Smoky bacon cigarettes
FORGET the health risks associated with smoking — according to an Australian professor, Jews should also be worried about the kashrut of cigarettes.
PETER KOHN
FORGET the health risks associated with smoking — according to an Australian professor, Jews should also be worried about the kashrut of cigarettes.
The warning from the University of Sydney’s Professor Simon Chapman comes in the wake of a Dutch study that revealed 185 industrial uses for pigs, including the use of their haemoglobin — a component in blood — in some cigarette filters.
Prof Chapman, a specialist in public health, told The Daily Telegraph: “I think that there would be some particularly devout groups who would find the idea that there were pig products in cigarettes to be very offensive.
“The Jewish community certainly takes these matters extremely seriously and the Islamic community certainly do as well, as would many vegetarians.”
However, Melbourne’s Rabbi Ralph Genende played down the kashrut implications. He told The AJN while he would not want to offer a definitive halachic opinion, “there is an argument that the pig’s blood acts as a filter, so you’re not directly inhaling it”.
The bigger issue, according to Rabbi‚ÄàGenende, is whether smoking itself is halachically permissible.
“There are halachic authorities who explicitly forbid smoking because it is detrimental to your health. But there are other well-known rabbis who continue to smoke and who obviously have a different reading on it.
“We could say, ‘you shouldn’t dine on swine, or inhale the porcine’.”
The Rabbinical Council of America, basing its decision on “unanimous opinion”, released a ruling in 2006 that smoking was against halachah.
The council stated that “the Torah is a book of life, both physical and spiritual. And especially on the issue of smoking, the Torah itself must be seen as a living, growing and ever expanding source of wisdom and life-giving energy, mandating the pursuit of good health and long life.”
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