Kaparot--Sept 29

Last Thursday, I did Kaparot (literally, atonement). For those of you who don’t know, this is one of the stranger and more disturbing rituals in Judaism, practiced mostly only by very Orthodox Jews. It involves swinging a live chicken over your head, while symbolically transferring the sins you’ve committed over the past year to that chicken. The chicken is then slaughtered and given to a needy family to eat. Some people use a bag of money instead (much nicer, in my opinion), and donate the money to charity.

So how did a lifelong vegetarian end up swinging a chicken over her head and handing it over to a shochet (ritual slaughterer) to be killed? Let me explain. I did not intend to do Kaparot. I went with a group of Pardes students, fully intending to just watch. My logic was as follows: It’s awfully inhumane. If I really thought it was going to atone for my sins, that’d be one thing. But—God hasn’t minded all the other years of my life that I didn’t do Kaparot, and really, if God decides not to forgive me this Yom Kippur, it’s not going to come down to whether or not I swung a chicken over my head. If I did it, it would be purely to have the experience. It would be touristy, voyeuristic , and that’s just not fair to a chicken. Also, I’d heard that in places like Mea Shearim, there’s no refrigeration, and the chickens lie out in the sun for hours, so that they’re not fit for anyone’s consumption. Which, to me, is morally disgusting. (Though that could be just a rumor; I haven’t verified it.) So I figured—I’ll go, and watch, and if it’s really awful maybe I’ll even join the animal rights protesters down the street.


We went to “Shuk Kaparot”, in the Machaneh Yehuda Shuk (market). I think I’d over-prepared myself for how bad it was going to be. I had imagined people swinging chickens by the feet, fast. Instead, the chickens were held behind the wings, and passed slowly over the person’s head three times. Not all that much different from the handling/treatment chickens would get on a farm, actually. The chickens were each in their own crate, not 6 chickens crammed into a tiny cage with beaks and toes cut off, like often happens to chickens destined for dinner in the US. And kosher slaughter, as far as methods of slaughtering animals go, is pretty humane. I asked one of the men working there who eats the chickens. “Poor families,” he told me. “When?” “In the next day or two.” And as far as I could tell, it was true—the chickens were already being plucked and taken away.


What were the reasons not to? I was going to be responsible for the death of a chicken, and for subjecting it to unnecessarily uncomfortable and scary (but not painful or horrible) treatment beforehand. I watched several chickens be slaughtered, to make sure I was fully conscious of and could handle what I was about to do. What were the reasons to? I wasn’t totally sure that this was going to atone for my sins, but at the very least I’d be giving dinner to a family that couldn’t afford it. And so…I decided to do it.

I found it interesting that I, a life-long vegetarian, was actually much less disturbed than many of my meat-eating friends. I’m not sure if it’s because, as a vegetarian, I’m very aware of horrible treatment of animals that occurs all the time in slaughterhouses and farms where meat is raised, so I wasn’t so disturbed when I saw chickens being slaughtered in a not-so-terrible manner. Or if it’s because I grew up in a rural area and am used to farm-animals. Or if it’s because I saw much worse treatment of chickens when I was in Tanzania. Who knows. I’m still surprised at myself for doing it. In retrospect, I definitely like Tashlich (which involves symbolically “casting away” your sins by throwing bread into water) better—it gives you as much time as you want to reflect, which is certainly difficult to do while holding a chicken.