Non-Jewish woman starts work at a religious Jewish institution. She is told that she cannot use their microwave because the kitchen is kosher and she is not. Woman complains. Woman gets fired.
Now here's the disclaimer before I get into my point. I don't think this woman should have been fired. No one should be fired for complaining.
The thing is, I don't think this woman should have complained in the first place. I would hope that before she was hired, someone would have informed her about any relevant Jewish laws and customs, particularly about the kitchen. If she wasn't warned, this is her employer's fault.
Orthodox Jews don't mess around with their kashrut (the act of keeping kosher), friends. Examples:
1. "Oh, but it's just a microwave, let the woman heat up her bacon cheeseburger in it because no one cares about a microwave." NO.
2. "Alright, well maybe she can bring something that doesn't involve pigs or meat + cheese and heat it up." NO.
3. "What if she cooks something entirely from certified kosher ingredients and we mean REAL kosher like the O U, not that bogus star-K crap (see pictures below)." NO.
Non-kosher food is not kosher. Food that is not blatantly non-kosher is not kosher. Kosher food prepared in a non-kosher kitchen is not kosher.
People who keep kosher keep two sets of silverware, dishes, etc - one for meat, one for dairy. You wash your dishes with different sponges and, in some households, even different sinks. Now that it's Passover and there's a whole array of food you can't eat for 8 days, if you mean business, you have 2 additional sets of silverware and whatnot because your Passover dishes are free from ever touching leavened products and everything else you can't eat on Passover (full explanation for another day). And this is only the tip of the kosher iceberg.
The point is, I understand that it's annoying for this woman to not be able to heat up her leftovers or whatever in the microwave at her job, and as ludicrous as these laws may seem, they still mean a lot to the people who observe them. People take religion pretty damn seriously, don't mess around.
I wouldn't go into a church dying of thirst and then complain that no one let me drink the holy water, would I? No. (You..can't drink the holy water, right? And what makes it holy? Is it blessed? Does it come straight from God's water fountain? I don't get it).
That's all for today's Jewtastic lesson.
2 comments:
Well, speaking as a Catholic you wouldn't really want to drink the Holy Water as people have been dipping their fingers in it to bless themselves. And once when I was a kid, I drank some Holy Water out of a bottle and it wasn't very nice.
Keeping kosher sounds really complicated!
I don't think she should have been fired. Unless she said that she wouldn't work there if she couldn't use their microwave and then they really had no choice. Would she have been allowed to bring her own bagged lunch and eat it there without having to eat it up? That would seem that she wasn't keeping kosher there either.
Definitely wouldn't want to drink holy water but I'm pretty sure all they do is bless it because at a church in Vermont, I was able to go to a blessed water pump and get my own. But sometimes it smells like they put something incensey in there so I wouldn't risk it!
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