Vayikra: Industry

Vayikra: Industry

The closest I ever came to an animal sacrifice was shlaging kaporoth, the expiation ritual, traditionally done on the day before Yom Kippur   I did it twice, 

The first time, I did it in Brooklyn, NY.  I went to the live poultry market on Belmont Avenue. Belmont Avenue is really in Brooklyn, not Brooklyn, NY.  Belmont Avenue was the street that was impervious to progress.  It was the last street to have pushcarts - horse drawn wagons without the horse, pushed by peddlers, parked at the curb, selling "notions", "foundations", fruit, anything.  Belmont Avenue was the  home of the last live poultry market- where there were all kinds of winged beasts: chickens, geese, turkeys, and especially, lice. 

We ( Allen Mansfield was there [and he will undoubtedly correct the story]) went to Abe Levy's live  poultry market and each of us got  a chicken,  The chickens were assigned, not selected.  The chickens were not white, they were multicolored.  We  wore  hats. I  held my  chicken by the legs and when I swung him over my head, saying Ze chalifathi, this is my exchange, the bird flapped his wings. ( More experienced kaparoth shlaggers hold the wings, too)  After three sets of  three circular swings, I handed the chicken to the shochet, He checked the knife ( it looked more like a straight razor [what the Gentiles use to shave themselves]).threw back the head of the chicken to expose the neck and slit the throat,  A drop of blood dripped out.  The chicken went from living to dead. More blood, the chicken convulsed, the blood was covered with sawdust ( kisui hadam), the dead chicken was taken away and a plucked, cut up;  the chicken carcass was returned in high quality  wax paper.  I took the chicken meat home.  My mother prepared it.  It became part of the pre-Yom Kippur feast.  After Yom Kippur, I became a vegetarian.  I had seen how small and simple is the death of an animal, my exchange chicken. 

The next time I shlaged kaporoth was in Seatle.  I was with a group of the wilder Seattle Orthodox men  We got the chickens from the Pollack Poultry Processing Company.  The chickens were white.  This time, I held the wings  while the chicken orbited around my head.  Rabbi Benzaquen  shechted the chicken, a simple, silent  slit, followed by the convulsion, the covering of the blood.  This part was all done in the BCMH parking lot ( when it had a patch of dirt and grass),  In Seattle there was no one to pluck the chicken. After some discussion, we took the chickens to the poultry processing plant.  

(The processing had to be changed.  Usually, the dead chickens are showered with hot water to loosen the feathers for the plucking machine. But, that would make the meat treif, the blood had not been removed and the blood would be cooked with the meat.  So the  hot water was turned off.)

Then I beheld industrial  proultry rocessing.  Crates of identical, live, white chickens, each containing about 10 chickens, are handled by 2 workers  Each worker removes two chickens at a time and hangs each  chicken, by its feet on restraining,  not penetrating, hooks on a conveyor belt.  The belt lifts the chickens and they move along until the conveyor turns a corner.  At  the corner is a rotating razor that slits the throat of the bird.  A basin beneath catches the blood.  The machine  then processes the chicken,  All the parts are collected and used.  Chicken Treblinka. 

Vayikra begins the description of the sacrificial rite. It was Belmont Avenue, but I  imagine that there were so many, a line outside the mishkan.  Was it industrial, too?