Departures

THE R STRAIN

Although I’m Jewish, I’m not particularly observant: I eat pork, for instance. One morning, after a breakfast of bacon and eggs, I thought, That’s so good, I wish it were kosher. “The R Strain” followed shortly thereafter. Curiously, after Stan Schmidt bought it but before it saw print, there was a story in Science News about the babirusa, a Southeast Asian pig that actually does more or less chew its cud. One of the scientists who was working on the babirusa saw the story in Analog and thought her work had given me the idea. It didn’t, but who knows? It might have.

Even in Los Angeles, it is out of the ordinary for the star of a press conference to be a small pink pig. Peter Delahanty had been anxious about how Lionel would react to the SV lights, but the shoat was doing just what he’d hoped: ignoring them. He was happily feeding his face from a plastic washtub full of potatoes and carrots. Delahanty beamed at him like a proud father, which, as he headed Genetic Enterprises, in a way he was.

Still cameras flashed and stereovision cameras whirred, but there were, after all, only so many pictures to be taken of a pig. After a while, Delahanty took the tub away from Lionel and put it on a table by the lectern.

Following it with his eyes, Lionel let out a grunt of piggy indignation. “Sorry, pal,” Delahanty told him. “Maybe later.” As if he understood, Lionel settled back-he really was a good-natured beast. His throat and jaws began to work.

More flashes went off. “That’s what you came to see, ladies and gentlemen,” Delahanty said. “Lionel’s one of Genetic Enterprises’ new R strain of pigs-R for ruminant, of course. In other words, unlike ordinary, unimproved swine, he chews his cud.”

“Just why is that an improvement?” asked a lady reporter in the second row.

“It makes him and his brothers and sisters more efficient food processors. Ruminant animals-cattle, sheep, goats, deer, antelope are some of the ones occurring in nature-partially digest food, then store and regurgitate it for rechewing and more complete digestion. They get more out of a given amount of food than non-ruminants. Lionel will gain weight on less feed or lower-quality feed than an unimproved pig.”

“Which means lower cost to the farmer?” someone asked.

“Exactly.”

“But of course buying your R strain is going to be more expensive for the farmer. What’s the net savings?”

Delahanty turned to a chart behind him.”Here you have costs for the R strain compared to those for ordinary swine. As you can see, the break-even point is at three and a half months if the farmer buys piglets; it’s even sooner if he chooses to have fertilized ova implanted in his own sows. And the extra expense is all in the first generation; the R strain breeds true.”

“Will they interbreed with unmodified pigs?” a man with a gray mustache wondered.

“No,” Delahanty said. “There may be matings, but no offspring from them. The genetic changes are too great for inter-fertility.”

Another woman had a question: “How hardy are your new pigs? Can they survive the poor treatment they may get, say, in a Third World country?”

“At least as well as any other pigs,” Delahanty said firmly. “Probably better, since they’ll thrive on less food. One of the reasons Genetic Enterprises developed the R strain was to provide more protein for overpopulated developing nations.”

He fielded more queries about costs, and several on the genetic engineering techniques that had gone into Lionel and his ilk. After half an hour or so, the reporters’ ingenuity flagged. Finally, though, someone asked the question Delahanty had been hoping for: “What do these beasts of yours taste like?”

He smiled. “I’ll let you all be the judges of that. The chops and hams on the buffet to my left here come from the R strain. If there aren’t any more questions-”

The surge forward was so sudden and urgent that Lionel snorted in alarm. But somebody was still waving a hand-not a reporter but a cameraman, a fellow with curly brown hair and a big nose. “Yes? You want to ask me something?” Delahanty called.

“Yeah, if I could,” the man said. “My name’s Stan Jacoby. Here’s what I want to know…”

Delahanty had been ready for every question the reporters, and a good many they hadn’t. Now, though, he felt his jaw drop. “Mr. Jacoby,” he said in the most spontaneous answer of the press conference, “I’ll be goddamned if I know.”

The phone rang three times before Ruth picked it up. “It’s for you, dear,” she shouted.

Rabbi Aaron Kaplan muttered something unrabbinic that his wet beard mercifully swallowed. “Unless it’s an emergency, get a number and say I’ll call back,” he called over the hiss of the shower. He expected to be dragged out dripping-when did anyone calling a rabbi not think it was an emergency? — but he got to finish bathing in peace.

Somewhat mollified, he surveyed himself in the steamy bathroom mirror as he dried off. There were gray threads in the beard and a bald spot at his crown, but his stocky frame had not changed too badly since his days as a high school linebacker twenty-five years before.

Ruth came in with a scrap of paper. He smiled at her, thinking how lucky he was; if she had not been a rabbi’s daughter, she would have been a rebbitzin decorative enough to make half his congregation nervous.

At the moment, she was giggling. “What’s so funny?” he asked. She gave him the paper. He recognized Peter Delahanty’s name; they had worked together on a couple of fund-raising committees. Underneath were a phone number and a one-sentence message: “Wants to know if pigs can be kosher.”

He laughed. “A practical joke?”

“I don’t think so. He seemed very sincere.”

“Well, all right, I’ll call him. He’s got chutzpah, if nothing else.” Kaplan went into the bedroom, put on a T-shirt and pair of shorts. Not for the first time, he was glad he hadn’t added video to his phone system.

He punched the number. “Genetic Enterprises, Dr. Delahanty’s office,” a woman said. He asked to speak to Dr. Delahanty. “May I ask who’s calling?” the secretary said. When he gave his name, she answered, “One moment. I’ll connect you.”

“Oh, Rabbi Kaplan. Thanks for returning my call.” Delahanty sounded young and earnest. If he was a practical joker, he was first-rate.

Kaplan said, “My wife tells me you were inquiring about the possibility of, uh, pork being acceptable under Jewish dietary law.”

“Yes, that’s right. You see-”

Kaplan cut him off. “I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Leviticus 11:3 and 11:7 are the relevant passages. Here, let me give you the exact wording.” He reached for the Bible on the night-stand. “ ‘Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.’ And again, ‘And the swine, because he parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, but cheweth not the cud, be is unclean to you.’ The fourteenth chapter of Deuteronomy repeats the same prohibitions. So I really don’t see how-”

It was Delahanty’s turn to interrupt. “Forgive me, Rabbi Kaplan, but I do know that under normal circumstances Jews are not supposed to eat pork. Let me tell you about Lionel, though.”

“Lionel?” Kaplan echoed, confused.

“Yes. This would have been easier if you’d caught the news last night. Lionel is a pig who chews his cud… Are you there, Rabbi Kaplan?”

“I’m here,” Kaplan said after a long pause. “I think you’d better tell me more.” He felt a headache coming on.

“The easiest thing to do would have been to say that pigs is pigs, whether they chew their cuds or not. That would have been that,” Ruth said when he finally got off the phone with Delahanty and, still wearing a bemused look, explained the dilemma to her.

“Simplest, yes, but would it have been right?” Kaplan said, shaking his head. “It goes against everything I’ve been brought up with to say ‘kosher’ and ‘pig’ in the same sentence. But if a pig has a cloven hoof and chews its cud, doesn’t it meet the criteria the Bible sets for permitted beasts?”

“It meets the criteria for trouble,” his wife said practically. “If you start saying pork is kosher, you’d best thank God there’s no Jewish Inquisition, because if there were, it would burn you at the stake.”

“At the chop, actually,” said Kaplan, who had a weakness for bad puns.

Ruth did not groan, as he had hoped she would. She set her hands on her hips, saying, “I’m serious, Aaron. Do you want to make yourself a laughingstock for the congregation, to say nothing of other rabbis?”

“Of course not.” Just the same, he winced as he imagined the headlines: “Only in Los Angeles.” “Rabbi Kaplan’s Favorite Ham Recipes.” A caption under a picture of a pig: “Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish.” Oh, he was opening a can of worms, and no mistake.

But it was such a pretty problem. Kaplan had been a rabbi going on twenty years now: a teacher, a counselor, a preacher, a social worker, sometimes even a scholar. Not since his student days, though, had he had a chance to be a theologian.

His wife recognized his faraway stare, and it alarmed her. She chose a question close to the issue at hand: “Aaron, have you ever tasted pork?”

As she had intended, that snapped him out of his reverie. He looked at her in surprise. He was Conservative, not Orthodox; he did not pretend to observe all the minutiae of dietary law. Pork, however, was something else. It was like asking if he had ever been unfaithful-exactly like that, he thought uncomfortably.

“Once,” he admitted. “I was eighteen, in my senior year in high school, and out to do anything my father didn’t want me to do. And so, one morning I stopped for breakfast with some friends, and I ordered bacon and eggs.”

“Was it good?”

“You know, I really don’t remember.” He supposed that was like a lot of infidelity, too-he had been too nervous to enjoy it. “What’s all this about?”

“If you decide this meat could somehow be kosher, I was just wondering how you were going to react when people said you did it because you liked pork yourself and wanted an excuse to eat it.”

“That’s ridi-” he began, and then stopped. It was not ridiculous, even in the twenty-first century. It might very well be one of the kinder things Orthodox rabbis would say. They would, he thought with a curiously mixed metaphor, crucify him if he had anything at all good to say about pigs. The only thing they could not do was excommunicate him; Judaism didn’t work that way. It was something of a relief, but not much.

Ruth was still watching him. “You’re going ahead with this.”

“You know me too well.” He sighed. “I’m going to investigate it, anyhow.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I sort of have to,” he said, but he was talking to her back. Sighing again, he went into his study. His books would not argue with him. He went first, as would anyone unraveling a problem of Jewish law, to the Shulkhan Arukh, the Ready Table of Joseph Karo. Published in 1564, it was still basic almost five centuries later, and its commentators reached to modem times.

Chapter 46 sounded promising: “Laws Concerning Forbidden Food.” He turned to it in some hope. It had nothing to do with pork, but dealt with meat and milk dishes; with eating food prepared by Gentiles or from utensils used by Gentiles; with wormy fruit, vegetables, and fish. Karo, reasonably enough, had never entertained the prospect of a pig that chewed its cud, nor had the rabbis who came after him.

Kaplan did find a reference to swine in Chapter 5, “Laws Regarding the Cleanliness of the Place for Holy Purposes.” There Karo remarked, “The mouth of a swine is considered like a chamber pot, for the reason that it pecks at excrement.”

The rabbi frowned. In modem times, pigs were no more filthy than any other domestic animals. Perplexed, he got down the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides’ great twelfth-century effort to reconcile religion and science. He found the reference to pork in Chapter 48 of Part III:

“I maintain that the food which is forbidden by the Law is unwholesome. There is nothing among the forbidden kinds of food whose injurious character is doubted, except pork, and fat. But also in these cases the doubt is not justified. For pork contains more moisture than necessary, and too much of superfluous matter. The principal reason why the Law forbids swine’s flesh is to be found in the circumstance that its habits and its food are very dirty and loathsome. It has already been pointed out how emphatically the Law enjoins the removal of the sight of loathsome objects, even in the field and in the camp; how much more objectionable is such sight in towns. But if it were allowed to eat swine’s flesh, the streets and houses would be more dirty than any cesspool, as may be seen at present in the country of the Franks. The saying of our Sages is well known: ‘The mouth of a swine is as dirty as dung itself.’ “

Again, the medical argument that swine’s flesh was inherently dirty: a physician himself, Maimonides would naturally reason thus. And again, it did not necessarily apply now, or indeed even in Maimonides’ day; chickens hardly had cleanlier habits than pigs. The quotation from the Talmud was in the same vein, if of even weightier authority than Maimonides.

Who else had spoken of the pig? He thought of one source, and pulled a well-thumbed book from a shelf apart from the religious tomes. As usual, Ambrose Bierce had a word for it: “Hog, n. A bird remarkable for the catholicity of its appetite and serving to illustrate that of ours. Among the Mahometans and Jews, the hog is not in favor as an article of diet, but is respected for the delicacy of its habits, the beauty of its plumage and the melody of its voice…”

Smiling, he put the Devil’s Dictionary away. Bierce’s mordant wit helped put things in perspective. He was certain his predicament would have amused the old cynic immensely, and perhaps inspired a fresh verse or two from that worthy bard, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.

At that, the mythical Father Jape might have sympathized with Kaplan. In Bierce’s time, Catholics refrained from eating meat on Fridays. Somehow the Catholic Church had survived when the prohibition was lifted.

But the ban against pork was centuries older than Christianity itself. And Judaism, unlike Christianity these last seventeen centuries, was mostly a minority religion, all too often a persecuted one. Jewish dietary laws expressed and emphasized the separateness of the Jews of the Diaspora from the peoples among whom they lived. Because they helped Jews maintain their cohesion, they became emotionally ingrained in believers; that was why even the thought of modifying them brought such a wrench with it.

And yet, he thought, Judaism always retained a certain flexibility other faiths lacked. In the Middle Ages, Jewish thought never accepted Aristotelian science as part and parcel of the tenets of the faith as the Church had-and therefore never had to go through a painful repudiation when Renaissance scientists showed that Aristotle did not, after all, know everything.

Adaptation to a changing world had been going on ever since. Among the observant in both Israel and the United States, a common item was a switch that could be set in advance to turn electrical appliances on and off on the Sabbath, when kindling a light was forbidden.

So-there was the question: was eating one of Delahanty’s R strain an accommodation to be gratefully accepted, or was it abomination? Whichever way he decided, he was going to be in trouble. He wondered if he ought to call another rabbi, someone older and maybe wiser. He thought it over, decided not to; it felt too much like passing the buck. The problem had been dumped in his lap, and he had to deal with it now. The time for others to judge would be later.

Ruth knew better than to disturb him in his study, but she pounced when he emerged. “Well?”

He spread his hands. “I don’t have any answer yet, I’m afraid.”

“Wonderful.”

He did his best not to notice the sarcasm. “The trouble is, the authorities so automatically think of pigs and pork as being beyond the pale that they don’t even discuss conditions under which it might be permissible.”

“Shouldn’t that tell you something?” Ruth asked pointedly.

“The rabbis of the Talmud didn’t have modem technology to complicate their lives. All they had to worry about was famine, insurrection, and Roman legions-they didn’t know when they were well off.”

“Now what?”

“I think I’ll call Delahanty back. Maybe he can tell me something that would make this all make sense.”

“I can tell you something that would make this all make sense: forget ft.”

But Kaplan was already hitting the phone buttons. The chief of Genetic Enterprises came on the line at once. He seemed so bright and eager, Kaplan thought, and almost as intrigued as the rabbi over mutual problem. It had to be honest intellectual curiosity; even if every Jew in the country started eating the new product, it wouldn’t bump consumption up more than a couple of percent.

“Damn, too bad,” Delahanty said when Kaplan told him of the unpromising turn of the research. Without being asked, he went on, “How about this, then? Suppose I shoot you all the information about the R strain. That might help.”

“So it might.” Kaplan paused and continued. “I want you to understand, Dr. Delahanty, no matter how intriguing the possibilities are here, there’s no guarantee I can find these beasts of yours acceptable.”

“Well, of course.” Delahanty sounded surprised. “You have to do what you think is right, Rabbi. I’m just glad you didn’t laugh at me and hang up.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t talk with my wife.”

Delahanty laughed. “Am I? Do you have your floppy ready?”

“Just a second.” The rabbi loaded a disk into the base of the phone unit. “All right, go ahead.” There was a faint whir from the drive as the floppy recorded the data Delahanty was sending. When it was done, Kaplan said, “Thanks. I’ll get back to you.”

“I ought to be thanking you.”

“Nonsense. I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.” After they said their good-byes, Kaplan took the floppy over to the computer and played it back.

Most of it, he discovered, consisted of Genetic Enterprises advertising videos. If half of what they said about the R strain was true, as soon as the first little porker turned thirty-five, it was going to get elected President. Rhapsodies over how nutritious the meat was, however, did not matter to Kaplan. Ordinary pork was perfectly edible. The problem lay elsewhere.

The rabbi learned that the R strain’s digestive tract was modeled after that of cows, sheep, and goats, but was not created from their genetic material. From the tone of the video, he gathered others had tried that approach and failed.

He was glad Genetic Enterprises had done something new; it was a minor point in favor of the R strain. Leviticus 19:19 said, “Thou shaft not let the cattle gender with a diverse kind.” In the Shulkhan Arukh, Karo extended that to working with a team of different animals, such as a horse and an ox, and said that two mules working together should be examined to ensure that both were the get either of a stallion and jenny or of a jack and mare: otherwise they were animals of diverse kind. Some authorities, in fact, noted Karo, reckoned one mule an animal of diverse kind and forbade its use. If the R strain had some of the genes, say, of a sheep, that argument could have been raised against it.

Kaplan waded through a series of charts and graphs extolling the R strain’s ability to put on flesh quickly. Again, that was beside the point. Moreover, while it was important to farmers, the rabbi found it mind-numbing after a while. He hit the fast-forward button.

He jabbed the stop control. There stood Peter Delahanty. He hadn’t changed in the year or so since Kaplan had seen him last: he was fair, just past thirty, good-looking in an abstracted way, and very sincere. This had to be the press conference he had mentioned. Maybe, Kaplan thought hopefully, it would give a tidy summary of all the data with which he had been bombarded. Lionel was certainly cuter than a pie chart.

The questions Delahanty had gotten were interesting, and his answers did help clarify matters, but only from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. Kaplan listened for fifteen minutes or so. He was about to give up and turn off the disk when a reporter with a bushy gray mustache stood up and asked, “Will they interbreed with unmodified pigs?”

When Delahanty said no, Kaplan felt like Archimedes in his bath. For that matter, a naked, dripping man running through the streets shouting “Eureka!” would attract no more attention in Los Angeles than back in ancient Syracuse, unless the police decided he was on angel dust and shot him.

He called Genetic Enterprises again; by now he did not have to look up the number. “I have the determination,” he said when Delahanty came on the line.

“And?”

“In my opinion, Jews may eat animals of the R strain, as they may any other beasts that have divided hooves and chew a cud.”

“Do you really think so? Do you mind if I ask you why you say so?”

“I was hoping you would,” Kaplan said truthfully; he had enough ego to want his reasoning appreciated. “The key is that properly speaking, these R strain beasts are not pigs at all.”

“No? What would you call ‘em, then? They look like pigs, they oink like pigs, they taste like pigs-though I don’t suppose you’d know about that. You told me you weren’t going to find the R strain kosher just to be doing it; it seems to me that’s what you’ve done. I don’t want that, Rabbi Kaplan.”

Kaplan almost burst out laughing. Of all the ridiculous situations in the world, for him to be explaining to an Irishman why a pig wasn’t a pig had to fall into the top ten.

He said, ”I was going to say no until I heard you tell the press that the R strain and ordinary swine weren’t fertile with each other.”

“No, they’re not,” Delahanty agreed. He sounded doubtful, then suddenly excited.”Oh, I follow you, I think. One scientific justification for calling two populations distinct species is that they can’t breed together. Is that it? Wouldn’t it just make the R strain a different kind of pig, though?”

Admiring his quick wits, Kaplan quoted Leviticus 19:19: “ ’Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind.’ The clear implication there, of course, is with a diverse kind of cattle. But the R strain can’t gender at all with pigs. And if they can’t gender with pigs, how can they be pigs, no matter what they took like?”

After a minute Delahanty said, “You’d make a good Jesuit, Rabbi.”

Kaplan grunted. Being a good Jew struck him as quite hard enough, without the added burden of lifelong chastity. Despite all his other strictures, Karo did not enjoin anything of that sort: In Chapter 150, he recommended cohabitation nightly for married men of strong constitution, twice a week for laborers working in the town where they lived, and once a week for those working in a different town. His injunctions included scholars, although Rabbi Eleazar said that “he used to have cohabitation with such awe and fear that it appeared to him as if a demon was forcing him to do it.”

While he was musing on Karo’s prescriptions, Delahanty said something he missed. “I’m sorry?” he said, embarrassed.

“I asked how serious you were about all this. Giving an opinion is easy, but do you mean it?”

“Of course I do,” Kaplan said indignantly.

“Then-” Delahanty hesitated, went on. “Look, if you think I’m out of line, tell me and I’ll shut up, and I certainly won’t think any less of you. But I would like to ask… having said what you’ve said, would you eat meat from the R strain yourself?”

He should have guessed the question was coming, but it took him by surprise just the same. Suddenly and bitterly, he understood how Ruth felt. Intellectually, he had convinced himself that the R strain was acceptable. Emotionally, Lionel, pink and plump and curly-tailed, was a pig, no two ways about it.

“Rabbi?” Delahanty said when he did not reply at once.

Having given the response he had, Kaplan saw he had no choice now. “I would eat it,” he said. “I will eat it. By your phone code, Genetic Enterprises is in Westwood or somewhere close by. Give me your address; I can be there in a half hour. I don’t care to make commercials for you, though, if you don’t mind.”

“I put you on the spot,” Delahanty said. “I apologize; that was nasty of me. Don’t let me make you do anything you wouldn’t want to.”

“You’re not. Tell me that address now, please.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Kaplan said firmly. He wrote down the street number Delahanty gave him, exchanged another minute or so of small talk, and hung up.

He threw on a battered corduroy jacket and was on his way down the hall when Ruth called “Where are you going?” from the den.

Sheepishly (under the circumstances, he thought, that was not quite the right word), he explained. He stayed right where he was; at that moment he didn’t feel much like facing her.

“You told him his pigs were kosher,” she said in a voice so flat he could make nothing of it.

“Yes, and this is what it got me.” He heard her get up. “What are you doing?” he asked in some alarm.

“Getting a hat.”

“What for?”

“So I can come with you, of course.”

He was still gaping when he stepped into the hall. He finally found his tongue.”What are you coming with me for? You were the one who told me to say the R strain was trafe and have done with it. You can’t want to go eat pork with me.”

“But it’s not pork, or that’s what you told Delahanty.”

“But to you it is.”

“Who’s the rabbi in this house?” she said, and laughed at his thunderstruck expression.”Besides,” she added softly, ”it’ll be easier if you’re not alone.”

“Thank you,” he said. That wasn’t nearly strong enough. He went over and hugged her. “Have I told you any time lately I think you’re wonderful?”

“Yes, but I never mind hearing it again. Come on; let’s get this over with.”

Traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway never moved fast. Old gasoline-fueled cars, alcohol-burners, and electrics crawled along together. Kaplan had just about decided to make his next car, somewhere in the indefinite future, an electric. With more and more fusion plants coming on line, they were definitely the coming thing. Smog was down, too; not out, but down.

They drove past billboards in Spanish, English, Korean, Japanese, and Hindi. Every decade, it seemed, some new group of immigrants settled in southern California in droves. Kaplan’s neighborhood supermarket stocked nine different chutneys and seventeen curries.

With their superior climate, Westwood and Santa Monica had long dominated the L.A. area, leaving the old downtown to stagnation again after its rebirth in the 1970s. Skyscrapers flung long afternoon shadows across the San Diego Freeway as Kaplan and his wife swung norm.

The parking garage in the building that housed the headquarters of Genetic Enterprises went down eleven levels underground. The elevator’s surge was like a rocket lifting off, but it was not the only reason the rabbi’s stomach had for lurching.

Genetic Enterprises kept its labs elsewhere in the city, where rents were lower. This was where the executives worked. When Kaplan opened the door to the receptionist’s office, a delicious smell rolled over him like a wave. It was not really unfamiliar; one could not live in Los Angeles without coming across it now and then. But it had never had anything to do with him before.

Delahanty came out almost at once to shake his hand. “Good to see you again,” he said, politely adding, ”A pleasure to meet you,” when Kaplan introduced him to Ruth.

“Shall we get on with it?” she said harshly.

“Of course,” Delahanty said. “Thank you for coming, both of you. I understand how difficult this must be for you.”

You don’t begin to, Kaplan thought, but he and his wife followed Delahanty back into his office. On the desk lay a meat-filled platter. “Blade-cut por-uh, chops,” Delahanty said. “Here, let me heat them up for you.” He popped them into a microwave oven, which obviously had been brought in for the occasion.

As the microwave hummed, Kaplan sighed inaudibly to himself. Perhaps even without meaning to, Delahanty had eliminated a possible last-ditch excuse to chicken out-another inappropriate phrase, the rabbi thought ruefully. He might have begged off by saying that the beast now reheating had not been slaughtered by a shokhet-any ritual butcher would have laughed himself silly at the notion of practicing his skill on a pig. But Kaplan did not insist that his beef and mutton come from the shokhet’s knife; he bought them at the supermarket. And so he could not honestly apply a standard to the R strain different from the one by which he judged other acceptable meat.

But he did avoid cuts from the hindquarters of the carcass. The section of meat through which the sciatic nerve passed was not kosher, in memory of the laming blow the angel of the Lord had inflicted on Jacob when they wrestled through the night. Blade-cut chops, though, came from far forward on the beast.

The reverie was done long before the microwave turned itself off. When it chimed, Delahanty took out the platter and produced some plastic cutlery from a desk drawer. “Would you like me to step out for a few minutes?” he asked.

“No, that’s all right,” Kaplan began, but Ruth broke in, “Yes, please.”

“Of course,” Delahanty said quietly, and shut the door behind him as he left.

The fantasy that flitted through Kaplan’s mind this time was frankly paranoid: he wondered if this was all an elaborate practical joke to get him to eat forbidden food.

He and Ruth looked at the gently steaming chops and at each other. Gathering his pride, the rabbi said, “Me first,” and picked up knife and fork. The meat was tougher, grainier than veal, which to his eye it most closely resembled. He speared it with his fork and brought it toward his mouth.

Chapter 92 of the Shidkhan Arukh dealt with laws concerning one dangerously ill and one forced to transgress a precept. Karo wrote, “If one who is dangerously ill requires meat, and only forbidden meat is obtainable, an animal should be slaughtered for his sake in order not to feed him with forbidden meat, as it is apprehended lest he will become aware of having been fed on forbidden meat and he will become nauseated thereby.”

Kaplan had come across that passage before. Now he had no doubt it described something real. When a couple of hours of theoretical knowledge came up against forty years of ingrained practice, distress was inevitable.

He clamped his jaw shut to hold down his gorge, then realized he could not eat that way. He took a deep breath, chewed, swallowed, then set his jaw again.

“Well?” Ruth demanded. “How is it?”

He laughed shakily. “You know, it’s just like the time I ate bacon and eggs when I was a kid. I have no idea what it tasted like.”

“Well, let’s find out, shall we?” Ruth cut a large piece and chewed with deliberation. “Not bad,” she said reflectively. “Nothing to write home about, but not bad.”

The second bite, Kaplan found, came much easier than the first. This time he too, was able to consider the flavor of the- of the R strain, he told himself firmly. “Different,” he agreed.

They ate a chop apiece, not with any great speed or relish, but steadily. Looking at the meat still on the platter, Kaplan asked, “Still hungry?”

“Not especially.”

“Neither am I. Even honestly believing that was acceptable food, it was harder than I ever thought it would be.” Ruth nodded. “You did very well.”

“Thanks. So did you, and thanks for that, too.” He hugged her again. “Shall we give Delahanty his office back and show him the dreadful deed is done?”

“Just a second.” She took a tissue from her pocket and brushed at his beard. “Now.”

“Okay.”

Not surprisingly, the head of Genetic Enterprises had been hovering just outside in the hallway. He hurried in, saw the bones on the platter. “Rabbi, Mrs. Kaplan, thank you very much,” he said, shaking hands with them both.

“It’s all right,” Kaplan said. “You’ve given me one of the more, ah, interesting afternoons of my life, that I can tell you.”

“I really didn’t mean to pressure you,” Delahanty said. But, like any scientist, he was curious by nature and could not help asking. “How did you like it?”

“We got through it,” Kaplan said.

Later, driving home, he wondered if he had been short with the man. Then he thought of twenty-five hundred years of history, of conquest and captivity under Babylon; persecution by the Greeks; savage and futile war against Rome; European ghettos and Christian mobs; Dreyfus; the Holocaust, still too appalling for any sane mind to take in; round after round of war in the Middle East, and no end in sight. No end to Jews in sight either, though.

Without much thought, he had managed to sum up the history of a people in four words. That wasn’t bad.

He changed lanes.