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The following quotes should serve for the purpose of inspiration and education, but should not be taken out of context--they should be a starting point for further learning. The sources have been cited whenever possible.Many thanks to Richard Schwartz, Daniel Brook and JVNA for many of these quotes.
From the Torah and Other TextsGod said: "Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree that has seed-yielding fruit, to you it shall be for food."
-Genesis 1:29
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creep upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul, every green herb for food.
-Genesis 1:30
When you see the ass of your enemy lying under its burden and would refrain from raising it, you must nevertheless raise it with him.
-Exodus 23:5
I will grant you the rain of your land in its due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your new grain, and your wine, and your oil.
-Deuteronomy 11:14
If along the road you chance upon a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life.
--Deuteronomy 22:6
You shall not muzzle an ox when it is threshing.
-Deuteronomy 25:4
God's tender mercies are over all of His creatures.
-Psalms 145:9
It shall come to pass in that day that mountains shall drip sweet wine and the hills shall flow with milk.
-Joel 4:18
The earth shall respond to the corn, the wine, and the oil.
-Hosea 2:24
I shall return my people from captivity, and they shall build up the waste cities and inhabit them, and they shall plant vineyards and drink the wine from them, and they shall make gardens and eat the fruit from them, and I shall plant them upon their land.
-Amos 9:14-15
Build yourselves houses and dwell in them, and plant gardens and eat the fruit of them.
-Jeremiah 29:5
And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
With a little boy to lead them
And the cow and the bear shall feed;
The young shall lie down together,
And the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw
-Isaiah 11:6-7
The righteous man regards the life of his animal.
-Proverbs 12:10
The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof.
-Psalm 24:1
For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts;
even one thing befalls them;
as the one dies, so dies the other;
yea, they all have one breath;
so that man has no preeminence above a beast;
for all is vanity.
All go to one place; all are of the dust.
Who knows the spirit of men whether it goes upward;
and the spirit of the beast whether it goes
downward to the earth?
-Ecclesiastes 3:19-21
While our teacher Moses was tending the sheep of Jethro in the wilderness a lamb ran away from him. He ran after her until she reached Hasuah. Upon reaching Hasuah she came upon a pool of water [whereupon] the lamb stopped to drink. When Moses reached her he said, "I did not know that you were running because [you were] thirsty. You must be tired." He placed her on his shoulder and began to walk. The Holy One, blessed be He, said, "You are compassionate in leading flocks belonging to mortals; I swear you will similarly shepherd my flock, Israel.
-Exodus Rabbah 2:2
Only a scholar of Torah may eat meat, but one who is ignorant of Torah is forbidden to eat meat.
-Talmud, Pesachim 49b
The Torah teaches a lesson in moral conduct, that man shall not eat meat unless he has a special craving for it...and shall eat it only occasionally and sparingly.
-Talmud Chulin 84a.
Jews are compassionate children of compassionate ancestors, and one who is not compassionate cannot truly be a descendant of our father Abraham.
-Talmud, Beitzah 32b
Those who have the capacity to eliminate a wrong and do not do so bear the responsibility for its consequences.
-Talmud, Shabbat 54b
One who destroys a single life is considered to have destroyed an entire world, and one who saves a single life is considered to have saved an entire world.
-Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5
The sword comes into the world because of justice delayed, because of justice perverted, and because of those who render wrong decisions.
-Pirkei Avot (Ethics of Our Sages) 5:11
_____________________________________________ HealthNothing will benefit health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
-Albert Einstein
Following the many precedents prescribed in the Code of Jewish Law, we would have little difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that, if indeed eating meat is injurious one's health, it is not only permissible, but possibly even mandatory that we reduce our ingestion of an unhealthful product to the minimal level.
-Rabbi Alfred Cohen, "Vegetarianism From a Jewish Perspective", Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society, Fall, 1981, pg. 61.
It is forbidden to eat anything that leads to any disease.
-Lomzha Rav, Divrie Malchiel 2:53
As it is halachically prohibited to harm oneself and as healthy, nutritious vegetarian alternatives are easily available, meat consumption has become halachically -unjustifiable.
-Rabbi David Rosen, from Rabbis and Vegetarianism, Micah, 1995, pg. 54.
Since maintaining a healthy and sound body is among the ways of G-d - for one cannot understand or have knowledge of the Creator if one is ill - therefore one must avoid that which harms the body and accustom oneself to that which is helpful and helps the body become stronger.
-Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Deot 4:1
One must avoid that which harms the body and accustom oneself to that which is helpful and helps the body become stronger.
-Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Deot 4:1
_____________________________________________ EnvironmentIn the hour when the Holy One, blessed be He created the first human being, He took him and let him pass before all the trees of the Garden of Eden and said to him: "See my works, how fine and excellent they are! Now all that I have created, for you have I created it. Think upon this and do not destroy and desolate My World, For if you corrupt it, there is no one to set it right after you.
-Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:28
There’s no doubt about it from an ecological point of view, simply even I’d say mathematical point of view, vegetarianism is a much more calculated way to manage this world. And there is indeed a direct ideological connection between responsible stewardship and vegetarianism.
-Samuel Chayen
This is the way of pious and elevated people... they will not waste even a mustard seed, and they are distressed at every ruination and spoilage they see, and if they are able to save, they will save anything from destruction with all of their power...
-Rabbi Aaron HaLevi of Barcelona, Sefer HaChinuch pg. 529
_____________________________________________ Rabbis and Other Jewish ThinkersThe Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Moses: Eating meat is not essential to one’s nutrition; rather, it is a matter of gluttony, of filling one’s belly and of increasing one's lust. Meat also gives rise in human beings to a cruel and evil temperament..therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, did not tell Moses that He would give the Israelites meat, rather bread, which is a fitting food and essential for the human temperament.
-Don Isaac Abarbanel (1437-1508), commentary on Exodus 16:4
Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
-Theodor Adorno, Ph.D., Jewish philosopher
Aside from the cruelty, rage and fury in killing animals, and the fact that it teaches human beings the bad trait of shedding blood for naught; eating the flesh even of select animals will yet give rise to a mean and insensitive soul.
-Rabbi Joseph Albo, 15th century Spain-Rabbi Joseph Albo, Sefer Ha-Ikarim, Vol. III, Ch. 15
People should consider themselves, and the worms, and all creatures as friends in the universe, for we are all created beings whose abilities are God-given.
-The Baal Shem Tov (Founder of Hasidic Movement), Tzava’as HaRivash 12
It seems doubtful from all that has been said whether the Torah would sanction "factory farming", which treats animals as machines, with apparent insensitivity to their natural needs and instincts.
-Rabbi Aryeh Carmell, From Masterplan: Its Programs, Meanings, Goals, Feldheim, 1991, p. 69
Following the many precedents prescribed in the Code of Jewish Law, we would have little difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that, if indeed eating meat is injurious one's health, it is not only permissible, but possibly even mandatory that we reduce our ingestion of an unhealthful product to the minimal level.
-Rabbi Alfred Cohen, "Vegetarianism From a Jewish Perspective", Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society, Fall, 1981, pg. 61
The simpler way [of maintaining kashrut], which is the better way in the eyes of the tradition, is to be vegetarian.
-Rabbi Michael Cohen
If you don't eat meat, you are certainly kosher... And I believe that is what we should tell our fellow rabbis.
-Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Haifa, Israel
To make animals suffer is forbidden by the Torah.
-Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen
No one can deny seriously, or for very long, that [people] do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty [of animal slaughter] or to hide it from themselves, in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide.
-Jacques Derrida, Jewish philosopher
What may have once made sense, now can no longer be justified....Let us realize today, in the vast majority of cases, "kosher meat" is an oxymoron.
-Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dob
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature.
-Albert Einstein
If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.
-Albert Einstein
In the course of his development towards culture, man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to annihilate the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom.
-Sigmund Freud, from “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis”
My ancestors did not belong to the hunters as much as to the hunted, and the idea of attacking the descendants of those who were our comrades in misery goes against my grain.
-Heinrich Heine, Jewish writer
A whole galaxy of central rabbinic and spiritual leaders … has been affirming vegetarianism as the ultimate meaning of Jewish moral teaching.
-Rabbi Isaac Ha-Levi Herzog, Former Chief Rabbi of Israel
Here you are faced with God's teaching, which obliges you not only to refrain from inflicting unnecessary pain on any animal, but to help and, when you can, to lessen the pain whenever you see an animal suffering, even through no fault of yours.
-Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb, Chapter 60, Section 4
It [meat eating] is an overall moral shortcoming of mankind, in that it does not promote good and lofty sentiments.
-Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935), First Chief Rabbi of Pre-State Israel, Hazon ha-Tzimhonut ve-ha-Shalom me-Behinah Toranit
Just as the Nazis dehumanized the Jews in their propaganda and in the atrocities they committed, the apologists for meat consumption and the exploitation of animals have stereotyped and degraded the animal kingdom for their own purposes, declaring animals to be devoid of cognitive functioning and even of pain.
-Jay Lavine, M.D., She’elot Uteshuvot (Questions and Answers) on Jewish Vegetarianism
It is also prohibited to kill an animal with its young on the same day (Lev. 22:28), in order that people should be restrained and prevented from killing the two together in such a manner that the young is slain in the sight of the mother; for the pain of the animals under such circumstances is very great. There is no difference in this case between the pain of man and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for her young ones is not produced by reasoning, but by imagination, and this faculty exists not only in man but in most living beings.
-Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 3:48
Since maintaining a healthy and sound body is among the ways of God, for one cannot understand or have knowledge of the Creator if one is ill - therefore one must avoid that which harms the body and accustom oneself to that which is helpful and helps the body become stronger.
-Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Deot 4:1
The Nazis explicitly structured their industrial destruction of the Jews on the model of animal slaughter. This is not to compare the suffering of animals and humans, but shows that the way we treat animals is similar to the way the Nazis treated us.
-Rabbi Hillel Norry
It is not necessary for any human benefit to consume the flesh of animals. In fact it is harmful to human health, destructive of the environment, and wasteful of valuable resources that could be better used to feed the hungry and provide for the needy. All of these are Torah values.
-Rabbi Hillel Norry
The domestication/enslavement of animals was the model and inspiration for human slavery…the breeding of domesticated animals led to eugenic measures as compulsory sterilization, euthanasia killings, and genocide, and…the industrialized slaughter of cattle, pigs, sheep, and other animals paved the way, at least indirectly, for the Final Solution.
-Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
Accordingly, the laws of kashrut come to teach us that a Jew's first preference should be a vegetarian meal. If, however, one cannot control a craving for meat, it should be kosher meat, which would serve as a reminder that the animal being eaten is a creature of God, that the death of such a creature cannot be taken lightly, that hunting for sport is forbidden, that we cannot treat any living thing callously, and that we are responsible for what happens to other beings (human or animal) even if we did not personally come into contact with them.
-Rabbi Pinchas Peli, Torah Today, Washington,D.C.: B'nai B'rith Books, 1987, p. 118.
The dietary laws are intended to teach us compassion and lead us gently [back] to vegetarianism.
-Rabbi Shlomo Raskin
Being compassionate toward animal life is not just a matter of being responsible for animal life, which we have very clearly laid down in the Torah, expounded by our sages, but is a matter of imbuing ourselves with the right kind of values. If we are insensitive towards animal life, then we desensitize ourselves as human beings. And therefore a truly sensitive human being, compassionate towards other human beings, should be compassionate towards animals.
-Rabbi David Rosen, former Chief Rabbi of Ireland
I am a vegetarian precisely because I am a believing Jew who strives to live in accordance with the ethical teachings of my heritage….I believe that if you follow the most sublime and noble values in our tradition, in this day and age,then there is an imperative to live a vegetarian lifestyle. … It is a halachic imperative. Compassion for animals is a halachic imperative. And being responsible also for your environment and for your globe, which also have ramifications coming out of the whole question of the meat industry and meat consumption, are all fundamental Jewish questions. So I, simply put, am a vegetarian because I am a religious Jew.
-Rabbi David Rosen
The current treatment of animals in the livestock trade definitely renders the consumption of meat as halachically unacceptable as the product of illegitimate means.
Rabbi David Rosen
As it is halachically prohibited to harm oneself and as healthy, nutritious vegetarian alternatives are easily available, meat consumption has become halachically unjustifiable.
Rabbi David Rosen
We should make all our consumption as holy as possible…The more we live as if this were the messianic age the closer we are to it.
-Rabbi Rami Shapiro
I am a vegetarian for health reasons - the health of the animal.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize laureate
In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Letter Writer”
As long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace... There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
The same questions are bothering me today as they did fifty years ago. Why is one born? Why does one suffer? In my case, the suffering of animals also makes me very sad. I’m a vegetarian, you know. When I see how little attention people pay to animals, and how easily they make peace with man being allowed to do with animals whatever he wants because he keeps a knife or a gun, it gives me a feeling of misery and sometimes anger with the Almighty. I say ‘Do you need your glory to be connected with so much suffering of creatures without glory, just innocent creatures who would like to pass a few years in peace?’ I feel that animals are as bewildered as we are except that they have no words for it. I would say that all life is asking: ‘What am I doing here?"
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Newsweek interview (October 16, 1978) after winning the Nobel Prize in literature
I think that eating meat or fish is a denial of all ideals, even of all religions. How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? Every kind of killing seems to me savage and I find no justification for it.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
I've noticed that quite a lot of people who are prominent in the animal liberation movement are Jews. Maybe we are simply not prepared to see the powerful hurting the weak.
-Peter Singer, ethicist, author of Animal Liberation
Unless you believe in fascism - that might makes right - we do not have a right to harm others.
-Henry Spira, Kristallnacht survivor and animal rights advocate
By not eating meat, I am much more certain to never violate, even accidentally, the Biblical and rabbinic prohibitions concerning non-kosher meat. The traditional production of kosher meat never envisioned mass slaughterhouses or factory farms. It is questionable whether most meat or poultry produced in this country that is sold as kosher is actually in compliance with the traditional rules of kashrut as well as the prohibition against cruelty to animals.
-Rabbi Jon-Jay Tilsen
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
-Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 10 December 1986
Don’t let your cravings delude you,
don’t become alienated,
don’t let your cravings become your gods,
don’t debase yourself to them.
-Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, V’haya Im Shamoa
Readers have left 2 comments.  1. "Statement attributed to Jesus of Nazareth"Engineer68, Registered"Against Moses indeed I do not speak, nor against the Law, which he permitted for the hardness of your hearts. Verily, I say unto you, in the beginning all creatures of God did find their sustenance in the herbs and the fruits of the earth alone, until the ignorance of man turned many of them to that which was contrary to their original use; but even these shall yet return to their natural food; as it is written in the prophets, and their words shall not fail." 2. Animals of the Land by Menachem Slae Chapter on Vegetarianism, pJanineLauraBronson, Unregistered Animals of the Land by Menachem Slae Chapter on Vegetarianism, pages 145-149, The Influence of Food on one Character
From the Holy Toarh from The Book of Shemot, Chapter 22, Verse 30, commentary by HaRamban and the Book of Devarim chapter 14, verse 3, Rabbi Menachem Slae in his book Animals of the Land page 146 explains the quote "And my People, Thou shouldest be Holy unto me" stating that what we eat influences purity, or holiness of the body and we are warned to eat only holy food that is clean and will not cause harshness, roughness, rudeness, or burishness and being inconsiderate or thoughtless in our minds and spirits for it is only those who are fully holy who can fully worship and pray wholly to Hashem, and therefore, it would appear, don't you think, that avoiding cruelty is necessary for peace of mind? |
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