An Unclean Thing

RM WEEKLY · ISSUE NO. 7

We've done the math. We've done the craft. We've done the cheese and wine, and greeted another summer. During all of that, somebody has been waiting in the back with the oldest objection there is, the one that comes for everything sooner or later, “But what does God think?”

Fair question. So today we go house to house, hat in hand, and we ask. I'll tell you now where I came out, because it surprised me. I went looking for permission. I found out I wasn't the first one here.

Start with the Jewish people, because they wrote it down plain. The rat is not kosher. It was never going to be. Their law wants a split hoof and an animal that chews the cud, and the rat offers neither. The milk takes the rank of the beast it came from. Unclean animal, unclean milk. There is no argument to have here, and I am not going to stand in front of three thousand years of careful people and tell them they made a clerical error.

But read it close. They did not leave the rat off a list. They named it. There is a line in Leviticus that calls the mouse out loud, by name, sets it down in the book among the unclean things on purpose. And later the prophet Isaiah goes further than that. He lists the people who eat the mouse right alongside the word abomination, and he says they will be consumed for it.

Think about what that takes. Not forgotten. Not overlooked. Named. You don’t write a thing into your holy book unless it scared you a little. You don’t bother to forbid the small and the harmless. They looked at this animal and felt something coming, and reached for the strongest word they had, “abomination.” I’ve been called worse. I'll take it.

The Christians inherited that whole list, and then they tore it up. There is a story in their book. A man named Peter, asleep on a roof, and a sheet comes down out of heaven loaded with every unclean animal there is, and a voice tells him to kill and eat. He says no. He is a good student. He knows the rules. And the voice tells him not to call unclean what God has already made clean.

And the wall came down. All foods clean. Which means, and I want the serious Christian reader to sit a moment with this, you may drink it tomorrow with a clear conscience. The same book that named my animal an abomination got an amendment, and the amendment runs in my favor. I won’t pretend that doesn't move me. But I'll tip my hat to the older law on the way past it. A man ought to know which rule he is walking away from.

The Muslims keep a third house in this same Abrahamic family. They hold to clean and unclean the way the older law does, the two of them share that instinct down to the bone, and the rat lands on the wrong side of the line. It is not food. It was never going to be. For them, the animal that eats the world is not the animal you build a clean table around.

Like Judaism, Islam named it. There is a teaching that gathers up a small handful of creatures so troublesome, that a man may kill them even on holy ground, even deep in his pilgrimage, when he is meant to raise his hand against nothing that lives. The mouse made the list.

There is also a ruling, old and exact, about what a person does when a mouse falls into the butter, whether you can save what sits around it or whether the whole vessel is lost. Prophetic. Somebody saw this animal coming for the dairy a thousand years ahead of me and wrote down a procedure.

That makes two of these three Abrahamic houses that looked the rat in the eye and reached for its name. You do not name the harmless. You name the thing you feel coming.

Now east. This is where I had to put the newsletter down and walk around the block.

The Hindus hold the cow sacred, so you’d think that settles the matter against us. It does not. Because there is a god named Ganesha, and Ganesha rides a mouse. The animal we farm is the mount of a god. It carries the divine on its back as a matter of doctrine, and has for longer than my whole country has had a name.

And then there is the temple. Karni Mata, out in Rajasthan. Thousands of rats living in it. Treasured, protected, fed. Bowls of milk and sweets set down for them every single day. The people there believe these are souls come back around, family returned, and the food the rats have eaten from is not swept into the trash. It is the most blessed thing in the building. They line up for it.

I’ve spent six issues telling you this animal deserves a seat at the adults' table. And the whole time, on the other side of the planet, there has been a building where they got there first. Where they feed it milk by hand and call it holy and have done so since before my grandmother drew breath. I thought I was early. I thought I was out here alone doing the unglamorous work. Somebody built it a temple before I was born.

Then there are the Jains, and the Jains humble me. Their whole faith is one rule carried further than anyone else on earth dares carry it. Harm nothing. Not the cow. Not the rat. Not the insect under your own foot. They sweep the path before they walk it. They strain the water before they drink it. They build an entire life around never being the reason something small had to die. The rat, our rat, the animal I have spent six issues defending with a spreadsheet, is exactly the creature they would lay down their own comfort to protect.

And some of them have followed that rule all the way to the end of it and given up dairy entirely, because they decided that even the gentle taking is still a taking. There are people who love this animal so completely that they will not draw one drop from it. More than I do. I run the numbers and I reach for the cheese. They run the same love further than I am willing to and reach for nothing. I am not going to win that argument. I am not going to try. I am going to take my hat off to the man who out-loved me on my own animal, and go quiet.

The Buddhists keep it simple, bless them, after the week I just had. Don't kill. Walk the middle path. Milk was never any trouble. The Buddha took it himself. There is no line anywhere about the rat. The door is open and nobody is standing in it. After going house to house all afternoon, an open door felt like a cold glass of water.

So here is where it all comes out. One faith named my animal an abomination and wrote it down so it would last three thousand years. One tore up the list and set me free. One built it a temple and feeds it milk by hand. And one loves it so far past me that they will not take the milk at all.

I went looking for somebody's permission, and what I found was better than permission. I found out I wasn’t the first man here. People have been fearing this animal, and feeding it, and blessing it, and protecting it, since long before I heard a man in a bar explain how you milk a rat. I am not the founder of anything. I am the latest one to show up and take it seriously.

And the abomination part, I am keeping it. A thing has to matter before anybody bothers to forbid it. Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter, and a god rides one to work. The math doesn't lie, and it turns out it never did.

Stay bold, my friends.

-– BigCrazyBaldhead