[Avodah] [Areivim] Chicken Scandal

[Zev Sero]

Micha Berger wrote:

> 2- The chazaqah disvara (rule of thumb) that observant Jews are trustworthy.
> Stam a person off the street is assumed to be kasher le'eidus. That DOES apply
> here.
> 
> However, as RnCL (RnCS?) pointed out, we seem to follow the Rambam in not
> using the person's chezqas kashrus when he has financial negi'us. So, we have
> machshirim. Now the rav hamachshir and the mashgi'ach are trusted because of
> their chezqas kashrus.

I don't think that's an accurate description of the Rambam's position.
The difference between the Raavad/Mechaber and the Rambam/Rama is not
whether we can rely on someone's chezkat kashrut when he has a financial
interest, but on how strong a chezkat kashrut we need in such a case.

The Raavad/Mechaber position is that all we need to know about someone
is that he is a Jew, and that we *not* know anything negative about him.
If his name is Cohen and we've never heard of him before, and he tells
us the food he's selling is kosher, we can believe that he's telling
the truth to the best of his knowledge.  (We still have to worry about
how far his knowledge extends; but if he says he bought everything as
raw ingredients, or with a good hechsher, that he bought his kelim new
and has never used them for anything else, etc, we don't need to worry
that he's lying.)

The Rambam/Rama position is that such a negative chazaka is not enough;
if he's selling something, we need not merely not to have heard
anything bad about him, but we need to know that he is an observant
Jew, as far as that can be known by others.  Once we do know that, we
can trust him.  The modern problem is that we don't know the people
who sell us our food, because our communities have grown so large,
and because we think nothing of shopping in other areas, or of having
people from other set up shop close to us.  In such a case, we need
someone who *does* know the seller, and can certify to us that he is
an observant Jew.  Note that this is still *not* a requirement for
hashgacha on the food itself; rather it's a hechsher on the *person*,
informing us that this person does indeed have a chezkat kashrut.
The machshir, on his part, need never set foot in the establishment,
or have the slightest interest in what goes on there.  All he is
saying is that he knows the seller, and he is indeed someone who has
an "enhanced" chezkat kashrut, one that satisfies the Rambam/Rama,
and not just the Raavad/Mechaber.

And that's mostly the function of the "heimishe" hashgachot -- they
look at the person, not the food; if the person is good then there's
no need to worry about the food, while if they don't think they can
trust the person then they don't give a hechsher no matter how good
the food may be.  The "major" hashgachot, OTOH, start with the
premise that the seller has no chezkat kashrut (as is indeed the
case with many of their sellers, not just according to the Rambam
but even according to the Raavad).  Working on that assumption,
they instead concentrate on making sure that this untrustworthy
person has no chance to treif up the food; IOW they avoid situations
that *require* trust.

That transfers the "chezkat kashrut" on which we must still rely,
from the seller to the machshir, and here once again we have two
positions that people take, on which machshirim they will trust;
some people take a pseudo-Raavad position, and will trust any
hechsher until they hear something negative about it; while others
take a pseudo-Rambam position, and want to know details about a
hechsher before they will trust it.

This also explains the story REMT told some time ago, of a time
when he was the OU mashgiach at a plant, and the representative
of a "heimishe" hechsher came, took one look at whom the OU had
sent, and decided that was enough to approve the product.  The
implication was that the other hechsher had not added anything
of value, but that is not true; what it had done was verify
that on this particular product the OU hechsher was reliable,
because its mashgiach was someone with a Rambam-style chezkat
kashrut.  Had the OU mashgiach not seemed so reliable, perhaps
the other mashgiach would have stayed, made other changes, or
even turned down the product altogether.  Think of the added
value like that added by an editor to an anthology; the editor
did not write any of the stories, and yet the quality of the
anthology is greatly enhanced by a good editor, who knows which
stories to pick and which to leave out.

As for the fact that in the Monsey case the "chezkat kashrut"
system seems to have failed, that is true, but the same happens
regularly with the major hechsherim's system.  In this case the
hechsher was on a person who (it seems) turned out not to be
trustworthy after all; but often when a hechsher doesn't trust
the owner's chezkat kashrut and instead relies on other chazakot
(such as that a businessman won't ruin his reputation by
deliberate and detectable fraud), or simply on careful supervision
of every aspect of the manufacture, they fail too.  Even in our
own homes, sometimes our self-"hashgacha" fails, and we have to
kasher something, and/or throw food out.  That doesn't mean the
principle is unreliable.


-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas