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From: adam@npois.UUCP (Adam V. Reed)
Newsgroups: net.religion.jewish
Subject: A Humanistic Jew's view on Shatnes
Message-ID: <240@npois.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 14-Mar-85 21:32:04 EST
Article-I.D.: npois.240
Posted: Thu Mar 14 21:32:04 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 16-Mar-85 00:58:24 EST
Organization: ATTIS, Neptune, NJ
Lines: 28

Eliyahu Teitz asks:

>How does a humanist keep shaatnez ( the prohibition of wearing
>wool and linen together, or of grafting trees, or crossbreeding
>vegetation or animals ) ?

Among the Goyim of the ancient world, it was a common practice to
breed for entertainment hybrid animals that looked like a sordid
collection of ill-fitting parts; to graft heavily-bearing branches
to trees that would be broken or stunted by the weight of the
resulting fruit; or to to blend wool into cheaper cloth to make it
look like wool. Shatnetz reflects the Jewish realization that every
man-made thing, such as piece of clothing or a domestic plant or animal,
is the embodiment of a human idea, and that the lack of material
integrity in any man-made thing is evidence of a lack of intellectual
integrity in the mind that created it.

Shatnetz is important in all man-made things, and not just in those,
like plants and animals and cloth, which existed in ancient times. A
short list of contemporary things that lack integrity might include
a car with a solid steel roof covered in vinyl to make it look like a
convertible; a print mounted on textured plastic to make it look like an
oil painting; or a house, newly built out of modern materials, designed
to look as though it had been built in the eighteenth century.  I don't
think anyone who makes such shlock, or uses it except in case of dire
necessity, is really leading a Jewish life, no matter how "observant"
he or she might otherwise be.
						Adam