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NYC Jews Say Don't Drink The Water

The AP reports,

Orthodox Jews in New York have become concerned that the city’s drinking water may not be kosher because it contains tiny crustaceans known as copepods.
The organisms, which measure about a millimeter long, pose no threat to human health, according to the city Department of Environmental Protection. But Orthodox teaching bars the eating of crustaceans — aquatic animals with skeletons outside their bodies, including shrimp, crab and lobsters.

Is this another instance of paranoid wig-burning or is there really a great concern here? The kosher fish we eat swim in the same oceans as the trayfe ones… Thus the water is technically still kosher. Don’t the water filtration systems sift all this stuff our before it reaches your tap anyway?

8 thoughts on “NYC Jews Say Don't Drink The Water

  1. this issue was being hocked same weeks as the wigs. that the main streem press just picked it up is silly since it was raised, noised, shiured, hocked, teshuvad and put to rest in the past 2 weeks.
    and you obviously dont read any of your fellow’s blogs.

  2. i am assuming the halachic issue is a “davar beriah”.. anything that is intself as an entire being counted as something… can never be buttul/nullified no matter how minute..

  3. the orthodox jewish community is increasingly, dangerously divorced from the here and now, the earthly, the human.
    the water issue is just completely nuts. regarding the wigs: at the very least they could have given those wigs to a national cancer clinic, no? they don’t seem to give a sh*t about anyone but themselves and anything but the most niggling rules.

  4. unless these critters are visible regularly, there is no way this is against halacha. for example, when you buy raw chick peas you have to check at least 5 of them inside the shell for bugs. if the first 5 don’t have them, then you can assume the rest are fine. but if you buy hummous that’s all ground up, you can take the bugs as part of the whole (even if they were there all ground up, like one in a hundred chick peas) and it’s all good.
    besides, all of our food is grown in soil where worms and other insects spend their whole lives making it nourishing so our food can grow. yes, that’s right folks, the vitamins in your broccoli were once worm poop! it’s the cycle of life baby! so you check the stems for visible insects before you eat it, but dude, it could never grow without the help of the little guys.

  5. see the letters and teshuvos and links all over the blogosphere for all the information you need on this matter.

  6. my concern is that why did these “rabbis” just wake up and discover 5th grade biology? Is science not taught in the yeshivas they attend or teach in? It makes me wonder, what else are they (not) learning?

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