G-d’s Forgotten Covenant

Jews around the world this week are reading the story of Noah in Genesis 9.

(Was he the one who first said, “When it rains, it pours”?)

Ironically, while most people associate this story with the saving of animals in the Ark, it is in this particular Torah portion that God first gives humans permission to kill animals for food.

Yup, the animals had barely set foot on terra firma when God told Noah and his sons, “Every living thing that moves shall be food for you.”

You can practically hear the cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys saying, “Are you kidding me?”

A year ago this week, The Beet-Eating Heeb, as a service to readers and animals alike, explained why Genesis 9 doesn’t really condone meat-eating, after all.

Click on this image to see a measure of how we treat God's covenant with animals.

But BEH left out an important point, which he will rectify right this very second.

If God really approves of us killing animals by the billions, why would He say that animals are explicitly included in His covenant?

It’s right there in Genesis 9, just a few short verses after humans supposedly got a permit to open slaughterhouses. (Emphasis on supposedly.)

In Genesis 9:12, God says, "This is the sign of the covenant which I am making between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all successive generations.”

Every living creature is in covenant with the Divine.

God was evidently concerned that humans would want to overlook this inconvenient truth, especially when there is meat on the grill.

So God repeated the statement not once, but three additional times.

Genesis 9, Verses 15, 16 and 17 all state that God includes animals in his covenant.

Sheesh, get the hint?

God does not want us to slash the throats of animals, or to abuse them in countless and hideous other ways, as we do in modern factory farms. Not if a Divine“covenant” means anything.

By definition, God would never have included the animals in His covenant if he didn’t care about their well-being. To which you’re probably saying, “No duh,” or amen.

To take it a step further, God could have established a covenant with animals without telling humans about it. But that would defeat the purpose. The reason this covenant is repeated four times in the Torah is because He is depending on us to make it a reality.

This is fundamental to Jewish thought. We are supposed to be God’s partners in perfecting creation. We are supposed to implement God’s will.

Sadly, we haven’t just ignored the fact that animals are partners to the same covenant we have with God. As the party responsible for making the covenant a meaningful reality, we have trashed it.

In the United States alone this year, 10 billion farm animals will be killed, while another 200 million animals will be killed by hunters, 100 million more in vivisection, and another 2 million in the fur industry.

And these figures don’t measure the brutality, the cruelty, the torture and the torment that these animals experience before they are killed.

This is how we honor the Divine covenant.

Animals shouldn’t be mad at God for what He said in Genesis 9:3. Technically, He may have given humans permission to eat meat. But He made it perfectly clear that He would strongly prefer that we don’t.

The animals should be mad at humans. We have betrayed them. And in so doing, we have betrayed God and His covenant.

Fortunately, we can begin to repair this covenant with a simple step.

Go veg.

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