Thought for the Week:

The one who eats is not to regard with contempt the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat is not to judge the one who eats, for God has accepted him. Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. (Romans 14:3-4). Yeshua never repealed the biblical dietary laws. The oft-cited passage in Mark 7:19, which says, "Thus He declared all foods clean," is a mishandling of the Greek.

Commentary:

Nevertheless, you are not to eat of these, among those which chew the cud, or among those which divide the hoof: the camel, for though it chews cud, it does not divide the hoof, it is unclean to you. (Leviticus 11:4)

Though the Master kept the biblical dietary laws, He seems to have avoided the type of minutia arguments that so typically divide people and communities. In Orthodox Judaism today, the kosher-keeping world is divided into a dizzying myriad of differing standards and stringencies that segregate communities into factions of who may eat with whom. The sit…