Agriprocessors and the Implications of Moral Myopia

• In Event: Ethical Standards and the Kosher Meat Industry

Abstract

This paper will examine the rise and fall of Agriprocessors, at one time the largest producer of kosher beef in the United States. My thesis is that Jewish ethics calls for a balance between “loving your neighbor” and “loving the stranger.” The absence of such a balance creates a kind of moral myopia conducive to large-scale ethical failure. Agriprocessors, under the ownership of the Rubashkin family, provides a sad but illustrative case study and raises important ethical questions for kosher consumers. The paper will apply a constructive reading and interpretation of the biblical commandment of loving the stranger.

Most of us easily recognize that there is a kind of absurdity in loving the stranger but not loving one’s neighbor. What kind of love would this really be? This paper suggests, through the use of the case of Agriprocessors, that there is another kind of absurdity. It is impossible to truly love one’s neighbor (in the deepest sense) in the absence of loving the stranger. While the Rubashkin family, on the surface, was seemingly a model for loving one’s coreligionists, in the long run, the love of neighbor was itself fatally tainted by a lack of concern for the “stranger.”

author

• Moses Pava, Yeshiva University