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A Fowl Custom: The Ongoing Debate over the Pre-Yom Kippur Chicken Sacrifice

The custom of swinging a chicken over one’s head on the eve of Yom Kippur, slaughtering it, and giving it to a poor family was once widespread among Jews. Now this exotic ritual is primarily relegated to the ultra-Orthodox. But even despite its former prevalence, it is nowhere mentioned in the Talmud, and was condemned by some medieval and modern rabbis. Shlomo Brody recalls:

When I was a sixteen-year-old yeshiva boy studying in Jerusalem, my friends invited me to go with them to “shlug kaparos” on the day before Yom Kippur. Though I grew up Orthodox, in Houston, I was not familiar with the term (which translates loosely as “beat the atonements”), but I was quickly off to the Mahane Yehuda market, where we muttered a quick prayer as a shohet [kosher slaughterer] waved a chicken over our heads. He slaughtered the animal and threw it into an overflowing bin destined for the poor. . . . As I recited Kol Nidre that evening, murmurs of angst crept into my head: Was that really a holy act? As it turns out, many commentators, both medieval and modern, have called it a grave mistake.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Halakhah, Jewish holidays, Kaparos, Minhag, Shulhan Arukh, Yom Kippur

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic