Not all foods are created equal. Your conscious mind may be oblivious, but your body knows the difference.

Here’s a halachah that takes this distinction very seriously:

Let’s say you hired Jewish workers for a job. You told them one free meal is included in their wages. They did the work, you paid them, hosted the meal, and they went home.

Then you discovered the food you served them wasn’t kosher. It looked kosher, it tasted kosher, but it wasn’t kosher.

Being an honest person, you run to inform the workers. You explain, “Hey, stuff happens. I’m really sorry. But I guess there’s nothing we can do now.”

“No, there is one thing you can do,” they reply. "You can pay us the worth of that meal.”

They’re right.

Why? Because, as the Jerusalem Talmud explains, for Jews, if a meal is not kosher, it’s not a meal.1 It doesn’t feed a Jewish body and it doesn’t satisfy a Jewish soul.

And so, you owe these workers a meal—or the value of one.

So how is it that so many of us seem fine and healthy with unkosher foods? How is it that so many of us enjoy eating these things?

Perhaps we were fed such foods in our infancy and became desensitized to them. Or perhaps we over-indulged in kosher foods for the sake of indulgence, setting ourselves on a slippery slope down into other forms of indulgence that would otherwise be foreign to us.

Even then, we never really adapt. In some subliminal way, these foods continue to have their ill effect. One of the first things you need to do to get on a path to Jewish life is to get those unkosher substances out of your body.

Soul Energy

The energy you obtain from your food does more than twitch muscles. It affects your conscious, emotional, and spiritual state.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. We know, for example, that foods high in tyrosine (like beef, whole grains, nuts, and seeds) raise your dopamine levels, boosting motivation and attention. High antioxidant foods (berries, leafy greens, dark chocolate) also improve cognitive functions. High glycemic carbs and processed fats, on the other hand, can impair clear thinking and positive emotions.

But a Jew is meant to take that good energy of healthy food and carry it yet higher. It needs to become spiritual energy, the thirst for divine wisdom, the joy of a mitzvah, love for G‑d. Not just power the heart that throbs with that love. Become that love.

How do you make carbs and proteins into holy energy? If that sounds to you like getting a chicken to fly, you’re not far off track. It’s more like getting a cow to jump over the moon.

Before the Torah was given on Mount Sinai, the sages taught, the spiritual and the physical realms were neatly partitioned and cordoned off from one another. Bodies were bodies and souls were souls, food was food and angels were angels. You could do spiritual things from within a physical body, but your body did not become spiritual. You could eat food and with its energy contemplate the divine, but the physical food only pulled you down.

When the Torah was given, those cordons and partitions came crashing down. The physical world could now be infused with spirituality. It could even boost that spirituality higher.

The calories of your food could now power more than the kinetics of your body. They could become spiritual energy for your divine soul. The cow that just yesterday never looked up from its stack of hay to behold the stars in the heavens now takes center stage at a Shabbat meal, when the body and soul of all participants is lifted into a day beyond time. That’s way beyond jumping over the moon.2

Food Untied

Not just any food can do this. Some food doesn’t connect with spirituality. Torah provides the guidelines to determine which foods can come to the party and which cannot.

Some foods are assur, meaning they’re prohibited. But the word technically means “tied down.” Food that is assur is tied down to its physicality. You can have all the best intentions, but it remains stuck in its place and can’t rise out of there. It can’t be tuned in to the divine, no matter how much TLC you pour into it.

Some foods are mutar, which means they’re permitted, but technically means “untied.” A body that is fed mutar foods is capable of becoming a spiritual body. Not only can this food facilitate spiritual growth, your soul can exploit it to attain heights unachievable in the highest heavens.

When you eat kosher and then learn Torah, do a mitzvah, or throw yourself into your daily prayers, you uplift all of yourself, body and soul, as one. Kosher foods rise and enter into full communion with the love and fear of your soul, expressing that with your lips. Physical calories ascend to become heavenly forces.

Foods that are assur, on the other hand, introduce foreign energies into your body, desensitizing it to your divine soul, preventing the two worlds from merging. You’re left with a deep rift between your true, inner self and your outer character. That in turn affects the way the words of prayer and Torah emerge from your lips. When you pray or learn Torah your body is forced to say words it cannot feel, like an actor who cannot relate to the role he is given to play.3

Words of the Scribes

So Torah doesn’t simply tell you what to do or what not to do. It illuminates the essential fabric of nature, exposing the energy pulsating within each thing. That allows you to be an informed consumer, knowing what is hazardous to your soul and what could be beneficial.

Torah also empowers the Jewish sages to add guardrails to its laws when it instructs them to “safeguard my prohibitions.”4

For example, Torah prohibits eating meat of a kosher mammal cooked in milk. But the sages recognized that it was necessary to forbid chicken with milk as well, or else confusion would ensue. Similarly, they forbade any wine made by non-Jews, even when not produced for sacramental purposes. They forbade milk not milked under Jewish supervision, even when there are no non-kosher mammals for miles around. The list goes on.

But there’s more to this than a guardrail. The guardrail actually alters the essential energies of those things it's guarding you from. A food that was capable of rising to holiness now becomes assur and tied down to its physicality.

On the other hand, there are occasions when the sages determined that some assur food should be mutar. For example, let’s say someone is in desperate need of food on Yom Kippur. The Torah is a Torah of life, said the sages. So they made that food mutar for this individual, untying it. Now it can rise up in this person’s heartfelt Yom Kippur prayers.

That explains why the sages of Torah are called “scribes.” The Torah documents the code for the natural world, but the sages are authorized scribes of that document, qualified to fill in the details where and when they are called for.5

For more on the topic of rabbinic safeguards, see Is It Really the Torah, Or Is It Just the Rabbis?

Milk and the Mind

All this could explain a story told by Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn about his ancestor, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of Tanya and the Shulchan Aruch HaRav, founder of Chabad.6

In the times of Rabbi Schneur Zalman, it was quite common for well-to-do merchants to marry their daughter to a Torah scholar and then support this son-in-law for five years or more so that he could sit and study Torah day and night.

One such a father-in-law brought his son-in-law to see Rabbi Schneur Zalman. He explained that this young man had always been on good behavior. He was a G‑d fearing, faithful young man who loved to learn Torah, an ideal son-in-law. But then, quite suddenly and out of nowhere, all sorts of foreign ideas began to fall into his mind, ideas that called all his previous convictions into question.

The strangest thing was that the young man himself was disturbed by all this. He himself didn’t know where these thoughts were coming from. He didn’t want to think them. But they kept coming.

Rabbi Schneur Zalman pondered the situation for a moment and then answered that the young man must have somehow been drinking milk that was not chalav Yisroel. The milking had not been supervised by a Jew and that rendered the milk forbidden. He advised them what should be done to rectify the situation.

As soon as everything was taken care of, the son-in-law ceased to have such thoughts and returned to his previous self.