Who made this, and how.
My name is Jacob Relkin. I put this together over many late nights, because I got tired of hearing this argument made badly — sloppily sourced, or all anger and no Torah. Both versions lose, and they deserve to. An argument from Torah has to be able to survive someone opening the Talmud and checking.
I am vegan for the animals, and because it is the right thing to do. You should know that before you read a word of the argument, because it means I am not neutral. This site is not a survey. It is a case, and every case should be read by someone who knows what the person making it wants.
What it is not is an argument I needed the Torah to win. The sources are here because the tradition has a great deal to say about this, and most of it goes unsaid. If every source on this site vanished tomorrow, the animals would still be in the sheds and it would still be wrong. The Torah is not my justification. It is my inheritance, and I think people are reading right past it.
לְעִלּוּי נִשְׁמָתָם · For my grandparents.
This site is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Harry Lerner and Lily Lerner.
My grandmother Lily Gluck Lerner was sixteen, a Hungarian Jew, when she was taken to Auschwitz. She survived it, and everything that came after — the family at her table, the grandson who built this site — is her answer to the people who intended otherwise. Decades later she set her testimony down in a memoir. It is called The Silence. Part of this site is about a silence too: why your rabbi hasn't said this. I did not plan the echo; when I saw it, I kept it, because what the two share is only the silence itself, the cost of not speaking, and nothing of what either silence surrounds.
I have to say the next part carefully, because it is the deepest thing in me and the easiest to say wrong. I do not compare the Shoah to anything. Nothing on this site places my grandparents' suffering on a scale beside anything else, for any cause. Their memory is not an argument, and I will not spend it as one.
But I will testify to what their lives did to my seeing. Growing up as the grandchild of people who survived the camps tuned something in me that has never untuned: an alarm that goes off at the sight of innocents in cages, at machinery built calmly around suffering. I did not choose that sensitivity; I inherited it, the way you inherit a name. And when I finally looked at what is done to animals — every second of every day — the alarm did not ask my permission to sound. This site is what obeying it looks like. It is not a comparison; it is an inheritance of vigilance, pointed at the one suffering my own hands can stop financing today.
A dedication should carry hope, so here is mine. I believe the redemption is near in the sense the chapter on repentance means it: it comes through deeds, one at a time, not by waiting. This is one of the big ones, and it is within reach of every Jewish home, three times a day. Doing it is a fitting way to honor them, who knew, better than anyone should have to, the worth of an ordinary meal eaten in peace.
I built this with AI, and you should know that.
The site you are reading was built with Claude, Anthropic's AI. It wrote nearly all of the code. It cut a single scrolling page into chapters. It checked every Hebrew quotation this site links to Sefaria against Sefaria's own text and found real errors in mine. One was two words of Mishlei 12:10 in the wrong order, sitting on this site, in a verse I have read a thousand times.
What the AI did not do is decide where I stand. The conclusions are mine and I answer for them. A model has no stake in what happens in your life, or in mine. I do.
None of this costs me anything to admit, because of how the site is built. Nothing here asks for your trust. All 90 sources are listed — linked to the original wherever a link exists, quoted in the Hebrew wherever the site quotes it — precisely so you never have to take my word, or a machine's, for any of it. A wrong page reference is wrong whoever typed it, and should be caught either way.
I say it because a site that demands you check its sources has no business being coy about its own construction.
No new ruling. None is needed.
I am not a rabbi who decides Jewish law, and nothing here is a new ruling. None is needed: the prohibitions this site applies are the Torah's, and every step from them to the verdict is on the page for you to check. This site does not replace your rabbi. It gives you what you need to talk to him, and you can go vegan while you ask. Positions attributed to named people are theirs, not mine, and I have tried to state them exactly as far as they go and no further. Where a source is disputed, the dispute is on the page. Where a critic has a point, the critic is on the page, with the answer.
If you find an error in a citation, even a wrong page number or vowel mark, send it in. It will be fixed, with thanks and in public. Getting the sources right is the whole point. It is the only thing here I am willing to be stubborn about.
Why the site is called Pardes.
Pardes is Hebrew for “orchard.” It is also a traditional name for four ways of reading a Jewish text: what the verses say, what follows from them, what they ask of us today, and the deeper meaning. Its four letters stand for those four ways. The argument does not depend on them; they are how the site got its name.
The four letters of the name
Read the large letters from top to bottom and they spell Pardes in Hebrew. Each one begins a verse from the Bible. Open one, or all four.
פפּוֹתֵחַ אֶת־יָדֶךָ…Peshat: what the verses say
You open Your hand and satisfy every living thing with favour.
The pe verse of Ashrei, which is itself an alphabetical acrostic, said three times a day. The Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim 51:7) rules that it is the one verse of Ashrei a person must say with full attention, and must say again if they did not. Every living thing means every creature, not only people. It describes God feeding the world; it is quoted for its first letter and for whom it names, not as a proof. It stands at the head of the peshat level.
ררְאֵה נָתַתִּי…Remez: what follows from them
See, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil.
The plain sense is the covenant's choice, between keeping the Torah and leaving it. It stands at the head of the remez level for its first word, see, and for the choice it puts in front of the reader, not as a verse about animals.
דדִּרְשׁוּ ה׳…Derash: what they ask of us today
Seek the Lord while He may be found; call on Him while He is near.
Its first word, dirshu, seek, has the same root as derash. The plain sense is a call to return while return is still open; the next verse goes on, let the wicked forsake his way. It stands at the head of the derash level, not as a verse about animals.
ססוֹד ה׳…Sod: the deeper meaning
The secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him, and His covenant, to make it known to them.
Its first word is sod. Tehillim 25 is itself an alphabetical acrostic, and this is its samekh verse. The covenant it names is the Torah's; the site does not read it as the covenant with the beasts of the field in Hoshea 2:20. It stands at the head of the sod level.
First compiled in the summer of 2026, and kept up to date. Set in Newsreader and Instrument Serif, with Frank Ruhl Libre for Hebrew and Archivo for labels.