The word kosher – Sh’mini
The reading this Shabbat includes the dietary laws.
We take it for granted that the way you talk about them is to say you keep kosher.
That word does not appear in the sidra and in fact it only comes once in the Bible, in the Megillah (Esther 8:5), where the queen asks the king if something is kosher (proper) in his eyes.
So kosher really means proper. Keeping kosher is the proper thing for a Jew to do.
In an ethical sense every Jew should be a kosher person, one who instinctively knows the proper way for a good person to behave.
