Tza•ar Ba•alei Ḥayim in the Marketplace of Values

The growing prominence of Jewish organizations calling for ethical meat production, and the resistance of mainstream Orthodox authorities to these demands, has drawn attention to the question of the place of moral rules about the treatment of animals in Jewish law. On one side, religious activists point out that the prohibition of causing unnecessary pain to animals, tza•ar ba•alei ḥayim, is stated clearly and unambiguously in Jewish law. On the other, Orthodox writers argue that medieval authorities consistently declined to apply this principle to situations involving food production. Both claims are indeed correct, and this creates a difficult, seemingly intractable situation where certain principles are codified in Jewish law codes but their application has been consistently limited. So what does “Jewish law” says about “animal welfare”? And if there is no clear answer, in what way can rabbinic tradition offer us any guidance about how to grapple with our own challenges?

The solution lies in an obvious but easily overlooked fact: each of these ethical dilemmas involves not a single moral value, but multiple concerns that stand in conflict with each other, and that must be navigated in order to come to any resolution. The question central to all rabbinic discussions of tza•ar ba•alei ḥayim is not whether the principle exists or even what it means, but rather how we are to weigh and balance the different values—each one compelling—that come into conflict. Animal welfare, on the one hand, is balanced against, on the one hand, ritual laws such as hilkhot Shabbat: for example, how should one act when the action needed to relieve an animal’s pain constitutes a violation of Shabbat? On the other hand, concern for animal welfare is also balanced against very practical concerns such as financial loss: what if one’s income depends on causing pain to animals? Tza•ar ba•alei ḥayim is a value that was considered to be of great import, and yet was often trumped by other, more pressing concerns. Thus the rabbinic sources I present here do not simply teach a value; they tell a story of how the rabbis fit that value into the real-life challenges of Jews in different eras.

This can, I believe, offer us a clearer and more authentic way to think about the meaning and function of many halakhic norms. The divergence of practical legal rulings in different eras often depends not on major changes in the values central to the halakhah, but rather in how the legal authorities of each generation balance the relative urgency of each value in their own times. The difference between earlier eras and our own often stems not from the assertion of values foreign to halakhah but rather from continuing the process of finding a balance between competing values—with that equilibrium often shifting in an ever-changing world. Our responsibility as modern, halakhic Jews, then, is not to simply identify and follow specific rulings of earlier sages, but in fact to mirror their process, seeking out the same delicate balance that they sought but within the context of our own unique challenges and resources.

Defining the Concept

I would like to begin with a few general observations about the general concept of tza•ar ba•alei ḥayim. The phrase, which literally means “suffering of animals,” is used in the Talmud¹ to describe a prohibition of either actively causing unnecessary pain to animals or passively leaving an animal to undergo such suffering. It will be used here to indicate this prohibition. It is generally accepted in the Talmud that there is such a prohibition, though there is extended debate as to whether it is of biblical or rabbinic origin (and therefore of greater or lesser authority). From the time of the earliest post-talmudic authorities, however, it has been universally accepted as being of biblical origin,² and there is no rabbinic authority, medieval or modern, who questions whether this principle is accepted or binding.

The main discussion of tza•ar ba•alei ḥayim in the Babylonian Talmud centers on the biblical...