A Vegetarian View of the Torah
(ankaŭ en Esperanto)

And God said: "Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree that has seed-yielding fruit -- to you it shall be for food." (Gen.1:29)

God's initial intention was that people should be vegetarians. The famous Jewish Torah commentator, Rashi (1040-1105), states the following about God's first dietary law:

God did not permit Adam and his wife to kill a creature and to eat its flesh. Only every green herb shall they all eat together. [1]
Many other Torah commentators agree with this assessment, including Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092-1167), Maimonides (1135-1214), Nachmanides (1194-1270), and Rabbi Joseph Albo (died in 1444). Later scholars, such as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), Moses Cassuto (1883-1951), and Nehama Leibowitz (1905-1997), concur. Cassuto, for example, in his commentary From Adam to Noah (p. 58) states:
You are permitted to use the animals and employ them for work, have dominion over them in order to utilize their services for your subsistence, but must not hold their life cheap nor slaughter them for food. Your natural diet is vegetarian... [2]
The above opinions are consistent with the Talmud, which states that people were initially vegetarians: "Adam was not permitted meat for purposes of eating." [3]
The great 13th century Jewish philosopher Nachmanides stated that the reason behind this initial dietary law was:

Living creatures possess a moving soul and a certain spiritual superiority which in this respect make them similar to those who possess intellect (people) and they have the power of affecting their welfare and their food and they flee from pain and death. [4]
According to the Jewish philosopher Rabbi Joseph Albo, the reason is that "In the killing of animals there is cruelty, rage, and the accustoming of oneself to the bad habit of shedding innocent blood..." [5]
God's first dietary law is a unique statement in humanity's spiritual history. It is a spiritual blueprint of a vegetarian world order. Yet how many millions of people have read this Torah verse (Gen. 1:29) and passed it by without considering its meaning?

After stating that people were to adhere to a vegetarian diet, the Torah next indicates that animals were not to prey on one another but were also to have only vegetarian food:

And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul, [I have given] every green herb for food. (Gen. 1:30)
Immediately after giving these dietary laws, God saw everything that he had made and "behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). Everything in the universe was as God wanted it, with nothing superfluous and nothing lacking, a complete harmony. [6] The vegetarian diet was consistent with God's initial plan.
There are other indications in early chapters of Genesis that people originally were to be sustained on vegetarian diets:

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying: "of every tree of the garden, thou mayest freely eat..." (Gen.2:16)
"...and thou shalt eat the herbs of the field." (Gen. 3:18)

Chapter 5 of Genesis tells of the long lives of people in the generations of the vegetarian period from Adam to Noah. Adam lived 930 years; Seth (Adam's son) lived 912 years; Enosh (Seth's son) lived 905 years; Kenan (Enosh's son) lived 910 years; and so on, until Methuselah, who lived 969 years, the longest time of life recorded in the Torah. After the flood, people lived for much shorter periods. Abraham, for example, lived only 175 years.
Why the tremendous change in life spans? Before the flood, people were forbidden to eat meat; after the flood it was permitted


Read more at: [link to www.jewishveg.com]