Exotic Kosher

A 15-course meal highlighted the latest in kashrut-sanctioned food.

July 24, 2009

Julie Gruenbaum Fax
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Question: Would you attend a dinner of exotic kosher food?

I drew the line at locusts. I didn’t care how cool it was that they were kosher, or that some rabbis in Algeria and Morocco said they are a delicacy. I wasn’t going to eat a locust. Locusts are bugs. I don’t eat bugs. Locust—dried, fried and certified—was the last item on the menu at The Prime Grill in Beverly Hills, Calif., where the Orthodox Union hosted its first Los Angeles “Halachic Adventure,” a gastronomic, anthropological and academic safari through the traditions of kosher animals.

The 15-course meal was the highlight of a three-day conference for lay people and kashrut experts on the latest in kosher food.

I don’t have a vegetarian instinct in me (except maybe the bug thing), but as I made my way into the dining room, I was tempted to swap the yak I was about to be served for the trail mix in a baggie offered to me by Richard Schwartz, president of the Jewish Vegetarians of North America, who was outside protesting.

But while Mr. Schwartz, wearing a fruit tie and veggie kippah, was joined by nine protesters, more than 100 people were down in the glitzy atrium courtyard, and I followed the masses.

Somewhere between the sparrow, wild turkey and dove minestrone soup and the spice-encrusted elk (not to mention the sauvignon blanc), I found myself appreciating, what this evening was about.

Yes, it was about the food, but more than that, it was about dissecting, celebrating and preserving the minutiae of Jewish law that guides everyday life for observant Jews—the niche avocation of “the two Aris.”

Dr. Ari Greenspan and Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky are longtime buddies who do this on their own time and mostly on their own dime, because they love it, because it’s fun and because, like anthropologists trekking to remote corners of the Himalayas to compile glossaries of dying languages, they are wholeheartedly committed to preserving traditions before it’s too late.

Dr. Greenspan, 44, is a Kentucky-born dentist (and a mohel, a scribe, a shochet [ritual slaughterer] and producer of techelet, blue dye derived from sea snails used for ritual garments) who has lived in Israel for the last 18 years.

Rabbi Zivotofsky, also 44, is a Brooklyn-born ordained rabbi, shochet and professor of neuroscience at Bar-Ilan University.

They each have three kids and wives who are apparently amused enough by their exploits to support them.

For the past several years, they have traveled through Israel and the world, interviewing shochets in their 80s and going on bizarre quests to places like Turkey to find fish mentioned in the Gemara.

“I think of them as the Jewish Indiana Jones,” said Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, director of synagogue services at the West Coast Orthodox Union, who helped organize the conference with West Coast director Rabbi Alan Kalinsky.

The Orthodox Union in New York held its first dinner featuring the Aris in 2004, after they heard about a similar dinner in Jerusalem. The O.U. did not make money off the Los Angeles event. The $175-a-person charge went straight to The Prime Grill to cover costs.

The two Aris got hooked on this when they were students at Yeshivat Har Etzion in 1981 and a newly observant friend stumped them with a question about whether pheasant was kosher.

The Torah gives physiological criteria for designating as kosher land animals (chews its cud and has split hooves) and fish (fins and scales), but no such criteria are given for birds. Instead, 24 types of birds are listed as not kosher, which leaves lots of room to figure out what is. For millennia, Jews have relied on a chain of tradition—if my butcher’s grandmother’s grandfather’s grandfather, who was also a butcher, shechted (slaughtered) the bird, it’s kosher.

The Aris found out that a leading American rabbi had concluded it isn’t kosher, because he could not find any tradition of kosher pheasant. But at the same time, Dr. Greenspan and Rabbi Zivotofsky found a Yemenite rabbi who said his community shechted pheasant.

They began to understand that kosher traditions could be lost as Jews moved away from ancestral homelands and acculturated into industrial societies. So they started interviewing ethnic rabbis in Israel, bringing along a video camera. They have traveled together to Ethiopia, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Germany, Morocco, Russia, Gibraltar, Greece, Croatia, and Spain to investigate halachic traditions.

They have expanded from kosher animals to exploring matzah and different etrogim (citron fruit)—including watermelon-size etrogim in Yemen.

To my relief, we got appetizer-sized portions of everything, from the crispy pigeon to the blue marlin (a fish still listed on a widely publicized non-kosher fish registry, due to its similarities to the swordfish). There was a lot of food, but it was delicate and civilized.

So, after the etrog and pomegranate cake was served, a plate was laid before me with a brilliant slice of magenta sabra fruit and two chocolate locusts. They were solid chocolate—no exoskeletons or wings inside—made from molds fashioned in Dr. Greenspan’s dental office.

You can visit Dr. Grenspan’s webpage at http://www.halachicadventures.com/ for more information.

Julie Gruenbaum Fax is the education editor for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.