Parashat Re’eh פָּרָשַׁת רְאֵה

This week’s parsha includes, among other things, a discussion of what is kosher and what is not.

Re'eh makes very clear something I think all of us know...

in order to be kosher, an animal has to have both cleft hooves AND “bring up its cud.”  

It mentions a number of animals that DO meet these criteria...

• the Deer
• the Ox
• the Sheep
• the Gazella

but there are other that DO NOT

• the Camel
• the Rabbit

Some animals like the hare and the DAMAN (whatever that is) look like they’re chewing their cud, but they’re really not.  They just chew their food for a really long time, leading us to think mistakenly that they are chewing their cud.  

We are also told that we can’t eat any animal that has died a natural death - that we can give to a stranger or sell to a foreigner, but we can’t eat it ourselves.  And the parsha also includes the famous prohibition:  we cannot boil a kid in its mother’s milk.

But there’s an interesting word in Re'eh that I want to consider just for a moment. The word is ZEMER, and it’s the last word in verse 5 that lists kosher animals, animals that have cleft hooves AND chew their cud.  The Chumash translates that word as “mountain sheep.” But Rabbi Ed Davis translates that word not as “mountain goat,” but as GIRAFFE.  

I thought that was sort of interesting - that there is no prohibition on eating giraffes.  Two things to note here: first, who would ever eat a giraffe? I don’t know any Jew who has been tempted by giraffe meat; and I’m not sure there are very many non-Jews who would eat it, either.  So why is giraffe kosher and yet not eaten by Jews?

It turns out that, according to one tradition, even though giraffe IS kosher to eat, we do not eat it because the neck is so long that no one knows where to perform the shechitah.  But that view has also been criticized because the Talmud spells out precisely where ON EVERY ANIMAL the shechitah should take place. Another view is that we don’t eat giraffe simply because our people don’t have a tradition of eating it.  You can decide which of these reasons is your reason for not eating giraffe.

But there’s something else that’s really interesting about the word ZEMER. It also means SONG or SINGER. That makes the translation of the word as “giraffe” even more intriguing, doesn’t it?  The giraffe, as we know, makes no sound.  

Maybe we wish some singers would do the same.  So what might this mean here?

Maybe the connection between the song and the giraffe represents a way to remind us that some songs are songs of the heart and they don’t have to be sung out loud.