Kashrut Deceptions

The NYT's Ethicist, Randy Cohen, fields a question that might strike dread in the heart of any Kashrut-observers who may visit or field visits from friends/relatives who do not observe the same laws of Kashrut:

My wife's sister and her husband keep kosher, so we have a special pot for their visits. Recently my wife caught me using the pot for my traif soup. She insists we must buy another pot, but I say as long as my in-laws believe it's kosher, they won't violate their faith by using it. Would I be unethical to keep this secret or simply cheap? Paul Kramer, Montclair, N.J.

An excerpt from the Ethicist's answer:

Religious laws, like secular ethics, often distinguish between knowing and unknowing transgressions. Menachem Genack, an Orthodox rabbi, claims that this is so for Kashrut, Jewish dietary codes. Biblical law punishes deliberate violations more severely than inadvertent errors (while contemporary Jews impose no actual punishments for Kashrut violations). This would ameliorate but not obviate your in-laws' misdeed. Certainly, it would not justify deceiving them.

Putting aside religion, if your in-laws discover your deception, trust between you will be undermined, much as that between you and your wife must be damaged or at least scuffed.

Well, at least there's some relief in the fact that the Ethicist recommended he tell his in-laws about the treifing up of the pot. But he certainly goes a bit easy on the guy for his complete disrespect toward the religious values of his family members. A few years ago, I had a nanny who was a devout hindu, and who therefore did not eat any beef or beef by-products. I would NEVER have attempted to deceive her regarding the contents of any dishes I cooked, nor would I have lied to her about whether non-beef dishes had been cooked in a pot that had contained beef in the past. The thought simply would not have occurred to me, and I was as careful with her dietary restrictions as I was with my own. Respect for another's religious values seems so simple and basic to me that I cannot begin to conceive that Mr. Paul Kramer would actually put his own name on this question in the New York Times, and risk his in-laws finding out how little he respects their values.

Until I read this, over at Gawker. Apparently, Gawker caught up with Mr. Kramer today, and they got a little background into what type of person would try to deceive his relatives into believing a non-Kosher pot was actually Kosher:

...we examine Kramer's crime in light of last week's controversy, and catch up with him on the phone while he's shopping at the supermarket.

...Kramer volunteered the use of his name, and as we found out this morning when we talked to him, he really didn't care if his in-laws found out about his scheme. "Anyone who knows me knows I'm an a**hole, so it's really not a secret," he said. "If I had trouble with telling my in-laws that I used the pot, then I probably wouldn't have written to him in the first place."

Sounds like a real sweetheart of a guy.