Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (26 page)

But if their devotion to their game fowl is any measure, they sacrifice creatures that they dearly love. Men cradle their birds like children and fuss over their food and housing. “To anyone who has been in Bali any length of time,” writes the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “the deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable.” The word for cock,
sabung
, can also mean anything from warrior or champion to lady-killer and tough guy. It is always a compliment.

It could be a Brooklyn block party, complete with a stage, concession stand, and milling late-night hipster crowd in a street closed off to cars by police barriers. But the stage on this balmy September evening is actually a two-story wall of blue and yellow plastic poultry crates. The concession stand is a slaughtering booth manned by expert butchers in blood-soaked yellow slickers and boots. The crowd is made up mostly of men with pale complexions above black beards and below black hats. They are waving live chickens over their heads.

It is nearing midnight on the eve of Yom Kippur, and the throng is here not to party but to expiate their sins. Here at the corner of Kingston Avenue and President Street, in the gritty neighborhood of Crown Heights, hundreds of Hasidic Jews are playing out a ­thousand-year-old ritual. At the center of this ceremony of
kapparot
, or atonement, is the pale-yellow bird. It will fortify their spiritual health for the Jewish New Year. The ceremony's ideal time is the hours before dawn of the day that marks Yom Kippur's start. In the quiet and dark of night, a calm that Hasidim call “divine kindness” is more easily accessible. On this night, here and in Hasidic communities around the world, the chicken's power to heal the spirit as well as the body is as alive as the dazed birds blinking in the spotlights set up on the sidewalk that illuminate the crowd.

Participants pay twelve dollars for a ticket and walk over to the wall of chicken crates that towers above the pavement, housing thousands of birds. Men get a rooster and women a hen. A pregnant woman buys three birds, two hens and a rooster, to cover herself as well as a baby girl or boy. Most hold their bird uneasily in their left hands, grasping the area between the wings, while balancing a prayer book in their right. Many young fathers conduct the ritual for their nervous and giggly sons. “Children of men who sit in darkness,” the Hebrew chant begins, recalling the bird's ancient association with light. The worshipper waves the chicken around his or her head while saying, “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my expiation.” Each person repeats this act three times, for a total of nine chicken circles. Then the worshipper acknowledges that while the cock or hen is about to die, “I shall enjoy a long and pleasant life of peace.”

Once that is done, the overwhelmingly male congregants take their chickens to the slaughter line. The booth is brightly lit and staffed by two burly men. They grab each proffered bird and swiftly and expertly slit its throat using a long and extraordinarily sharp knife. By kosher law, death must be swift and with a minimum of suffering. If the knife becomes dull and the animal is denied a quick demise, the bird is no longer considered kosher. Once butchered, the men toss the birds behind them as assistants in bloody yellow slickers scramble to shove the carcasses into large green plastic bags. Each bag then goes into a plastic trash can and is dragged to a van parked a few yards away. From there, they are taken to a soup kitchen; by tradition, the birds go to feed the poor.

Chickens are not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and therefore are neither proscribed nor permitted as food. This posed a theological problem when the bird appeared in the Middle East. The Roman Jewish writer Josephus says that early rabbis were divided over whether the bird was kosher or unclean. Some scholars believe it was accepted and eaten in Galilee in the north, but forbidden in the sacred precincts of Jerusalem. At least one rooster lived close enough to the temple that the apostle Peter could hear it crow on the morning of Jesus's death. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,” Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew, perhaps reflecting an upbringing among Galilean birds. “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”

The Mishnah, an older part of the Talmud compiled around AD 200, refers to chickens as
tarnegol
, or king's bird, a word derived from the ancient Akkadian term that reflects its earlier royal origins as an elite and exotic gift. A later portion of the Talmud praises the chicken as “the best of birds.” The Hebrew word for rooster,
gever
, is the same as that for man, a curious fact that bolsters its status. The practice of
kapparot
, however, is mentioned neither in the Torah nor the Talmud, and has been controversial since it was first described in the ninth century AD by Jewish scholars at the Sura Academy south of Babylon, in today's Iraq.

A nineteenth-century historian reports that it was “a custom of the Persian Jews at an early date.” That points to a ritual originating among the cock-adoring Zoroastrians who dominated today's Iran before Islam arrived in the seventh century AD. Mystics and common people embraced the ritual, while more bookish sorts tended to abhor it. Thirteenth-century rabbis dismissed it as a “foolish custom” derived from pagans, while a member of the Israeli parliament recently criticized it as “deplorable.” The practice never gained many adherents in medieval Egypt and Spain. A small minority of orthodox Jews practices it today. Many of those are in New York City, and tens of thousands of birds are trucked in on the day before Yom Kippur.

The late-night Crown Heights gathering is rife with rabbis and scholars, and I ask several in the crowd to explain why the chicken is the favored animal. Rabbi Beryl Epstein, a Chattanooga-born Hasid with a ZZ Top beard, tells me that you could swing a potted seedling, a fish with fins and scales, or a white cloth filled with money destined for charity and achieve the same results. Like almost all the other pedestrians on the crowded sidewalk, he is wearing the high black hat and long black coat popular in eighteenth-century Poland where the mystical Hasidic movement began. “Here everyone does a chicken,” he adds. Though swinging money is gaining popularity among other Hasidim, Lubavitcher Hasidim like Epstein prefer sticking to tradition.

Another rabbi tells me that since roosters and men share the same name, they are a good substitute for humans. A white-bearded scholar disagrees. He explains that any undomesticated four-legged animal—such as a deer—would do as well, but that chickens are simply easier to come by in New York City than wildlife. Yet another insists that it was the fowl's very absence from the Jerusalem temple that makes it the animal of choice. The ritual is not technically a sacrifice, since it involves use of a live animal. The killing part comes after the ritual. This matters to traditional Jews, since they are forbidden by rabbinical law from offering sacrifices in the wake of the temple's destruction in AD 70. Since the chicken never was a sacrificial an
imal, there is less chance that
kapparot
practitioners will confuse it with a sacrifice.

Opinions also vary within the crowd as to what is actually taking place during the
kapparot
ritual. Epstein says that the bird is not absorbing the sins of the person twirling it over his head. That would make repentance unnecessary. Instead, he sees the purpose as a “wake up” to the coming day of judgment, a reference that echoes the rooster's ancient role as a spiritual alarm clock. Other rabbis believe that the bird symbolically takes on the sins of the human. The fact that a chicken can't be “reused” for another person's
kapparot
suggests that the chicken is playing more than a symbolic role. Part of the prayer recited in the ritual includes the biblical verse that says God ordered people to be healed.

Most
kapparot
critics in the past focused on the pagan origins of the ritual, but animal cruelty is at the center of today's debate. In 2005, a chicken vendor abandoned more than three hundred birds packed into crates in a vacant lot in Brooklyn, drawing the attention of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “The industrialization of
kapparot
has made it almost impossible to do the ritual humanely,” PETA investigator Philip Schein told one reporter. “These are massive makeshift slaughterhouses on urban streets with tens of thousands of panicked chickens being trucked in horrible conditions and handled roughly by the public.”

Lubavitchers like Epstein insist that the chickens are humanely treated, as required by Jewish law. But as I watch these city folk handle the live birds, it is clear that most don't know how to grasp the ­creatures without causing potential injuries. One teenage girl panics and flees when her chicken flaps its wings vigorously. Later, as I wander through the crowd, a few of the younger men confront me in ­halting English, questioning why I am taking pictures or ordering me not to. There's hostility in their voices, and I keep moving to avoid their angry stares.
Kapparot
's critics now include many orthodox Jews, and Lubavitchers are increasingly isolated in their practice. There is a new app for Yom Kippur atonement, but it uses a digital goat rather than the fowl.

Across the East River in Manhattan, a billboard showing a young Hasidic man gently holding a plump white chicken in his arms touts the “Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos.” A similar debate is being waged in Israel, as opponents to the practice become more outspoken. “Kapparot is not consistent with Jewish teachings,” former Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Goren said in 2006. The day before my visit to Crown Heights, the chief rabbinate declared that the use of the chicken was still permitted, but only if unnecessary suffering is avoided. Only later do I hear what took place not far from Crown Heights in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. Hundreds of fowl slated for use in the ritual died from the heat of the October warm spell,
New York Daily News
reported—“No One Here but Us (Dead) Chickens!” was the eye-catching headline—and many people had to be turned away for lack of live birds.

Crown Heights'
kapparot
may be the last link with ancient traditions that used chicken sacrifice as a form of protective shield for children and a fertility ritual. In medieval times, the Jewish practice was designed primarily for children rather than adults. As recently as a century ago, Muslim villagers in Syria sacrificed chickens to ensure their progeny would survive and thrive, a hen for a daughter and a cock for a son. This tradition even extends to the other side of the world, in the Babar archipelago in eastern Indonesia. James Frazer noted in his 1890 book
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
that a Babar woman desiring a child would have a man hold a chicken over a woman's head and repeat the words: “O Upulero, make use of this fowl; let fall, let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall and descend into my hands and onto my lap.” He then holds the bird over the man's head, says another prayer, and kills the chicken.

The healing power of chickens in a religious context was common even in nineteenth-century Wales. Frazer notes that epileptics would come to the village church of Llandegla to perform a ritual in which their malady was magically transferred to a rooster or hen, depending on the patient's sex. Jews in nineteenth-century Galicia believed that epilepsy could be cured using a slaughtered cock. Such traditions
may seem bizarre, but they are remnants of a time when the chicken was an elemental part of our spiritual as well as our physical well-­being. One surviving bastion of the bird's spiritual healing power is in a Miami suburb.

The morning after Arkansas governor Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election, Justice Antonin Scalia discussed chicken sacrifice on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court. “You may kill animals for food but not for other purposes?” he asked the lawyer arguing for repeal of a Florida law forbidding the practice. “Not for sport, not for sacrifice, not for anything but food?” The lawyer responded that there might be one exception. “You'd kill an animal in self-defense if you're being attacked by a bear.”