„The Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace”

Our world today does not stand in its completeness. Eating animals is something that is not moral, and it contains problems and injustices that it is important for us to be aware of. It is forbidden to be needlessly cruel to animals; it is forbidden to harm without reason a creature that God created. But the building of a moral world must be gradual. When the building is not done this way, it is liable to do enormous damage to all of humanity.

Until the days of Noah, eating animals was forbidden. Man ate from the grass of the field. Animals and human beings were the system above the rest of nature, a higher system. That is how it should be, ideally. And then came the Flood. And it came because all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth. The Midrashim tell of the mating of humans and animals: an intermingling and enormous confusion between the levels. From the days of Noah after the Flood, we eat meat. The Torah permitted eating meat not because this is the ideal, but because the world must understand the ranks that exist within it. In a world where animals are given a station as high as that of human beings, human beings will be harmed. In a world where a dog is embraced like an infant, mothers will give up their infants. There is still a long road to a moral world. At the end of that road, the world will also arrive at the path of vegetarianism. But if we try to reach this process before its time, we are liable to destroy the world—a destruction we can often see in the concern for the rights of animals or of foreigners, together with a disregard for, and even hatred of, the rights of human beings and of our own people, out of a desire to give to another.

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