In a lecture on Deuteronomy 12 delivered in 2004, Dennis Prager says: “I was in my twenties on an airplane. I was sitting next to a woman who had a vegetarian meal. I asked her if she was a vegetarian. I asked why. She said, we humans have no right to kill animals to eat them. After all, who are we humans to think we are more valuable than animals?
“That shook me to the core. That’s when I came up with the question I thought was rhetorical. I said, You don’t really mean that. If a dog and a human were drowning, which would you save first?
“And she thought.
“I’ll never forget the silence. I said, I’m sorry, did you hear my question?
“She said, I’m thinking.
“When she said, I’m thinking, I concluded at that moment, either I’m sitting next to a nutty woman, which I did not believe, or she reflects what is happening in our secular age.”
Dennis Prager says: “I see animal sacrifice as a good thing. It teaches you that animal life can’t be wasted. It must be honored. That’s why you can’t eat the blood. It represents the being of the animal. The Torah is saying, you can have the carcass, I get the life. The blood is the soul.”
“The Nazis were very pro-animal. The most developed animal rights movement in the Western world prior to modern contemporary Europe and US was Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany banned vivisection. They banned experiments on animals, but they fostered experiments on humans.”
“The Nazis were the strongest anti-smoking culture prior to our own. This Princeton professor has interesting cartoons from the Nazi press, including of animals going ‘Heil Hitler’ in gratitude to the Nazis for their anti-vivisection policy.”
Jeff emails: The fact that the Nazis supported or didn’t support some general idea does not mean anything. The Nazis produced the first low priced car, does that mean that Jews have to buy expensive cars? The Nazis were correct in banning smoking as a health issue, does that mean that all Jews should smoke? That’s such a half witted argument. Does Mr. Prager never wear brown colored shirts? Besides, that’s a myth, the Nazis had SS candidates raise dogs and then kill them to make themselves cruel.
Anyway, it evades the point. Rav Kook, who was not a Nazi as far as I can tell, and Rav Tzadok HaCohen of Lublin, probably also not one to suspect of Nazi leanings, both were vegetarians, and both argued that the whole purpose of the kosher laws was to make meat difficult to eat, and that in perfected time after the arrival of the moshiach, all of mankind would be vegetarian, just as it was in Eden before Adam’s sin. In theory in Torah Judaism meat was only allowed after the flood, and according to the Torah text, only in the context of a sacrifice.
Frankly, I find R. KookÂ’s chazon hatzimchonut to be very compelling, more compelling than anything Prager wrote, certainly more likely to endure, and as a child of survivors I don’t like Mr. Prager to accuse me of being a Nazi as a result.
