Hey there and welcome back to Take One. That music you just heard, that sounds like kind of a Metallica power ballad. Yeah, we have new music

because we have a new tractate and this one, well, it's about very powerful stuff. Look, I could tell

you all about it. Or I could do something much wiser and invite our great friend and our great,

great teacher to tell us what Masachat Chulin, the one we are going to read in the coming days and weeks, is all about.

Rabbi David Bachevkin, welcome back to the show, my friend.

Liel, what an absolute privilege and pleasure, and I am so excited for this tractate.

This tractate, Chulin, is all about the laws of kosher. It begins with the laws of ritual slaughter and is all about preparing kosher meat to be

eaten by the Jewish people. And it's a really fascinating tractate because when you think

about it, kosher has always been attacked. It is one of the oldest traditions that we have

consistent historical representation. Whenever Jews were attacked, they always began by attacking their ability to create kosher meat.

The laws of slaughter were featured always very prominently.

It's where Nazis began by banning ritual slaughter in 1933, and even going way back when

to kind of the turn of the millennia, going back even earlier,

the way Jews were described, you could read old Roman documents, where Jews were described

when the temple stood, and Jews were described as the people who don't eat pig, that we only have specific animals that we do

and don't eat.

And very often, people are like, even Jews sometimes scratch their heads and like, what difference

does it make?

Why is Judaism so obsessed with what we put in our mouth and how we prepare it. Some people even

pejoratively call the religion. They said, Judaism is the religion of pots and pans. That's

all they care about. All they want to know is how the meats being prepared and we happen to make,

I mean, kosher deli, we make a mean corn beef.

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