Insulting Rules and Hospitality

Cindy and I ate kosher last night. It tasted fine but I'm still not sure how I feel about it all.

A friend of mine is leaving town and, although we already attended a big leaving party for him a few weeks ago, he invited us to a more intimate dinner hosted by a friend of his. It was a bit last-minute but we didn't mind; we were told that dinner would be barbecue beef brisket so I grabbed a bottle of red that I'd been saving.

When we arrived the hostess thanked us for offering the wine but said that she couldn't serve it because she keeps kosher. Cindy rolled her eyes and steeled herself for a night of biting her tongue; I allowed my miserliness to distract me from dwelling on it and accepted the alcoholic punch she offered.

That should have been the end of it but when the other guests arrived the hostess made a point of telling them that I had been thoughtful enough to bring wine that she wouldn't let us drink. I felt like saying to her, "Don't rub it in!" when our friend apologised for not letting me know and started to explain, incorrectly, that the only thing that makes wine kosher is the rule about letting fields lie fallow so that poor people can have some of the fruit. (He made it sound like a version of fair-trade. If that were the only rule I'd consider buying that sort of wine all the time.) I uncharacteristically tried to divert him from the subject because it was his leaving event and I didn't want to talk about sensitive issues. But when he finished saying that that was the only rule, I had to point out to him that there's also the rule that no gentiles can be involved in the production of kosher wine. (I think they can pick the grapes but that's all. Only sterilisation makes it ok for gentiles to touch.) It's not just about the ingredients and the method per se, it's also about who makes it. If I were the winemaker, I'd be very offended by that! Nothing I could do would make them willing to drink it - that's racism. (Or something extraordinarily close to it. I guess someone could convert to Judaism just to make the wine but, because the rabbi has to refuse your request three times, it's tantamount to racism.)

Afterwards when Cindy and I debriefed, she suggested that the reason why our hostess didn't just say, "I won't have any, so only open the bottle if the three of you can finish it without me" might have been because she was trying to keep all her glasses kosher. (It was only when she served dinner and our friend asked which were "the meat plates" that we realised just how serious she was. She also gave me Baileys in a different glass from everyone else, because it's dairy.)

I guess it might seem too much like BYO to not share it with the hostess. Her other option might have been to lie and say that she had paired another wine specifically with the meal. I would have looked forward to tasting whatever wine she served if she had said that! And it need not be a lie, she could actually pair wines with dishes in the future, if she wanted to avoid telling people that she was rejecting it because of the ethnicity of the winemakers. But of course she didn't expect gentiles to know those rules (she said as much).

The other issue that I didn't raise was the fact that we were served kosher meat. I've heard it suggested before that kosher and halal slaughter are less humane than stunned killing and I've been thinking about it again since the recent brouhaha in Australia. I'm no expert and I'm not going to give up meat altogether but when the RSPCA tells me that some methods of slaughter are unacceptable, though legal through religious loopholes, I take that seriously. I haven't made it a rule to refuse to eat kosher or halal meat because it seems there's still some experts who claim it's just as painless when done right. I suspect that these are outliers but I don't know enough to make a moral stand on this point.

Deontologically speaking, I probably should have said something about both the meat and the wine -- it's hard to justify putting politeness above opposing racism and cruelty, even if I would rather my vegetarian friends didn't lecture me. Kant himself would say that we may use animals as means to an end except where the cruelty makes us worse as humans. The kosher system is institutionalised enough for that to be a possibility they don't believe that they're beling cruel, so I'm not sure if that would count for Kant.

For consequentialism it would depend on whether any good could come of it. That means not turning on my heel and leaving but remaining and lecturing them on the wrongs of their two rules. But I didn't have enough info at my fingertips so there's no way I could have produced more good than displeasure by carrying on like that.

It would seem that I did exactly the right thing for virtue ethics -- trying to be a gracious guest. But I knew that, even if she didn't mean it that way, refusing our wine for that reason should be construed as insulting. The reason I didn't make a fuss was not just to keep the peace but more because I didn't feel offended. I guess I'm not very emotional but it still seems strange that what I know intellectually to be an insult didn't register emotionally as offence. When you look at it like that, it becomes a little less clear that I did the right thing from an aretaic view. A true Aristotelian phronimos might say that I should have demanded satisfaction. (I didn't have a glove with me but we could have left.) Similarly, a Confucian gentleman might be concerned with defending Cindy in some way. Naturally I would respond verbally to any deliberate insult but should people be called out for accidental ones? More to the point, I know that Cindy's emotional response was not offence, it was more like plain old disapproval (and she doesn't need my assistance with that!).