B"H
- The halachot (Jewish Laws) of shechita (Jewish slaughter) are nowhere written in the [Written] Torah. There is one very oblique reference:
When Hashem your God will enlarge your border…and you will say: I will eat meat – because your soul will lust after meat – you may eat meat howsoever your soul lusts. If the Place the Hashem your God has chosen to put His Name upon will be distant from you, then you will slaughter of your cattle and your flocks which Hashem has given you, as I have commanded you (Deuteronomy 12:20-21). In this passage, Moshe gives the nation what must, at the time, have been a startlingly new concept: until now, throughout their 40 years of wanderings from Egypt, every Jew knew that upon sacrificing animals or birds, the sacrificer would eat part of the sacrificial meat. Now, Moshe gives them this concept of killing an animal for the sole purpose of eating the meat, not for sacrificial purposes. The Jew is now permitted to eat meat without having to bring the animal to the Altar in the Tabernacle (or later, in the Holy Temple). In simple terms – if you live up north, or east of the River Jordan, in the territory of Zebulun for example, four days’ travelling time from Jerusalem, then you don’t have to make a week-and-a-half journey to the Holy Temple and back just to eat a sausage.
The operative phrase here is
you will slaughter of your cattle and your flocks…as I have commanded you: the Torah nowhere commands how to slaughter an animal. These halachot are written for the first time in the Talmud: the slaughterer must slaughter the animal with a single stroke of the knife which slices through most of the oesophagus and the windpipe in a single clean cut.
This causes instant and complete unconsciousness in the animal, who dies immediately thereafter without pain. This is because this cutting action inevitably severs both the carotid arteries (one on each side of the oesophagus and windpipe), which carry the blood from the body to the brain through the neck.
This, however, applies solely to kosher animals, and to all kosher animals. In every non-kosher animal, the vertebral arteries at the back of the neck provide additional blood to the brain; hence using kosher shechita on a non-kosher animal would cause considerable suffering before death. (This applies to warm-blooded animals; reptiles’ anatomy is somewhat different.)
The anatomy of kosher animals and the kosher method of shechita are clearly dedicated to one anther; each of them was designed to complement the other. The Oral Law is a beautifully-designed [and perfect]system, and interfering with it even slightly destroys the entire system. This has interesting implications, and let's mention one of the major ones here: Islam has adopted
zabiha, the halal method of slaughtering animals, very similar to shechita. However, certain animals are halal although they are
not kosher (rabbits, horses, wild donkeys, and camels). So, when Moslems slaughter these animals by
zabiha, they cause considerable suffering.
Now, is it likely that the Rabbis of the Talmud simply chanced upon this method of slaughter by coincidence? Is it likely that the Talmud just happened to choose a method that, when a counterfeit religion adopted it and made a seemingly minor alteration, rendered the entire method meaningless? Or does this suggest that G-d, Who alone in the ancient world knew how animal anatomy worked, directed this specific method of slaughter?
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