Off the Pulpit: Animal Rights and Wrongs

By RABBI DAVID WOLPE

Can you spot the difference in these two injunctions?

Ex 23:4. “When you encounter your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering you must take it back to him.” 

Ex. 23:5. “When you see the donkey of your enemy lying under its burden and wish to refrain from helping him, you must nonetheless raise it with him.”

Why do you nonetheless have to take action? Because in the second instance the animal is suffering. It is crushed under the burden. The loathing you feel for your enemy is not to be transferred to the animal; rather you need to have compassion for its suffering. Judaism has an entire set of laws, “tsa’ar ba’alei hayim,” the requirement “to prevent the suffering of living creatures.”

As a vegetarian I take the suffering of animals who are cruelly slaughtered seriously. Kashrut is a way of eating meat that attempts to minimize pain to the animal. But whether you eat meat or not, you are part of a tradition that in small ways and large is concerned to lessen the pain of the world.

(Rabbi David Wolpe is the senior rabbi of Sinai Temple of Los Angeles.)