“An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” — Martin Buber
By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California
This week the Torah turns its attention to creatures who cannot speak back. And in doing so, it quietly reveals something about us.
Long before the SPCA was founded in 1824, the Torah already treated animals as moral subjects rather than scenery. The same portion that legislates against kidnapping and false weights also forbids yoking an ox and a donkey together, muzzling an ox while it treads grain, taking a mother bird with her young, and cooking a kid in its mother’s milk. These are not sentimental asides. They are character tests.
Consider first the prohibition against plowing with an ox and a donkey together (Deut. 22:10). Ibn Ezra observes that the stronger animal will pull ahead while the weaker one strains and suffers. The Torah refuses to let us create a partnership of mismatched strength. Each creature is unique; forcing them into the same yoke ignores the particularity God built into them.
One might smile at the image of an ox and a donkey arguing over the proper pace of work, yet the law is deadly serious. It trains us to notice difference rather than erase it. The same sensitivity, the rabbis imply, should govern how we treat human beings of unequal strength, status, or ability.
The companion law is equally revealing: “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain” (Deut. 25:4). The animal that labors is entitled to taste the fruit of its labor. The rabbis long ago noted the human parallel: a person capable of muzzling an ox is only a short step from muzzling his workers. History confirmed their suspicion. In Italy, vineyard owners once forced migrant laborers to wear muzzles so they could not eat the grapes they harvested. The Torah saw the danger centuries earlier. Cruelty, it turns out, is a transferable skill.
The Sefer HaChinuch states the underlying principle with clinical precision: Adam nifal kefi pe’ulotav — a human being is shaped by his actions. Cruelty practiced on the vulnerable does not stay quarantined. It migrates. Modern criminology has merely rediscovered what the Chinuch already knew. Children who torture animals are statistically more likely to grow into adults who harm people.
The FBI now tracks animal cruelty as a distinct felony category precisely because the correlation with violent crime is too stubborn to ignore. In recent years, judges have begun handing down 20-year sentences for the most egregious cases. Civilization, it seems, is slowly catching up to Deuteronomy.
Jeremy Bentham asked the right question centuries ago: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” The Torah answers by protecting the ox that labors, the mismatched team in the field, the bird that broods, and the calf whose mother’s milk was never intended as a cooking liquid. Philo already noted the poetic cruelty of the latter: milk exists to nourish life, not to extinguish it.
Ramban and Maimonides diverge on the mother-bird commandment, and both are illuminating. Ramban worries about the human heart becoming coarsened and about the reckless extinction of a species. Maimonides goes further. He insists that the mother’s anguish is real — that the love of offspring is not the exclusive property of creatures who possess speech. There is, he writes, no essential difference between the distress of a human mother and that of an animal. The Torah therefore refuses to let us inflict that particular suffering.
Even the ordinary daily rule — feed your animals before you feed yourself — trains the same muscle of deference. The hierarchy of need is inverted: the mute claim priority over the articulate.
I once found myself in Mexico watching the crowds stream toward a bullfight. It brought to mind Albert Schweitzer’s horrified account of Barcelona, where elegant young women hurried to the arena to watch bulls and mules torn open for entertainment. The man who invited Schweitzer was, by all accounts, a cultured Christian. Spain, of course, was also the country of the Inquisition. One begins to wonder whether societies that perfect the art of public animal torment do not eventually perfect the art of public human torment as well. Correlation is not causation, but the pattern is not subtle.
The Torah’s insistence on kindness to animals is therefore not a peripheral ethic. It is a diagnostic. The way a person treats those who cannot retaliate or complain — whether an ox in the field, a donkey forced into unequal labor, or a mother bird on her nest — is the clearest X-ray of the soul available this side of the World to Come.
Buber was right. An animal’s eyes do speak a great language. The only question is whether we are still capable of hearing it — and whether, having heard it, we are willing to be changed by what it says.
Shabbat Shalom.
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California.