats it all the time.

1:04:38 Speaker 2 He wouldn’t think it was a different fish, and he’d end up eating a treif fish, a nonkosher fish.

1:04:44 Speaker 4 Mm-hmm.

1:04:45 Speaker 2 Here in Israel they sold fish fillets labeled “white tuna,” but the fish was actually blue marlin. There’s a question about whether that fish is kosher at all. Even with things we think are no problem whatsoever, you see that you have to know.

1:05:07 Speaker 4 Things that seem straightforward.

1:05:09 Speaker 2 You have to know to look for a reliable kashrus certification that checks these things.

1:05:16 Speaker 4 Right. And speaking of shluchim, when they’re starting out and arrive in a new place, what’s the main thing they deal with in terms of kashrus? I know that for meat, they usually arrange shechitah or import it from somewhere nearby. But for shluchim in remote places, what have you seen as the main challenges?

1:05:33 Speaker 2 The biggest challenge for a shliach—

1:05:35 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:05:36 Speaker 2 Is actually getting milk.

1:05:39 Speaker 4 Milk.

1:05:39 Speaker 2 Milk and cheese are the biggest challenge, because frozen meat can always be sent from somewhere else. I’ll tell you, when I was a kashrus supervisor and used to fly—there were periods when I flew to Thailand and China every week—I always had two suitcases full of canned goods and food for the Chabad House. Ketchup, flavorings, sauces. I always brought things. Every kashrus supervisor traveling to a Chabad House brings things. The regulars who know the routine bring that sort of thing to the Chabad House. The biggest challenge is milk and dairy products.

1:06:14 Speaker 4 Why?

1:06:14 Speaker 2 Because there you have to find a dairy farm willing to produce it for you, and station a young man there all the time so it will be cholov Yisroel. You have to deal with surgeries performed on the cows, which is a whole story in itself. Then you have to supervise which dairy the milk goes to and make sure there’s a dairy producing just for you, so it doesn’t get mixed with other milk. It’s very challenging. And making cheese is a project. You need the ingredients for it. Some Chabad Houses have managed to arrange all this.

1:06:40 Speaker 4 Oh, actually arrange the whole...

1:06:41 Speaker 2 Because, as I told you, a student who can’t get kosher milk will use the local milk. He won’t go without it.

1:06:49 Speaker 4 And that’s the shliach’s job.

1:06:50 Speaker 2 Right. So tell me, for example, if powdered milk is available for a while, the shliach may have to use it. Powdered milk is better than having nothing at all.

1:07:02 Speaker 4 Right.

1:07:02 Speaker 2 So that’s why I say it’s the challenge. Most things can be brought in from somewhere else.

1:07:09 Speaker 4 But the main challenge is milk and dairy products.

1:07:11 Speaker 2 Exactly. All those fresh things you can’t leave sitting in a container on a ship.

1:07:17 Speaker 4 Right.

1:07:17 Speaker 2 It’s a very big challenge.

1:07:18 Speaker 4 Now I wanted to ask you—

1:07:19 Speaker 2 The second thing is arranging bread and a bakery.

1:07:24 Speaker 4 Why? You can make that at home, can’t you?

1:07:26 Speaker 2 But you have to arrange flour and ovens. You can’t do it at home. If you want to provide for a hundred or three hundred people, you need a big mixer. That’s a challenge too.

1:07:37 Speaker 4 I have brothers-in-law who are shluchim in Africa and India, and suddenly you think about all the things we just buy in a store here. You know, you go in and buy them. You don’t realize what it takes for a shliach to put on an event with challah and, as you said, dairy products and things like that. It’s incredible.

1:07:52 Speaker 2 And of course, alongside kashrus, the first project for a shliach involves other things too.

1:07:57 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:07:57 Speaker 2 Arranging a mikvah.

1:08:00 Speaker 4 A mikvah, yes.

1:08:00 Speaker 2 That’s no less important than kashrus. I mean, they have to be done in parallel. He can’t do one instead of the other. A mikvah and kashrus are the basics he has to take care of.

1:08:11 Speaker 4 So that people can live a proper Jewish life there.

1:08:13 Speaker 2 That will come.

1:08:14 Speaker 4 Right.

1:08:14 Speaker 2 That will come. When there’s a mikvah, when there’s family purity, when there’s kosher food—that’s purity too—the Jewish life will come. I’m telling you, there’s a Chabad House I was involved in establishing.

1:08:23 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:08:23 Speaker 2 So what did the shliach do there? There were 150 families connected to the Reform community, and within five or six years he brought them all over from the Reform congregation to his community. The pastor fought him, and the authorities fought him. Today he has a magnificent Chabad House that one of the community members donated.

1:08:41 Speaker 4 Wow.

1:08:42 Speaker 2 It’s truly miraculous. I’m telling you, the Rebbe was there every day. Every day the Rebbe was there helping him. I’m telling you, I won’t even say his name. Rabbi Shimon Kadner[?].

1:08:52 Speaker 4 Kadner[?]?

1:08:53 Speaker 2 Yes, he—I'm telling you, just this month he dedicated a magnificent new mikveh, one of the finest. I remember the first time I set foot on that property with him, fifteen years ago. If you'd told me there would be a magnificent mikveh there, I'd have thought you needed to be hospitalized.

1:09:08 Speaker 4 Wow, baruch Hashem.

1:09:09 Speaker 2 I'm telling you, I was in touch with him every day. I'm telling you, the Rebbe was there every day. There wasn't a day the Rebbe wasn't there.

1:09:15 Speaker 4 Wow, today there's a mikveh there, and...

1:09:18 Speaker 2 You don't understand what's there. And more than that, there was a fish-processing plant there that needed kosher supervision. That's how the whole Chabad House started.

1:09:29 Speaker 4 At the end, I wanted to ask how your connection to Illinois began.

1:09:32 Speaker 2 In the end, Rubashkin was put in prison right where we built the Chabad House. He was a shliach who stayed close to Rubashkin for about three years. That young man was a shliach who was in touch with him every day. So, so you understand, I'm telling you it was a miracle that—

1:09:55 Speaker 4 You saw it.

1:09:56 Speaker 2 Every day, every day there was a miracle there.

1:09:58 Speaker 4 I wanted to ask you: with all the advances in technology today, they're reaching food too. I mean, today people are developing food in laboratories.

1:10:05 Speaker 2 Right.

1:10:06 Speaker 4 Beyond... No, how does halachah—and in your experience and with your knowledge—deal with that? Because you can't just give a hechsher to something that's a steak made in a lab.

1:10:17 Speaker 2 So, so.

1:10:18 Speaker 4 Is that something you've had occasion to work on here in...?

1:10:20 Speaker 2 I think I'm the one person in kashrus with the deepest background in this. I study it from a scientific standpoint too. I think I'm the only one. There are several areas.

1:10:33 Speaker 4 I thought you'd start by dividing it into two.

1:10:35 Speaker 2 No, it's four.

1:10:36 Speaker 4 Four.

1:10:39 Speaker 2 But let's give an introduction first, before we get into this whole subject of... In professional terms it's called food tech.

1:10:47 Speaker 4 Food tech, yes.

1:10:48 Speaker 2 Let's start with a brief introduction. The world of food is going to change, just as today we don't eat the food our ancestors ate. Right?

1:11:01 Speaker 4 Yes, all those things—the airplane, like, that flies and...

1:11:04 Speaker 2 It's not just industry. Everything you eat today, everything you eat today has undergone genetic modification: tomatoes, wheat, potatoes. Nothing you eat is what naturally comes out of the field. Technology has changed and improved everything to suit our needs. That's why we have vegetables all year round that used to be seasonal. That's why grapes have suddenly become sweeter and darker. All of that is because of genetic changes made to them. The world is changing. First of all, what percentage of humanity do you think are farmers? What do you think?

1:11:49 Speaker 4 Farmers, there are...

1:11:50 Speaker 2 What percentage are farmers?

1:11:52 Speaker 4 Wow, good question. I don't know.

1:11:53 Speaker 2 Three percent.

1:11:55 Speaker 4 In the whole world, three percent are involved in producing food.

1:11:57 Speaker 2 In agriculture. And that number keeps falling.

1:12:02 Speaker 4 You're saying it's going to—

1:12:03 Speaker 2 Fall further and further. If you go around here—we're in the north, and there are a great many farmers here—you'll see that most farmers are sixty or older.

1:12:16 Speaker 4 And their children aren't.

1:12:17 Speaker 2 They don't want to be.

1:12:17 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:12:18 Speaker 2 He'll earn twenty thousand shekels and work out in the sun and heat all the time. A farmer works seven days a week, including Shabbos and holidays. He can go to Tel Aviv, work in a factory, and get the same salary in air conditioning. Why would he do this? And we see it: why do you think food prices keep rising? The supply of raw materials keeps shrinking.

1:12:45 Speaker 4 What do you mean, the supply of raw materials is shrinking?

1:12:47 Speaker 2 They're growing less.

1:12:48 Speaker 4 Ah.

1:12:49 Speaker 2 Second, the temperature on Earth is changing dramatically. It's become very hard to grow crops in recent years. You know, for example, in winter they tell you, “Listen, we got as much rain this year as last year.” Right? Isn't that what they say at the end of the year?

1:13:08 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:13:09 Speaker 2 What don't they tell you?

1:13:11 Speaker 4 How much?

1:13:12 Speaker 2 That it fell in two weeks. It used to be a little rain, then a little more rain, then a little more.

1:13:16 Speaker 4 Right. That's really been the case in recent years.

1:13:17 Speaker 2 Suddenly you get two weeks of nonstop rain. Flooding all over the country, people drowning. That's not good for agriculture. It isn't. You need a winter with rain spread through it. Rain all at once brings cold, destroys the blossoms, and causes the grains and seeds—the seeds—to rot. You need the right amount of wind, the right amount of cold.

1:13:44 Speaker 4 The amount of rain.

1:13:44 Speaker 2 Rain spread over a longer period, and that's changing all the time. It causes enormous damage to agriculture. The world's population is growing. We're producing less food, and there's more demand for it. That's leading the world to understand that it needs to develop food different from what we eat now, and to start developing food produced in a lab rather than grown in fields.

1:14:23 Speaker 4 Meaning, when you look to the future, are people talking about an entire shopping cart—fruit, vegetables, cucumbers, everything—being produced in a lab? Is that where this is going?

1:14:36 Speaker 2 If you're asking me what things will be like in a hundred years?

1:14:38 Speaker 4 Yes, just some years down the road, without putting a number on it.

1:14:43 Speaker 2 What they're saying.

1:14:44 Speaker 4 Yes, what the people working on this around the world are saying.

1:14:49 Speaker 2 You come home in the evening. You have a computer at home. Next to the computer is a large 3D printer. Your name is on the computer; you double-click it, and today is Tuesday.

1:15:06 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:15:08 Speaker 2 Six in the evening, dinnertime. You double-click Tuesday, double-click dinner, and it prints your meal.

1:15:16 Speaker 4 That's where it's going.

1:15:17 Speaker 2 That's where it's going. Now, if you went to the doctor in the morning and he told you, “Listen, you're low on B12, you're low on B1,” you wouldn't go to the pharmacy to get it. It would already be included in the cartridge of ingredients.

1:15:39 Speaker 4 He sends it to your computer.

1:15:41 Speaker 2 It's all in there. The technology already exists. I ate a fish that had been printed on a printer, and it looked the same, smelled the same, and felt the same in your mouth.

1:15:55 Speaker 4 And was it kosher?

1:15:56 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:15:57 Speaker 4 Because the ingredients were kosher.

1:15:59 Speaker 2 Yes. So that's where it's going. If you ask me whether it'll happen tomorrow morning, or in another ten years...

1:16:09 Speaker 4 Okay, it'll take time.

1:16:10 Speaker 2 It'll take a little time. And why does it take time? When they printed the first meat patty—it was in Holland—each patty cost three hundred thousand euros.

1:16:27 Speaker 4 That's crazy.

1:16:28 Speaker 2 And they want to get it down to half a dollar a patty. Today it's already down to thirty dollars.

1:16:37 Speaker 4 We're very—

1:16:38 Speaker 2 So that's where we're headed.

1:16:39 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:16:42 Speaker 2 In the meantime, there are all kinds of attempts to make intermediate products. For example, they take a stem cell from a cow—something microscopic—and put it in a lab with special equipment. It starts multiplying as it would in the body, reproducing the cells: ten, twenty, forty, eighty, and so on, into the billions and billions, until we begin to see tissue, tissue, tissue, tissue. In practice, ten cells could provide meat steaks for all of the Jewish people for years.

1:17:22 Speaker 4 And that's the power of taking those tiny particles.

1:17:25 Speaker 2 Now we come to the question: Is it meat?

1:17:29 Speaker 4 Isn't it meat?

1:17:30 Speaker 2 Is it ever min hachai—meat taken from a living animal?

1:17:32 Speaker 4 Wow, wow.

1:17:33 Speaker 2 There are halachic solutions to this too. Every question has a solution.

1:17:36 Speaker 4 So you work on this, right?

1:17:39 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:17:39 Speaker 4 Incredible.

1:17:39 Speaker 2 Now, unfortunately, some of the people working on it don't understand the actual processes, and when they sometimes bring—

1:17:46 Speaker 4 What you said at the beginning: expertise is very relative.

1:17:49 Speaker 2 I'll give you an example. Look, they bring rabbis to various laboratories. Israel is a powerhouse in this area of research. The rabbis come in without any idea how a lab operates or how the testing is done, and they're embarrassed to say so. They walk around the lab, nod their heads like this, and then leave and issue rulings. I'll give you an example. There's a company in Rechovot that produces, uh, chicken breast in a lab.

1:18:18 Speaker 4 And is it already being sold to people?

1:18:20 Speaker 2 Yes. Well, no, it's very expensive. Yes. It takes its stem cells from eggs. So there's a rabbi whose responsum you can find in various places. He wrote a long answer: since an egg is pareve and it came from a chicken, and so on, there's no halachic problem and you can eat it. A very well-reasoned, fine answer, right? What doesn't he know? That the egg had been in an incubator for several days and a chick had already begun to develop inside it. After all, stem cells have to be taken from a living creature. You can't get them from an egg. Once development has begun inside the egg, that egg is already treif, so the product is treif. The whole answer he wrote is therefore wrong; its entire premise is wrong. That's why I say that when you come to rule on this... That's why, for several years now, I've been studying this at a university, so that in a few more years I'll be able to give a hechsher to it. To rule on these things, you have to know the processes. The one thing that's already on the shelf at an affordable price is milk made in a lab, which today is called [unclear] pareve milk. It's made from milk proteins. They take the milk protein, [unclear], and make it pareve, and sell it. That's already on the shelf. There's lab-made honey too.

1:19:43 Speaker 4 Today it's—

1:19:43 Speaker 2 It's simply a machine doing the bee's work. You put nectar in one end, and honey comes out the other.

1:19:52 Speaker 4 And is it written on the products that they're produced...

1:19:54 Speaker 2 Yes, it’s made from that. And I’ve already eaten, in laboratories—not available to the public yet—beef, for example. It wasn’t a steak; it was little bits of beef. You actually eat it, and it feels like beef. In the taste, on your tongue, it feels like beef. Do you know what it’s made from?

1:20:17 Speaker 4 No.

1:20:18 Speaker 2 Banana peels.

1:20:20 Speaker 4 Banana peels?

1:20:21 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

1:20:22 Speaker 4 And it tastes like meat and everything?

1:20:25 Speaker 2 It feels like meat. You can buy a sunny-side-up egg in supermarkets, kosher l’mehadrin, that’s made from pea protein.

1:20:37 Speaker 4 What a Geulah. Some things are changing it completely.

1:20:40 Speaker 2 Exactly. I saw sausages in a laboratory—not available to the public yet, still in the lab—but I ate them, and they really, really taste like sausages in every respect. Seventy percent of the raw ingredients are carrots. So—

1:20:57 Speaker 4 Crazy.

1:20:57 Speaker 2 The whole world of food is going to change.

1:20:59 Speaker 4 That’s where it’s headed.

1:21:00 Speaker 2 There simply won’t be a choice; there won’t be other food. Look, every year food gets more expensive, and people are already struggling financially because they don’t have the money. But what can you do? People don’t want to work in agriculture. So the world is looking for solutions.

1:21:16 Speaker 4 So if I came to you now as a young couple, building our home, and I wanted to get all this straight—your recommendation would be to look for a kashrus organization that’s structured in a way that... I want to get something practical out of what we’ve discussed.

1:21:33 Speaker 2 Let’s divide this into two parts. But I want it to be practical—not just “don’t eat this, don’t eat that,” but to understand the issues a bit, and then go from there. A young couple building their home in a city in Israel doesn’t have kashrus questions. Things are very well organized. A Jew living in Tzfas has Rabbi Landau, the Eidah Hachareidis, and Rabbi Bistritzky providing supervision. It’s very simple.

1:22:04 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:22:05 Speaker 2 That’s not what we’re talking about.

1:22:06 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:22:07 Speaker 2 Nor are we talking about a young couple moving to Jerusalem or Beit Shemesh. Right? Let’s talk about a young couple moving to Beit She’an, for example. They need to set up their kitchen there. At the supermarket they’ll find plenty of products certified by the Eidah Hachareidis and Rabbi Landau, but there are things they won’t find.

1:22:30 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:22:31 Speaker 2 And that’s where they have to ask themselves: What can I do? With a particular product, sometimes you need to know two things: Are there serious halachic questions about it, or do we know it really isn’t problematic? Or—actually, I want to make a very important point here. You can also decide what you expect of a kashrus organization. I suggest that a young couple not work that out alone, but do it with someone knowledgeable. People come to me from all sorts of places around the country, including people who have moved to Eilat, Binyamina, and elsewhere. There’s also the question of educating children, which is very important. A Jew from Bat Yam asked me about a chain of bakeries that only bakes—it doesn’t make the products. Everything it bakes comes from the Eidah Hachareidis. All its frozen cartons arrive with Eidah Hachareidis certification, and there’s a mashgiach from our community there. But the bags and papers bear the stamp of a kashrus organization we don’t bring into our homes.

1:24:00 Speaker 4 The certification given to the place itself.

1:24:02 Speaker 2 To the place itself. It’s just a stamp. The mashgiach tells me, “I’m here. Nothing comes in that isn’t from the Eidah Hachareidis. I have a dairy oven and a pareve oven, and separate trays; everything is marked.” So he asks me whether it’s all right to buy those products for his home. I thought about it and thought about it. Then I said, “Listen: Until your child is eleven, don’t buy from there.” Why? In the end, a child will do what he sees at home. A four-year-old who sees that stamp in the kitchen won’t know that this is a bakery you checked and found everything in order. Tomorrow he’ll go to a store with his friends and say, “Look, we eat things with this certification at home. Let’s buy this chocolate.” You can explain it to an older child, and he’ll understand: We don’t generally eat products with this certification, but in this case we checked, we know everything comes from the Eidah Hachareidis, I’m in touch with the mashgiach, and so on. I buy it with that stamp, but the stamp neither adds nor takes away anything. So you can buy it. But know that a small child notices these things, even when we think he doesn’t. There’s a well-known story about my father, z"l. A young married man once met him in the street and asked, “At what age does educating a child begin?” My father asked him, “How old is your son?” “Six months.” “You’re already late.”

1:25:41 Speaker 4 Too late.

1:25:41 Speaker 2 We need to understand that the example we set—the way we bring things into our home—is what will shape things. You can’t look for excuses afterward.

1:25:50 Speaker 4 Mm, amen.

1:25:54 Speaker 2 I’m asked a lot about people traveling to the United States. People are going all the time.

1:26:03 Speaker 4 Purim is coming up, and all the guys are already making plans for Tishrei.

1:26:05 Speaker 2 Yes, they make plans for Tishrei. Yeshivah students even put together a group for the year and so on. What should they eat?

1:26:12 Speaker 4 Yes, kashrus there is a completely different world.

1:26:15 Speaker 2 You need to know that abroad, ninety percent of the good kashrus certifications—no, not ninety percent. Let me put it this way: There are three or four kashrus organizations in the United States that are in a different category. They don’t even reach the standard of the poorest certification in Israel. The bar there is much lower. And I want to say something: It’s not that the people heading those kashrus organizations have less yiras Shamayim. They were set up for a different public. You have to understand that.

1:26:50 Speaker 4 Like what you told us about the—the [unclear].

1:26:52 Speaker 2 Exactly. They were set up for a different public.

1:26:55 Speaker 4 So when I come there from Israel...

1:26:58 Speaker 2 You need to ask the mashpi’im there what has been checked and what’s acceptable to eat. You can’t eat everything just because the window has a neon sign saying “kosher” in Hebrew, “Pas Yisroel,” “old flour.” By the way, that isn’t correct: There’s no such thing as “old flour.”

1:27:21 Speaker 4 What do you mean?

1:27:22 Speaker 2 We use it as the opposite of new flour: old flour. But there’s no such thing as old flour. There’s flour with no concern of chadash. It isn’t a matter of old and new. Right?

1:27:32 Speaker 4 They aren’t opposites.

1:27:33 Speaker 2 Exactly. So we really need to ask the mashpi’im there now and find out what people customarily eat there.

1:27:41 Speaker 4 This is very relevant, because right now guys are making plans for Tishrei.

1:27:44 Speaker 2 Right, right, right, right.

1:27:46 Speaker 4 You have to check. You can’t just arrive and eat everything.

1:27:50 Speaker 2 And the big question—tell me, do you want to get into it now?

1:27:55 Speaker 4 Yes, I’m with you.

1:27:56 Speaker 2 Is Coca-Cola around the world.

1:27:58 Speaker 4 I wanted to ask about that. I was at the institute yesterday, and a student came up and asked me about Coca-Cola around the world.

1:28:04 Speaker 2 Good. Then, if you’ll allow me, I’ll first explain how the Coca-Cola company operates worldwide.

1:28:15 Speaker 4 Okay, so the question is whether Coca-Cola around the world is kosher or not.

1:28:21 Speaker 2 Yes. Not whether it’s kosher or not, but whether we can drink it. Not everything that’s kosher is something we can drink.

1:28:29 Speaker 4 Yes, we explained that.

1:28:30 Speaker 2 Yes. In Israel there is no Coca-Cola company. There isn’t.

1:28:38 Speaker 4 There’s the factory in Bnei Brak; you see it from the road.

1:28:40 Speaker 2 There’s a company called the Central Bottling Company.

1:28:45 Speaker 4 Oh, that’s always written on the back.

1:28:47 Speaker 2 And it has a license to use the Coca-Cola logo, because it isn’t a Coca-Cola factory. A Jew opens a soft-drink factory in Bnei Brak and wants to produce a Coca-Cola drink. He approaches Coca-Cola’s management in the United States and asks to be its franchisee in Israel. He gets exclusive rights. A Belgian non-Jew goes to Coca-Cola in the United States and says, “I want to be your franchisee in Belgium.” He gets exclusive rights there. What does that mean? He doesn’t know how Coca-Cola is made. He doesn’t know. Barrels of prepared concentrate arrive at his factory gate. He has large stainless-steel vats in his factory. He pours in the concentrate, adds water and sugar, and mixes it according to the company’s instructions.

1:29:56 Speaker 4 So he actually gets instructions, kind of like—

1:29:58 Speaker 2 Not just instructions. A technician from the company comes and checks that he’s following them exactly. Just as there’s a kashrus mashgiach, there’s a quality supervisor. Then he puts it into cans and bottles, adds carbonation, and distributes it. So what he adds, in practice, is sugar, water, and carbonation. Those are the three things he adds.

1:30:27 Speaker 4 Besides the concentrate they supply.

1:30:29 Speaker 2 He can buy the concentrate only from the Coca-Cola company, and that’s where Coca-Cola makes its profit. He can’t come to me and say, “I want to buy it for less.” There’s no competition.

1:30:40 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:30:41 Speaker 2 He buys only from Coca-Cola. So whatever price they decide to sell it to him for—that’s their money, and that’s how they profit.

1:30:47 Speaker 4 That’s how it works all over the world.

1:30:48 Speaker 2 Throughout the world, in every country and among every people.

1:30:52 Speaker 4 In every city.

1:30:53 Speaker 2 There’s a fran—franchisee, a soft-drink company that has the franchise to use the Coca-Cola brand. The company isn’t owned by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola has several plants around the world that make concentrates. Coca-Cola doesn’t produce bottles of drinks; it produces only concentrates.

1:31:15 Speaker 4 That’s wild.

1:31:17 Speaker 2 For each country, they adjust the flavor to what the residents like.

1:31:24 Speaker 4 The concentrate.

1:31:24 Speaker 2 Meaning, the orange concentrate in France doesn’t have to taste exactly, exactly like the concentrate in Israel. For every flavor they make, they bring in groups of people to taste it and adjust it to the population. Someone in the United States will taste the...

1:31:44 Speaker 4 Sweeter and fruitier.

1:31:45 Speaker 2 They adjust it precisely. Sometimes you’ll see them suddenly introduce some flavor as a summer edition. Why? What’s a summer edition? It’s a trial. If it sells, it becomes a nationwide edition.

1:32:03 Speaker 4 Ah, so that’s how they test the market.

1:32:04 Speaker 2 That’s how they test the market, and they send people to supermarkets. You bought it, you tasted it—did you like it? Do you think they should change something: more color, less color? And they build up a body of information. So Moshe, the operations manager at the soft-drink company in Bnei Brak, needs so much cola syrup for next month, so much lemon syrup, so much of this syrup.

1:32:31 Speaker 4 Lemon, all the Sprite, all those things.

1:32:33 Speaker 2 Yes, all of it. He emails Coca-Cola’s operations center in the United States with an order for what he needs. He doesn’t know which Coca-Cola plant will produce it. That doesn’t concern him.

1:32:50 Speaker 4 Because, as we said, there are several plants around the world that produce it.

1:32:54 Speaker 2 The operations manager at Coca-Cola checks which plant has room in its schedule to fit in that production run, and he arranges it. The company might receive a container from the United States, a container from Ireland, a container from Asia.

1:33:09 Speaker 4 And they’ll receive—and he receives the... according to the... according to the Israeli taste.

1:33:13 Speaker 2 The Israeli taste, the ingredients, the... everything will be the same. He doesn’t care where it comes from. It’s the same for the plant owner in Belgium, France, and so on. In fact, only a handful of people inside the company that makes the concentrates know how to make them. It’s top secret, and they don’t give out that information.

1:33:36 Speaker 4 So what is the kosher certification based on?

1:33:38 Speaker 2 For many, many years, the Coca-Cola company in Bnei Brak had certification from the Tel Aviv rabbinate. Why the Tel Aviv rabbinate? The plant was in Bnei Brak, where there was no rabbinate, only Rabbi Landau.

1:33:54 Speaker 4 Ah.

1:33:56 Speaker 2 How did the Tel Aviv rabbinate provide supervision? Seventy years ago, the heads of OU kosher certification came to Coca-Cola and said, “Listen, many Jews have just arrived after the war, and Coca-Cola is a symbol of America, and so on. We want to certify your product as kosher.” They refused, because kosher supervision means looking—and they weren’t willing to reveal it to you. They were willing to give you a list of how they do things and what they use, and to consult with you. I wasn’t there seventy years ago, and I don’t know exactly what happened, but the OU decided to permit Coca-Cola, and on the basis of that ruling, the Tel Aviv rabbinate certified the plant in Bnei Brak.

1:34:44 Speaker 4 So, essentially, back then...

1:34:45 Speaker 2 A serious kosher certification agency can’t certify something that way.

1:34:48 Speaker 4 So is the certification still like that today?

1:34:51 Speaker 2 One second.

1:34:51 Speaker 4 Ah.

1:34:52 Speaker 2 A serious kosher certification agency can’t certify something that way. And whenever they wanted certification from either the Eidah or Rabbi Landau, those agencies demanded to travel to the plant and inspect things, and Coca-Cola couldn’t allow it. So I remember that when I was a child, you couldn’t buy Coca-Cola in Bnei Brak. There was none. There was Crystal, there was Tempo, there were other drinks. Then one day Pepsi sprang a surprise. Pepsi is Coca-Cola’s biggest competitor. It surprised Coca-Cola by entering Israel all at once, after the Oslo Accords. There’s a reason it happened after the Oslo Accords, too. And it came in with certification from the Eidah Hachareidis. Coca-Cola couldn’t let that go, and it put enough pressure on the company’s headquarters in the United States to let Rabbi Landau, of blessed memory, enter the plant and inspect it. So he traveled to inspect it, and he had to replace some of the raw ingredients. He published a clear notice: “You should know that it is forbidden to drink Coca-Cola elsewhere in the world. I know what it contains only where I have provided supervision, and anyone who tells you it’s permitted”—this is Rabbi Landau’s wording in the notice—“is making assumptions based on a gut feeling.”

1:36:13 Speaker 4 Ah.

1:36:14 Speaker 2 He hasn’t seen the production. When Rabbi Landau writes a statement like that, uses words like that, we mustn’t drink Coca-Cola without his supervision.

1:36:25 Speaker 4 But that means that even today, when they send Coca-Cola—Coca-Cola concentrate—to Israel...

1:36:29 Speaker 2 A mashgiach travels to inspect the raw ingredients.

1:36:31 Speaker 4 Which is what...

1:36:31 Speaker 2 It’s the only company in the world, in the world.

1:36:34 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:36:35 Speaker 2 And that’s why, for the Israeli Coca-Cola company, they actually make the concentrates in only two concentrate plants, because you can’t have a mashgiach traveling everywhere. So, exceptionally—really exceptionally—you can find Coca-Cola in New York with Rabbi Landau’s certification that was produced in Israel. Usually there are exclusive territories, right? You can’t sell in one country...

1:36:59 Speaker 4 Somewhere else.

1:37:01 Speaker 2 New York is the only place in the world where they sell Coca-Cola from Israel, because they understood that they needed to sell it only with Rabbi Landau’s certification; otherwise it wouldn’t work. So we need to know: when we’re on a plane, when we travel abroad, with Coca-Cola—Rabbi Landau is the only one who knows what’s in it, and he says it’s forbidden. Can we disagree with him on that? Are we in a position to disagree with him? If Rabbi Landau says it’s forbidden, then it’s forbidden. I was at a kosher certification conference where Rabbi Landau was sitting at the head table, and there was local Coca-Cola there. One rabbi asked him for some. Rabbi Landau refused even to hand him the Coca-Cola. He refused and said, “I won’t—I won’t cause you to stumble. You may choose to act that way, but I won’t give it to you.”

1:37:43 Speaker 4 Wow. So only Coca-Cola produced in Israel with Rabbi Landau’s certification is...

1:37:48 Speaker 2 Permitted. You can drink it.

1:37:50 Speaker 4 Is it the same with Sprite?

1:37:51 Speaker 2 With Sprite, all these years—now Rabbi Landau says it isn’t. I don’t know why Sprite was permitted. Apparently the problem was with food coloring; that was the issue. People said it was glycerin—I don’t know whether that’s true or not; Rabbi Landau didn’t say—but some did permit drinking Sprite.

1:38:10 Speaker 4 Wow. Well, I really wanted to surprise you with that question, and you beat me to the Coca-Cola issue.

1:38:15 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:38:16 Speaker 4 So, to wrap up, we ask all our guests for a tip in serving Hashem—something that works for you that you can share with us—or in education, since education is ultimately our subject. So, do you have something you could share with us about...

1:38:30 Speaker 2 I want to sum up something we’ve actually already said, something that has run through our whole conversation. We’ve spoken about both education and Yiddishkeit, and I want to return to this point and use it to conclude. If a person wants to be a vessel—and by “vessel” I mean that when you sit down with a book of Chassidus, you understand what you’re reading—you need a clean heart, a whole heart. All the warmth of Chassidus is found in the heart, and that will come only, only if we know how to guard our hearts. And I... let me ask you a question. Say an unconfirmed rumor starts going around Tzfas this evening that the water in Tzfas is badly contaminated. The municipality hasn’t announced it. It’s a rumor. Do you think most people would drink water from the tap, or would they boil it?

1:39:44 Speaker 4 They’d boil it.

1:39:45 Speaker 2 But the municipality didn’t say it, and neither did the water company.

1:39:47 Speaker 4 You don’t take the risk.

1:39:48 Speaker 2 It’s a rumor.

1:39:49 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:39:50 Speaker 2 That’s how you should approach food. Even if all you’ve heard is a rumor that there’s a question about it, don’t touch it until you’ve checked the facts.

1:40:03 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:40:03 Speaker 2 That will elevate your heart.

1:40:05 Speaker 4 Those are the implications.

1:40:06 Speaker 2 And our children see how we conduct ourselves in this area. Education happens through personal example. The more we ask questions and show that kosher standards matter to us, the more that will carry over to the next generation. I have a friend with a large family who bought another apartment, the one next door to his. So I said to him, “Oh, now you’re going to connect the two apartments. You’ll have two kitchens. Surely you’ll make one a Pesach kitchen, so that on Pesach everything will already be—”

1:40:44 Speaker 4 Yes, all ready.

1:40:45 Speaker 2 “All organized.” He said to me, “Are you kidding? I’m making one kitchen dairy and one meat. I want my children to see how much work we put in and how we kasher a kitchen for Pesach. How will they experience the atmosphere of Pesach? How will they know what Pesach is if they don’t see it at home?”

1:41:03 Speaker 4 Yes, the whole process that—

1:41:04 Speaker 2 I want them to see that we’re making an effort! We’re scrubbing the walls, scrubbing the countertops, covering them, so the children are immersed in that atmosphere of keeping kosher. That’s education. Education means setting an example and showing that this matters to us, that we work for it. We work to keep kosher; we make an effort for it. I have to go to another store, and then another store. A child sees that and appreciates it, and that’s what we need to focus on.

1:41:37 Speaker 4 Amazing. You’re saying it comes across through what they see us doing—where our priorities lie, how important it is to us if—

1:41:44 Speaker 2 Exactly.

1:41:44 Speaker 4 —that kosher item isn’t available.

1:41:45 Speaker 2 Exactly.

1:41:46 Speaker 4 Right, to start saying, “There’s this here...” Absolutely. Well, Rabbi Aharon Volkan, yasher koach. Thank you so much for your time.

1:41:53 Speaker 2 I’m glad you had me.

1:41:54 Speaker 4 It was fascinating.

1:41:55 Speaker 2 My pleasure.

1:41:56 Speaker 4 Yes.

1:41:56 Speaker 2 And we’d be happy to hear if there are any more questions.

1:41:58 Speaker 4 Yes, of course. So I’ll put it in the episode description below. You also give lectures on the subject these days.

1:42:06 Speaker 2 I give lectures on kashrus and various aspects of kashrus.

1:42:10 Speaker 4 So I’ll put the details in the description below. Anyone interested is welcome to get in touch.

1:42:12 Speaker 2 With Hashem’s help.

1:42:13 Speaker 4 That’s how I got to know you. I saw you at a lecture and said, “We have to sit down together.” So thank you so much for your time.

1:42:17 Speaker 2 Thank you, yasher koach.