Keeping Kosher

So the reason that I didn't blog for almost a month is that 1) I'm in college and we had end of quarter projects and finals going on and 2) right after finals, I went on an alternative break trip. Alternative break is basically a community service trip. I went with my school's Hillel group to do tornado relief work.

We stayed in an orthodox synagogue and had to keep kosher for the week. I'm pretty familiar with kashrut and all, but it was freaking hard. It wasn't hard in the sense that I didn't understand the rules and kept breaking them or anything. It was hard in the sense that from the moment we had to start keeping kosher, I wanted everything that was not kosher. The first night we had spaghetti... and meat sauce. I am the queen of putting parmesan cheese on my spaghetti but I couldn't have any! One day one of my friends and I went with the group leader to do the grocery shopping. We really wanted to have cake or something for dessert to have after another meat meal. It took quite a while to find parve chocolate cake mix and parve frosting. Then we had to find kosher eggs and some more kosher snacks for lunch the next two days. And we couldn't just find any kosher symbol; the rabbi doesn't accept triangle K so we had to weed those foods out as well. Basically, kosher grocery shopping takes three times as long as normal grocery shopping.

Now, obviously Friday night meals at Hillel are kosher. But I'm not the one preparing the meal and I don't actually keep kosher so I don't really have to think that much about it. I have a lot of respect for the people who keep strict kosher, and honestly I haven't met very many people who do. I have friends who keep "kosher-like" in that they don't eat pork or shellfish, but on everything else they eat just like I do. According to the rabbi on our break, keeping kosher isn't hard for him and his family because "they have to do it." Being orthodox and all, he views the Torah as completely binding so he doesn't see a choice in the matter. But I still think it would be a challenge. You have to think far in advance about what you're going to cook and eat and have to make sure that all your meat stuff stays away from the dairy stuff. If you mess up, you could potentially have to re-kasher everything in your kitchen. Those are some high stakes.

I can definitely see the religiosity of keeping kosher, too. You have to constantly keep the rules of kashrut at the forefront of your mind and when you get frustrated by it and think "WHY am I doing this?" you'll kind of remember it's because G-d said so. You eat at least three times a day, so at least three times a day you'll by thinking about how your actions are commanded by G-d. That's gonna cause you to be way more in touch with G-d than going to church for an hour each week.

I'm really glad that I got to go on this trip and have the super Jewish experience of keeping kosher. I imagine there are a lot of people who consider and actually do convert to Judaism who don't get to have an intensive experience like that. I know I'm lucky to have that experience and I learned a lot. But as soon as I got home, I had some breakfast with a side of bacon.