The answer to the question, “Are cheeseburgers kosher?” is a resounding NO!…and a resounding YES!

If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video.

If you ask any “mainstream” Jewish person, their answer will be “No” because their rabbi has taught them that any mixture of dairy and meat consumed within a certain number of hours is a sin (the time between eating one and the other is different depending upon whether you are Sephardic or Ashkenazi Jew.)

If you ask a Christian, born again or not, they will tell you it is a sin but only for the Jews because Christians are under Grace and the need to obey the Mosaic Laws is done away with when you accept Jesus as your Messiah.

Lastly, if you ask me, I will tell you that it is not a sin to have a cheeseburger because all God told us in Leviticus 11 (and a few other places within the Torah) is that we are not to boil a calf in its mother’s milk.

There is nothing, at all, anywhere in the Torah that says you cannot have dairy and meat together: that is strictly a Talmudic requirement.

If you aren’t familiar with the Talmud, it is considered by many Jews, especially within the Orthodox sects, to be as important as the Torah. This is because the Talmud is called the “Oral Law”, which is the many other commandments God gave to Moses that were not written down, but instead passed orally from Moses to Joshua, and so forth down through the centuries until it was finally written down in the Mishna, composed circa 300 CE. Later, the Gemara was added around 500 CE. There are two separate Talmud’s, the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian, or Jerusalem Talmud. The Talmud contains Halacha, which means “The Walk” or “The Way to Walk”, which is how Jews are to worship and live their lives. Everything from how far you can walk on Shabbat, to what kinds of dishes to have, to how hot your dishwasher has to be, to what lights to leave on Friday before Shabbat, to what you can wear, to how to groom yourself, to …well, you get the idea.

So if Jews say cheeseburgers aren’t kosher, and Christians say kosher isn’t required for people who believe in Jesus, why do I, a Jew who believes in Jesus, say that cheeseburgers are kosher and the kosher laws are still required?

I’ll tell you why: because God never said don’t mix dairy and meat together in the same meal and Yeshua never said any of the Mosaic laws, which include the kosher laws, are no longer necessary when you follow him.

Let’s get this straight: I do not condone or even suggest that we should change God’s commandments because of the difference between how people lived then and how we live today, but rather that we should know how they lived then and account for how we live today to ensure we follow not just the letter, but the spirit of the law.

God was clear when he spoke through the Prophets that he wants obedience, but obedience from a desire to please him and not as a means of earning salvation.

In other words, just going through the motions (what we call Legalism) is not enough.

I say cheeseburgers are kosher because when we consider what the culture and society were like when God gave that command, we know that back then you most likely owned the cow that gave the milk and birthed the calf, so you knew which calf belonged to which cow and which cow gave what milk. Knowing who belonged to whom, you could easily avoid using the milk that came from that calf’s mother to cook that mother’s calf.

God only knows why he gave this specific commandment, but it seems obvious there is spiritual importance in what God said. To me, this clearly indicates some relationship with child sacrifice, and the hideousness of parents eating their own children, which is often brought up as the epitome of horror resulting from being under siege.

Maybe being “under siege” doesn’t have to relate only to being surrounded by an enemy, but to being surrounded by sin? Such as when we live in a sinful and fallen world?

So, back to cheeseburgers: the meat in the cheeseburger comes from the beef cattle industry and the milk comes from the dairy farm industry: these are two totally different animals (pardon the expression), and in dairy farming the cows aren’t killed until they are no longer able to produce milk. And that isn’t part of the beef industry.

Calves are born in both the beef and dairy industries, but they stay within that industry. To violate the kashrut (kosher) commandment regarding boiling the calf in its mother’s milk, you would have to buy milk from the grocery store that was from the same cow that gave birth to the veal you bought from the grocery store, then boil that veal in that milk.

The milk production from United States dairy farms is about 21 billion gallons a year, and the meat Americans eat is not mainly from America, but the top four producers of meat sold in America are Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Hong Kong. Considering these statistics, it seems pretty safe to say that there is no way in the world that anyone would ever be boiling a calf in its mother’s milk.

Unless you owned the cow and did it all on purpose.

So there you have it: if you want to live “rabbinically” kosher, obeying what men say which overrides what God said, then you will never eat any dairy with any meat product, ever. At least you won’t be sinning.

Or, you can ignore the kosher laws altogether, as Christians have been taught they can do, thereby always sinning: not just by violating the cow/milk/calf thing, but by pigging out on pig and having a shell of a time eating shellfish.

There is a third option: you could do as I do and be “biblically” kosher, eating what God said is OK to eat, and not eating what God said is not OK to eat.

This ministry is not here to tell you what you should do but to teach you what you need to know in order to make an informed decision, and now that you have been informed it is up to you to decide what you will do.

Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know to help this ministry grow. Please subscribe to both my website and YouTube channel, and don’t forget to also check out my books and Facebook page.

And remember that I always welcome your comments.

That’s it for now, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Today we will go over how it all fits together. And if you are wondering just what it is that fits together, I will start by explaining what I mean.

And we will start out with God, which I think is a pretty good starting place.

If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video.

When God created everything he knew exactly what he was doing. He created human beings with Free Will and allowed iniquity within our personality so that we could choose to worship him. After all, if he never gave us the opportunity to refuse his instructions, then worshipping him would be an empty and unmotivated act, not much more than simply reacting to a stimulus.

God also knew that because of our iniquity, that is, the innate desire to sin, that we would eventually need some way to lead us into eternal communion with God by providing an invulnerable means of forgiveness, and that way is through his Messiah. This Messiah was promised, first and foremost, to and for the Jewish people but would later provide salvation for the entire world.

That’s what I am talking about when I said we would go over how it all fits together. Now, here we go…

God rid the world of that first group from Adam and Eve, as well as from Cain, and started a new batch of humans through Noah. Noah’s grandson, Abram (not Abraham yet) was the one God selected whose faith was so strong that he was chosen to be the father of many nations (thus renamed “Abraham”), which God promised to him in Genesis 17:4.

The next step in God’s plan was to also tell Abraham that through his descendants the entire world would be blessed (Genesis 22:18).

The next step comes hundreds of years down the road when God told Moses that the nation of Israel, now freed from Egypt and on their way to the Promised Land, will be his nation of priests to the world (Exodus 19:6). After that, God gives Moses the Torah (Exodus 20) which is God’s instructions to the Jewish people regarding how they are to worship him and treat each other.

And here is where Christianity has gotten it all wrong: the Torah is not just for the Jews. Before God gave the Torah to the Jewish people, he anointed them as his nation of priests. What does a priest do? The Priest is the Intercessor between God and the people, serving God by teaching the people about God, which includes the proper way to worship him and how they should live their lives according to God’s way. Well, if the entire Jewish nation is God’s priests, they aren’t “priesting” to themselves, so who are they the priests for? Obviously, they are God’s priests to the world! And since the Torah is the worshiper’s User Manuel, which God gave to the Jews as his priests to teach the nations (i.e., Gentiles), that proves the Torah must be for everyone.

And the last part of this puzzle is Deuteronomy 28, one of the last chapters in the Torah, containing God’s promises of blessings for obedience to the way we are to worship him and treat each other that he instructed us to do, in the Torah.

One other thing to point out: God chose Abraham not just because he was faithful, but because he was also obedient. Yes, obedience was an integral part of Abrahams’ righteousness, and God told that to Isaac in Genesis 26:5.

God promises blessings to those who obey him, and the blessings are to come through Abraham’s seed, the Jewish people, and God gave them his instructions (the Torah) to learn how to receive those blessings. After learning the Torah, as God’s priests to the world, the Jewish people would now teach the rest of the world how to receive those blessings.

The greatest blessing of all to come from the Jewish people is, of course, the Messiah.

He makes it possible for us all to receive forgiveness, which became impossible (in accordance with the Torah) when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Yeshua the Messiah made forgiveness possible because he replaced the need to bring an animal to the temple, which was always part of God’s plan.

One last time for those in the back row who may not have heard it all: God chose Abraham to be the father of a nation that would bring God’s promised blessings to the entire world through their teaching, as priests of God, the instructions God gave in the Torah which tell us how to receive those blessings, the greatest blessing of all being the Messiah.

That’s it- pretty simple when you know how all the pieces fit together, isn’t it?

Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel, as well as my website and Facebook page.

And please remember that I always welcome your comments.

Until next time, l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!