What Shechita Involves

It is a positive Torah command that anyone wanting to eat the meat of an animal or bird must slaughter it properly first — "you shall slaughter from your cattle".

And then the Torah says nothing at all about how.

The method is oral

The laws of how to perform shechita are not written in the Torah. They were given to Moshe at Sinai by mouth and handed down from there.

That is not a gap. It is the clearest illustration in kashrus of how the written and oral Torah work together: the verse obliges you to do something it does not describe, and sends you to the tradition for the description. Every piece of kosher meat traces back to an unbroken oral transmission.

Who may hold the knife

Before any question about the cut comes the question of who is permitted to make it, and the answer arrives in layers.

1. Learn the laws — all of them.
2. Do not shecht alone even then. Knowing the halachos is not sufficient, because someone may freeze or falter in the middle of the cut.
3. Practise in front of a chacham, repeatedly, until he has demonstrated three times in a row that his hands are steady and he does not falter.
4. Obtain kabbalah — formal certification from a rav who rules in halacha.

The early authorities in these lands went further and decreed, backed by a formal ban, that nobody may shecht alone or inspect the lung — however expert — without that certification.

And the rav does not grant it until he has tested three things: does the candidate know the laws of shechita and of inspection; can he prepare a knife that is sharp and perfectly smooth; and can he feel the tiniest nick in the blade. The custom is that the shochet takes a written document as proof of his certification.

Note what that third test is. Not knowledge — a physical skill, tested in the hands.

What the cut must achieve

Two pipes in the neck are the object of the cut: the kaneh, the windpipe, and the veshet, the foodpipe.

The standard to aim for is that both are cut completely through into two pieces, with nothing remaining attached — for an animal, a wild animal and a bird alike. That is what the shochet should be trying to do.

The floor, after the fact, is the rule of rov, a majority:

• For an animal — a majority of both pipes.
• For a bird — a majority of either one.

Two refinements matter. The majority must be visible, not calculated — you have to be able to see it. And exactly half counts as nothing: a majority means more than half, and half is a failure.

Why the community controls it

The laws of who may shecht end with the community's authority to restrict slaughter to its own appointed shochet.

That is worth noticing, because it is the root of communal kashrus supervision as it exists today. The structure of a community appointing, certifying and standing behind the person who handles its food did not begin with modern certification agencies. It begins here.

See also the shechita knife and the five things that invalidate shechita.