blueandnoah asked:
hi! so i’m a non-jew, but i lived in a jewish residential building last year that was home to jews and non-jews alike. we were supposed to keep kosher in the dining room, but other areas in the house were fair game (i say this as an indicator of how liberal/not the house was). as a vegetarian there wasn’t much for me to eat at meat dinners so i’d have bread and margarine, but now that i know about ma’arit ayin, i wonder if i shouldn’t have done so. certainly one of the cooks once asked me if the margarine was butter (so it wasn’t totally clear what i was eating). so basically, as a non-jew obligated to keep kosher because of the rules of the house, should i also have followed ma'arit ayin, or is that a separate thing that didn’t apply to me? (i’m not living there anymore, so this is a question borne of curiosity and not of necessity.) thanks for any consideration =)
That’s a really thoughtful question! The quick answer: because of the fact that margarine is commonplace, eating margarine during meat meals wouldn’t have been a problem of ma’arit ayin even if you were Jewish.
Essentially, due to ma’arit ayin, some actions are prohibited despite not technically breaking halacha because they look like you’re breaking halacha - like, imagine you went to a Jewish community which had never seen soy burgers before and started eating one with cheese. They’d probably assume you were breaking kashrut, even if you weren’t, and so that wouldn’t be okay from a perspective of ma’arit ayin.
In the modern day, margarine is well-known. People use it a lot, and even if it initially looks a little strange, we can reasonably assume that you weren’t eating butter. (The cook may have asked because you weren’t Jewish and they weren’t sure if you had, I dunno, forgotten about milk and meat, but given the respectful tone of the ask I’m going to assume you were reasonably well-trusted in this area.)
One caveat: the sources I looked at about this discussed only how Jews should behave. It is possible that I have missed a nuance that comes with you not being Jewish, or missed something elsewhere. As usual, followers please feel free to respond/add to the post. And anyone who wants to ask me a question can always do so in my ask box or by messaging me.