My Jewish Vegan Story: Rabbi David Rosen
The following interview was conducted by JES with Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s International Director of Interreligious Affairs. He served as Chief Rabbi of Ireland and as the senior rabbi of the largest Orthodox Jewish congregation in South Africa. He is also a prominent vegan activist and an Honorary President of the International Jewish Vegetarian and Ecology society.
Let’s start with your personal story. What motivated you to make the choices you have about your food consumption?
To begin with, I grew up with a strong love of nature and of animals. It didn’t seem quite right to kill animals for food, but in all honesty, we hook our children all too often on a meat diet and I was hooked as a small kid and I was quite a big meat consumer as I grew older. It was only when I was a Rabbi and on the Beit Din on the Ecclesiastical court in Cape Town that I had to visit the slaughter houses and check up on the slaughterers to ensure that their knives were perfectly sharp and that the slaughtering was taking place in accordance with Jewish law. And I was confronted by a scene that actually I hadn’t encountered before because I hadn’t trained in Schita, or anything like that, before and the scene was horrific. And I wouldn’t want to do it, so it posed for me, first and foremost, a moral question: “Should I benefit from that which I wouldn’t want to do?”
That was the beginning of my journey. Then I became much more aware also of the cruelty involved in the transportation of animals. And other questions confronted it, if you slaughtered the animal the right way and process its food but you completely mistreated it from point A to Y, does that make it really kosher? So there was another problem there. I also became aware of not only the treatment of animals but also the way that they are pumped full of antibiotics and hormones and that this is retained in the food chain with added toxicity. There was also cancer in the family at the time, so I became more conscious also of the health dimensions of this. All these led me to realise that I had to make a change in my lifestyle and my diet.
In all honesty, it wasn’t just me. If I hadn’t had my wife’s complete support and cooperation, it would have been very difficult for me to make that change, but we were able to do it. Firstly eliminating meat, then it took a while before we eliminated foul and then when we left South Africa and we went to live in Ireland, we eliminated fish, which, of course, for many Irish people was deemed as a heresy in itself!
And it took a while before I really became truly conscious of the cruelties and the barbarities in the dairy industry and in egg production and therefore I really should have been vegan much earlier since my concerns were really moral concerns and today, thank G-d, I live a vegan lifestyle. I also don’t wear any leather except for the tefillin, which is an interesting problem and a challenge, but my tefillin are actually my late father’s tefillin who died when I was only 10 years old.
What are some of your favorite vegan meals?
I’m very blessed in so many ways but, above all, to have a wonderful wife. And my wonderful wife and I embarked upon this journey together and that’s what made it so much easier for me to make the successful transitions that were not simple. It is very difficult when you are brought up on a meat based diet to give up meat. And it is very difficult as a vegetarian still to give up eggs. And this was a serious effort but I was blessed to have a partner who is so skilled in the kitchen in terms of her culinary capacities and capabilities that it wasn’t too much of an effort for me after all.
To try to pick out one particular recipe out of my wife’s repertoire is to do her an injustice. But I would say something that I particularly like, amongst all the things that I like, is her wonderful tofu ersatz cheesecake. It’s not really cheese, it’s tofu cake, it’s made with silken tofu, but with a lot of lemon in which the lemon is ground up in it with a biscuit base. And to be able to celebrate Shavuot, the festival that is traditionally a festival of dairy products, but with deserts like that, enable you to do so without being party to such terrible desecration of Jewish teaching that renders even celebration of festivals and Shabbat almost contradictory in terms – that’s a wonderful gift.
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