CHICKEN PERFUME

I can’t believe that it’s been 35 years since I began my rabbinical career just outside of Chicago. Mine was a tiny schule, actually a remodeled greasy-spoon. We served Shabbos Kiddush from the short-order counter.

We were new and few in numbers, so we did everything for ourselves: No custodian. No kitchen manager. No one to shop for us, clean the bathrooms, set up the chairs. But, we were young, and we had a lot of fun.

I was their rav, and I held on to my strict orthodoxy. My congregants were another story. No one observed kashrut, but within the walls of the synagogue, it was the strict rule. God bless them for that. No matter how obedient, though, they could never understand why Corn Flakes were kosher but Corn Flake Crumbs required a separate hechsher. If someone would explain it to me, we’d all understand.

Then there was the time that they were preparing a Shabbos dinner for the congregation. A delegation from the sisterhood was dispatched to the kosher butcher in Chicago, where they purchased a huge bag of frozen poultry and left it in the schule refrigerator to defrost.

Thursday night, I received a frantic call. “We need you to check the chicken, and it’s an emergency!”

“All right,” I told them. But, I thought, what could be wrong with a bag of kosher chicken?

Two of them appeared on my doorstep carrying the dripping bag.

“Why don’t you come in?” I offered.

“No, it’d probably be better if you came outside.”

They gingerly opened the bag. It reeked. Rancid. Putrid. Disgusting. I reeled from the stench.

“What’s your question?” I asked. “That chicken is rotten.”

“Well, that’s what we thought. But then we started wondering if that’s the way kosher chicken is supposed to smell.”

35 years have passed. The questions have gotten easier, and I have yet to be asked to poskin on a broken chicken wing. I should have become a shoemaker, but I couldn’t drive the nails straight. Instead, I heard the calling to become a rabbi, and have paid by spending decades trying to convince balabotim that kosher chicken doesn’t smell funny. Or does it?