Geoffrey D. Claussen, “Moses and the Kid, Judah and the Calf, and the Disavowal of Compassion: Reading Rabbinic Stories with The Question of the Animal and Religion,” The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, vol. 20, no. 1 (2023).
This article draws on Aaron Gross’s book
The Question of
the Animal and Religion in analyzing two rabbinic stories regarding
compassion for animals: a story of Judah the Patriarch disavowing compassion for
a calf but later showing compassion to a group of young rats, and a story of
Moses showing compassion for a young kid.
The article explores ways in which these two stories reveal the shared
vulnerability of humans and animals, show animal agency, and have been
understood as teaching compassion for all creatures. It then focuses on how these stories have
been understood as encouraging compassion only in very limited ways, and it considers how while (as Gross argues) the
narrative regarding Judah shows a transition towards greater compassion for
animals, the narrative regarding Moses may be read as showing a transition in
the opposite direction, from compassion to disavowing animal suffering. Compared with the story of Judah, the story of Moses appears to offer a more typical response to the claims that animals make.
The article is online
here.
