GEN1543 Historically the dietary laws (kashrut) have been a way of encouraging Jewish social intercourse and limiting interaction with non-Jews. Dietary rules create boundaries.  This is well illustrated when Joseph eats with his brothers before he reveals his true identify to them [this verse].   Kashrut has played a significant role in connecting Jews to one another and achieving a sense of common identity.  However, disputes about kashrut have created divisions within the Jewish community regarding the creation of boundary lines distinguishing one stream from another or one school of interpretation from the other.   Decisions about dietary restrictions are often grounded in the philosophy of a particular steam.  The best and clearest example comes from classical Reform Judaism and its 1885 Pittsburgh Platform with its thoroughgoing universalism and its rejection of bodily mitzvot.  In rejecting peoplehood, the rejection of kashrut makes complete sense.   Classical Reformers understood how important the dietary laws had been to the past formulations of Judaism and that the new Judaism they were creating required a radical change to symbolize the new philosophy: We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state.   They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.  If the goal was integration into society, kashrut was a barrier.   Meals played an important role in nineteenth-century social and business relationships, as they do today.   If the essence of religion is ethical behavior, then what goes into the mouth is not as important as what comes out of the mouth.   This Enlightenment-inspired Reform community wanted to assimilate into educated society and to emphasize ethical behavior.   That legacy shaped Reform Judaism.   Personally, I remember participating in youth group events where the food was deliberately not kasher as a way of emphasizing the ethical dimension of Judaism. (By Peter Knobel, “WHAT I EAT IS WHO I AM: Kashrut and Identity”) SACTAB 439-440 (Continued at [[LEV118]] Leviticus 11:44 holy SACTAB 440-2)