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Playing chicken: how do we tread the finely drawn line between valid critique and religious prejudice? Les Rosenblatt recalls his experience.

Article Excerpt
The woman said she hated the way some Israeli Orthodox Jews used a sacrificial chicken to help with their purification rituals around the time of the Day of Atonement.

Introduced by the Radio National program presenter as a leader of a movement for Progressive Judaism in Israel; she explained that she and her fellows were trying to get the Israeli legislature and judiciary to oppose the practice of ritual slaughter of chickens as an adjunct to Day of Atonement sin-purging.

Apparently the practice requires the swinging of a plucked hen with its throat cut so that drops of its blood will spatter around the head of the would-be penitent thereby creating a circle of redemptive purification. The spokeswoman for Progressive Judaism could find no rationale for this practice in any Biblical injunctions nor in the vast quantity of heuristic commentary on the Torah amassed over many centuries. She claimed it originated in the superstitious hot-house milieu of Eastern European shtetl life as a shamanistic echo of primitive Judaism involving animal sacrifice before the destruction of the Biblical temple resulted in the diasporic dispersion.

She considered the acceptance of this practice amongst certain groups of Orthodox Jews as antithetical to the idea of doing good in God's eyes. She argued her modernising case on the basis of animal rights and minimising cruelty,...