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There is a mitzvah that appears three times in the Torah, tucked in alongside the most exalted commandments of pilgrimage, sacrifice, and first fruits: “you shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk” (Shemot 23:19; 34:26; Devarim 14:21). Few prohibitions have invited as much discussion, speculation, and mystery. Why is this verse so important that it had to be repeated three times, in three different contexts? And why is it juxtaposed with commandments of holiness and worship?
The Talmud (Chullin 115b) makes the legal point clear: three mentions establish three separate prohibitions— cooking, eating, and deriving benefit. But the soul of the mitzvah cannot be reduced to legal detail alone. The mefarshim across the ages wrestle with its meaning, its spirit, and moral weight.
The Rambam, ever the rationalist, saw in it a trace of idolatry. He speculated that boiling meat in milk was once a pagan rite, a way of calling on fertility gods to bless the harvest. Thus, the Torah, when commanding us to appear before God on the festivals, warns us not to bring along the baggage of pagan worship. “If you want blessing,” says the Sforno, “do not turn to magic or superstition; bring instead the finest of your first fruits!” (Commentary on Shemot 23:19). In other words, holiness is not manipulation of the divine through ritual tricks—it is relationship, covenant, and the offering of the best of ourselves to God.
Others, like the Ibn Ezra and the Rashbam, heard in the verse a moral cry against cruelty and gluttony. How perverse to take the very milk meant to nurture life and turn it into a sauce for death. How shameful to consume mother and child together, to turn the bond of life into a feast of greed. The Torah wants to train our instincts toward reverence for life: do not slaughter mother and child on the same day, do not take the mother bird with her chicks, and do not boil a kid in the milk that sustained it. Holiness is not only in the Temple; it is in the kitchen, in the market, at the dinner table. It is cultivated in the way we eat and the way we restrain ourselves.
Rabbeinu Bachya takes it further: mixing meat and milk deadens the heart. Meat – the symbol of blood and power, carries the potential to stir cruelty. Milk, transformed from blood, retains some of that power even in its gentleness. Mix them together, and the negative traits are awakened, making the heart coarse. Philo of Alexandria, from a different world yet speaking with a similar moral imagination, wrote: it is intolerable that the very liquid which sustained the young at birth should now be used in its death. Mercy and cruelty must not be swallowed in the same bite.
Seen this way, the mitzvah becomes more than a dietary restriction. It becomes a spiritual training. As Dr. Gabriel Cousens puts it in his Torah as a Guide to Enlightenment, meat represents death, milk represents life. We separate them to remind ourselves not to collapse life and death, compassion and destruction, into one confused act of consumption. We are asked to cultivate sensitivity, to feel the distinction, to pause before we eat, to remember that our food choices are moral choices.
And yet, there is also the voice of mystery. The Ibn Ezra admits we may never truly know the reason. Rabbeinu Bachya suggests that the ultimate meaning of the prohibition will only be revealed in the Messianic age. This humility is itself part of the teaching: not every mitzvah exists to satisfy our rational categories. Some mitzvot are there to shape us, to remind us that holiness is not fully in our grasp, that we are called to live in reverence even when we do not understand.
Taken together, these approaches converge on a single theme: holiness is learned in the details of life. The Torah is telling us: when you come to My house three times a year, when you bring your offerings and your first fruits, do not imagine that worship ends at the altar. Holiness is in how you eat, how you farm, how you treat your animals, how you restrain your appetite, and how you remember compassion in the most ordinary of acts.
The prohibition of cooking a kid in its mother’s milk is a symbol of that broader calling: to separate life from death, compassion from cruelty, covenant from idolatry. It asks us to make holiness real not only in prayer and sacrifice, but in the daily rhythms of our homes.
And so, perhaps this strange, small verse—repeated three times—carries a message as large as Torah itself: be holy in all your ways, for you are a holy people unto the Lord your God.
Shabbat Shalom!
-Rabbi Dan
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