Jewish tradition of chicken swin

PAULA KRUGER: For the past week, a custom that may seem strange to outsiders is being performed by Jewish people around the world.

The tradition in its more strict form involves swinging a live chicken around the head - a symbolic way of cleansing oneself of sin.

For hundreds of years the ritual has marked the most holy ten days of the Jewish calendar, but this year there have been demonstrations against what some regard as a cruel and barbaric act.

In Jerusalem, Middle East Correspondent David Hardaker spoke to Anat Hoffman. Anat Hoffman is the Executive Director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, and is taking on the religious establishment to end the live chicken ritual.

She begins by describing gruesome details of what happens to the chicken.

ANAT HOFFMAN: The awful thing is that she wakes up in the morning and is placed in a cage, and in the worst conditions brought to the centre of town, without air conditioning of any kind, is placed in the heat, in the sun for many, many hours. Many of them die just of the heat.

And then she's picked up by her feet and swung above somebody's head, and then her throat is slashed, but not all the way, so she can run in the dust and the blood is pouring, and pouring till she dies.

DAVID HARDAKER: This ritual surely has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years. What kind of reaction are you getting now to this attempt to stop it after all this time?

ANAT HOFFMAN: It's becoming now possible to criticise the Kapparot ritual.

For many years it was accepted as something halachic, meaning that it comes out of Jewish law. But it's now very clear that it has nothing to do with, not with the Bible, not with the Talmud, it's not mentioned anywhere.

It's a folk habit that I wouldn't be surprised we picked up from some of the neighbours. It doesn't evolve out of Judaism, it's very popular.

There's something very enticing about seeing how your sin is moved from you right now to that animal, and you can say this cock shall meet death, but I will have a long life of peace.

I'm disappointed that this is still popular, and I'm delighted that there are now voices out loud of Rabbis criticising it.

DAVID HARDAKER: But aren't there just some occasions, and maybe this is one of them, where the rights of an animal need to take second place to the long-standing traditions of a society?

ANAT HOFFMAN: What a question!

Look, if there are alternatives, we should take the alternatives. And there are alternatives. I can understand the desire to atone by doing an action, not just feeling something in your heart, then let's do a good action. Let's clean up the environment to atone, let's give some tzedekah, some money to a poor person, as a way of atoning.

I think of one million Jewish ways to do a good deed in the world, and make ourselves atone for our sins, than killing an animal in this way.

DAVID HARDAKER: But when you take the idiosyncracies, the strange things, the illogical things out of a religious practice, you're kind of almost destroying the religious practice, aren’t you?

ANAT HOFFMAN: Rabbi Israel Eichler today on Israel television said the following: he said the generation that will stop doing this ritual will give birth to a generation that will stop observing the day of atonement, and the generation that will stop observing the day of atonement, will give birth to a generation that will marry non-Jews.

Straight away, from stopping killing the chickens, we start marrying non-Jews.

DAVID HARDAKER: Well these symbols matter, don't they?

ANAT HOFFMAN: David, these are cognitive leaps that I would invite you not to jump into. These are not correct things.

I think Judaism has to, we say in Hebrew (Hebrew phrase) - we're saying the old will be renewed, and the new stuff is going to be hallowed.

Let's think of modern rituals that fit our values.

Maybe what I want to say is that rituals are supposed to serve the values that we believe in. What is the value of killing this chicken? And hopefully it will become less popular, as we become more modernised and more... a thinking Jew.

DAVID HARDAKER: Your politicians react really to popular pressure, votes, more than - don't they? - or a religious ritual or any regard for it. Isn't that what they're reacting to? They're going to turn a blind eye, because they don't want to have a backlash from a religious community?

ANAT HOFFMAN: You have just given us another reason to atone in this Yom Kippur, that we have not provided the public in Israel with politicians that are immune to this, politicians who remember what our values are and keep their eye focused on the ball. That's a good reason to atone for that.

PAULA KRUGER: Anat Hoffman, Executive Director of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, speaking with David Hardaker.

Correspondents Report - Sunday, 1 October , 2006

Reporter: David Hardaker