Skip to content
Skip to main content

About this free course

Download this course

Share this free course

Exploring the boundaries between religion and culture
Exploring the boundaries between religion and culture

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

5 Exploring the boundaries between religion and culture

There are stories that ask ‘why do Jews do that?’ One variation goes like this:

A woman is asked by her daughter, ‘Why do we cut the corners off beef when we roast it?’ Both realise that this is not in any typical list of traditional Jewish practices, but they assume that there must be an authoritative rule to explain the requirement. Possibly it is to do with Moses or ancient temple rituals. To find out, the mother asks her own mother the question, which causes bafflement until the older woman realises what started all this. ‘When you were a child,’ she says, ‘my roasting tin wasn’t very big so I always had to cut the corners off the beef’. Laughter all round.

But the point of the story has yet to be revealed. It is not that people get confused or make mistakes. The point is that a family tradition has evolved and now has a similar force to more widely known food practices. This will now be what this family will do – but they will know where the tradition began.

This is intended to be a humorous story. But at its heart is the serious point that people (religious or otherwise) do not have to know the origins or rational explanation for any particular action. Explaining what people do can legitimately be as straightforward as saying ‘we do this because we do it’. Or, ‘to be a Jew, a Muslim etc. is to do these kinds of things’.

Put another way, it is not common to eat horses or dogs in Britain (even though their meat is not so different from that of cows or sheep) and this is probably ‘just’ because ‘horses and dogs are not commonly eaten here’. History doesn’t provide full explanations for this food avoidance and it certainly isn’t fully rational. But this does not make it any less important.

This story shows how some members of a religion might come to do their religion differently from others. This is important in understanding:

  • the ways in which religion and culture are woven together
  • one of the ways in which religious practices may change over time
  • the ways in which our questions about what people believe and why they do certain things might receive unexpected answers.