Judaism

A little over a year ago, I noticed that the stuff at Holy Land had this little symbol on it. Since halal isn’t “equivalent to kosher,” I wondered exactly how legal it was–it’s illegal to imply something is kosher when it isn’t. In addition, kosher certification agencies generally freak out over misuse/misleading usage of their heschers, though that wouldn’t be the issue at stake here.

I hit up Shmarya after finding a post he made on the exact same thing, but he said that no rabbis seem concerned about it.

I had figured it was either a deliberate attempt at faking a kosher certification where there was none, or simply trying to poorly explain what “halal” is to people either too sheltered or too stupid to Google it for themselves, but assumed it was the latter.

Just recently, I noticed that the little symbol has changed from saying “equivalent to kosher” around it, to “certified since 1987.” I wonder if someone complained?

From Micah Gil at Killing the Buddha: the shofar and hermaphrodites in Talmudic literature:

There follows a most peculiar statement: “A hermaphrodite can perform a religious duty for a fellow hermaphrodite, but not for any one else.”

Some folks are shocked to find the rabbis even mentioning hermaphrodites, what the Gemara calls androgynus, but the truth is that this being of unusual gender shows up all over Talmudic discourse. Perhaps in the days before the “medical miracle,” when a procedure on the birthing table, a kind of grotesque circumcision, purports to solve this riddle of nature forever, the alternately-sexed were simply more present in everyday life. But what the rabbis lack in surgical technique, they make up for in the rigidity of their intellectual categorization. In every discussion, it is determined whether the androgynus will be treated as a man or a woman, depending on circumstance. Only one sage, the forward-thinking Rabbi Jose (pronounced Yo-si,) offers the suggestion that a hermaphrodite “is a creature unto itself.”