If You Tickle Us...

What are we to make of these new bedfellows, Kedassia meat, world famous for its excellence in kashrus and with a price to match, and some lowly piggies slaughtered presumably for the non-kedassia market? After Peppa Pig is this Rebbe Pig? Before you bother huffing and puffing with your brilliant erudition that halachically there is nothing wrong in kedassia beef catching a free ride with some piggies and that they have been travel companions ever since the chazeirim have been ripping us off with their prices, let me remind you that there are other matters at stake when the ‘Seal of Quality’ gets into bed with the bacon. For a start can we be sure that the pigs don’t carry in the eiruv? What if a piggy noshed a strawberry which then splashed onto the beef? What then,eh? Are you prepared to take the achrayis of strawberry juice without a hechsher contaminating your chulent ? Let me pre-empt what the buffoon with a bout of mad-cow disease is bound to raise: can we be sure that the

…though the Evening Standard did help out.

I penned this blog some weeks ago after Geoffrey Alderman had a pop at one of the communal sacred cows, the Community Security Trust , better known by it acronym the CST. Other things overtook my life and this was left to rot. Then last week Alderman dished another column at them making me return to what I had started. If ever the proverbial ton of bricks has come remotely close in composition, density and weight to the real thing the letter in response by almost every knacker (omit the 'n' at your peril) known to this sceptred isle attacking Alderman and in defence of the Community Security Trust must have been it. With such an esteemed attack you might be thinking that Alderman had called for the CST to be disbanded, its funds sequestrated and its members arrested. Or perhaps simply voiced doubts about its necessity. Or maybe doubted the accuracy of its figures on Anti-semitism . Not a bit of it. All he said was that despite that it 'probably does valuable work'

I’m sorry I’ve had to introduce moderating to the comments due to some overenthusiastic supporters of the ‘rabbi’ using the platform for purposes other than to defend the allegations and address the serious points. ‘nough said. I can assure you that this is not censorship by the back door and however unminced your comments are you will still see them appear.

Walking the street enjoying the sights of the flowers and the smell of dairy delicacies it occurs to me that while the other festivals are offshoots and commandments of the Torah, only Shavouth is the festival of the Torah itself. It is when we celebrate the Torah given to us on Mount Sinai though the Torah does not make the link and, like most things, comes to us by rabbinic deduction perpetuated by culture and custom. Perhaps like a birthday boy or girl who do not organise their own party, the Torah kept silent on the issue and left it to others to throw the bash. And what a bash it is! Other Holidays go on for what seems a lifetime and come with truck loads of rules restricting what we can eat, when we can eat, where we can eat and sometimes whether we can eat at all. Pesach supposedly celebrates freedom but enslaves us weeks in advance in preparation and weeks after in paying the bills. Succoth celebrates the shade in the wilderness so we Jews decided to commemorate it by erectin