The Slaughterer: A Nightmare

"This story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, is emblematic of the position of the believer who has nonetheless given up his faith, thinking that God passed his cruelty on to men. Singer's vegetarianism, plain in this text, is an ideological protest against the cruelty suffered by animals slaughtered in God's name. The narrator is Isaac Bashevis Singer himself, questioning and denouncing the rules of ritual slaughter. Ioina-Meir should have become the rabbi of Kolomyia, but ends up the village's shochet. This thankless office grieves him deeply. He feels he has plunged into a permanent bath of blood from which he cannot find his way out. He tries to justify all his ritual slaughters and turns to the Kabbalah to understand divine conduct towards the beheaded animals (...)." (Rafael Goldwaser)