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Midrash Breishit Rabbah: AND THEY DID EAT. Did they then eat? They pretended to eat, removing each course in turn.
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As the curtain rises on this week's parasha, Avraham is sitting in his tent and traditionally is considered to be recuperating from the circumcision (described at the conclusion of last week's portion). Three angels/men appear and this Divine visit is regarded as the model for the value of Bikkur Holim, visiting the sick. Reciprocating, Avraham goes out of his way to accommodate his guests, thereby demonstrating another Jewish value: Hakhnasat Orchim, welcoming the stranger.
There is a lot of excitement when guests arrive. This is probably as true today as it was for the ancient world. And in sparsely populated areas such as the desert, the presence of a guest would be quite the event. For the guest, being welcomed and given food and drink in the harsh environment was not only proper etiquette, but could mean the difference between life and death. Our text tries to capture some of the excitement, the worrying, the running around, and everything that was done quickly to make the guests feel comfortable.
And then we read that Avraham served them curds (many translations improperly render chem'ah as butter, the modern meaning of the Hebrew word). The Everett Fox translation (The Five Books of Moses, Schocken) uses 'cream'. It was probably a curdled dairy product similar to yoghurt (like leben in Israel). The text is not troubled by the fact that these angelic messengers ate (the Rabbis learn from this the lesson: 'when in Rome, do as the Romans do'), or by the fact that Avraham obviously didn't have two sets of dishes!
Avraham's meal of milk with meat violates the rabbinic prohibition of eating milk with meat. I found very little commentary or discussion on this verse: either because the Rabbis aren't bothered by it, or because they are bothered, but couldn't figure out how to deal with it, and consequently avoided it. One [far-fetched] explanation is: when the text says they 'ate' (after all- how can angels eat, anyways), it refers to the 'words of Torah' that Avraham offered at the meal. (According to the Rabbis, every meal should be accompanied by words of Torah- and this is what the angels 'ate'.) But it isn't necessarily a problem that the angels ate meat with milk. After all, the angels appeared as travellers in the desert. Who says they were even Jewish? (Are angels Jewish?)
However, most Rabbis are flabbergasted. Do you mean Avraham, the founder of the Jewish people didn't keep kosher?! The classic understanding is that the patriarchs observed the Torah and the mitzvot (even though this is before Sinai). How? According to the Rabbis, the Torah existed even before the world; God looked into the Torah to create the world.
Although it sounds like they were served together (all in one verse), apologists point out that the dairy is listed first, and that it is possible that the dairy was served (while the meat was being prepared) to alleviate their hunger, and then, [after they rinsed their mouths?] the table was reset, and they had a meat meal. Unfortunately, this interpretation is really not supported by the text which does not indicate any break between the dairy and meat courses. After all, one can eat meat almost immediately after dairy, but not the other way around. Children: remember, eat your ice cream BEFORE your hamburgers for supper. (Different traditions require different wait times after eating meat- the Dutch wait only one hour! Supposedly it is so the meat and milk don't mix while in one's stomach, and meat takes longer to digest.)
Now you and I know that Avraham's menu shouldn't be a problem. After all, the laws of Kashrut, and the prohibition against eating meat and milk (which only appear later in the Torah) haven't been given yet. And the prohibition in the Torah, may actually be more specific than the way we understand it today through the rabbinic lens. Unlike the old joke, the Torah doesn't actually specify two sets of dishes! Some biblical scholars even suggest the whole thing is a misunderstanding and that the prohibition is against cooking a kid in its mother's fat (halav-milk, and heilev-fat, appear as identical words in the Torah).
But rather than try and convince us that even though it looks 'traif' they were still keeping kosher, one midrash (Shabbat 88b) uses the apparent lack of observance to our credit. When God presents the Torah to Israel at Sinai, the angels protest, on the grounds that the Israelites will inevitably violate it. God rebukes them by reminding them of this incident, that they themselves ate milk with meat. As they say, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!"
Lessons for Today
I am more fascinated by the Torah's lack of condemnation of Avraham than whether he kept kosher or not. It's hard for us to look at Avraham without seeing his life through the lens of the rest of the Torah, and the lens of rabbinic tradition. Renaissance paintings of biblical scenes are famous for portraying biblical figures in sixteenth century fashion and biblical buildings with gothic architecture. That kind of error is common in film even though they try really hard to avoid these types of continuity errors. (One of the men getting in a lifeboat in the Titanic movie can be seen wearing a digital watch.) We would think the Torah should have 'cleaned up the story' and omitted the menu, or at least made some disparaging comment on how Avraham neglected to observe the dietary laws. But it doesn't. It is comfortable to depict Avraham faithfully as the nomadic monotheist that he was, and not retro-project later prohibitions on to him.
The Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chasidism, asked why do we say "God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob" in the Amidah prayer (and not God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob)? Because each one of the patriarchs and matriarchs had a unique relationship with God. The God of Abraham was not the God of Isaac. The God of Rachel was not the God of Leah. The 'Torah' of Avraham was not the same as the 'Torah' of Moses. The Torah's integrity is not compromised because it contains 'continuity errors'; in fact, it teaches us that each generation has its unique encounter with God and a unique relationship with the Torah.
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